Unrest looms, Biden or Trump

Violence and protests will continue to sweep across the United States regardless of who wins the presidency, according to researchers citing a “political stress index.”

The academics claim their measure of political instability shows that the country would still be a powder keg waiting to erupt even if Joe Biden wins by a landslide, BuzzFeed News reported.

“The tendency is to blame [President] Trump, but I don’t really agree with that,” Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, told the news outlet. “Trump is really not the deep structural cause.”

Turchin and George Mason University sociologist Jack Goldstone argue that the most dangerous element in play is the corrosive effect of inequality on society. They claim their model explains how mounting inequality leads to political instability.

Turchin developed the political stress index, or PSI, which includes measures of wage stagnation, national debt, competition among elites and distrust in government. He built on Goldstone’s research that shows how revolutions tend to follow periods of population growth and urbanization.

Turchin also raised a red flag a decade ago, when he predicted that instability would peak in the years around 2020.

“In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt,” he wrote in a letter to the journal Nature. “Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability.”

Goldstone and Turchin wrote in a recent article that “almost any election scenario this fall is likely to lead to popular protests on a scale we have not seen this century.”