Psychology Today | 09.05.2026 01:31
Around fifteen years ago, a major science journal asked leading researchers to picture the coming decade. Most answers were sober—emissions paths, growth curves, demographic projections. One was strange. Peter Turchin, who had begun his career as a theoretical biologist before turning his quantitative tools on history, told them the U.S. was moving toward a serious internal crisis around 2020. Polarization would harden. Trust in shared institutions would crack. Political violence would surface in ways most Americans alive had never seen (Turchin, 2010).
