What Price Immortality?

by John Leach

On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I crossed the Arctic Circle heading north.  I wasn’t aiming for Greenland, hoping to stake my claim before Trump got there; I was chasing the receding polar night line.  We never quite caught up with it; we arrived at Norway’s northernmost point three days late.  North Cape had daylight. But the interval between nominal sunrise and nominal sunset was supposedly an hour and a half; it was hard to tell.

I was on a cruise to see the Northern Lights.  We started at Oslo, headed south then west to round Norway's South Cape, headed up past Stavanger and Bergen and into the Arctic Circle, past Tromsø and on to the North Cape, at which point we turned round and sailed back to Oslo.  One thing they don’t tell you in the brochures is that you almost never see the Northern Lights as vibrantly and clearly as in the pictures advertising the cruise.  What you tend to see is a hazy green curtain, like a soft, faintly green cloud in the night sky that waves slowly if you can tolerate the cold night air long enough to see it.  To get those brilliant pictures you see in the brochures you need a camera.  And not just an ordinary smartphone camera (though I am told those are getting cleverer these days); you need a camera where you can turn off auto-focus, put it on slow exposure, apply various filters and then hold it perfectly still for several seconds.  It was eye-opening to see the difference between what I could see with my naked eye and what others caught with their expensive-looking cameras.

There was a lot of night-time on this cruise, and a lot of sailing, both of which I enjoy, so I took a good book to read whilst sitting in the upper-deck bar - End Times by Peter Turchin.  I don’t know about you but I find I always have to read a book twice to get much from it; the first time to understand the author’s perspective and to get an outline of their theses, and the second time to mine the book of its detail.  Because of this, one book was all I needed for a two-week cruise.

According to the dust-sheet, End Times is about political disintegration.  It is about why empires endure only so long and then collapse.  Empires might last 150 years, they might last 500, but no matter how great they are at their zenith, they always, always, eventually collapse.  The blurb undersells the book.  It turns out the book is as much about political power - its different forms, who holds it and how they use it - than it is about the downfall of empires.  Two books for the price of one.

The thing that made the book of special interest is that Turchin claims this is a book about the “science of History”.  It is not a ‘Great Man’ history book where history is seen as a series of events driven by the whims and desires of men such as Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte or Winston Churchill.  History is seen as a series of categorisable causes and outcomes, hugely contingent on the specifics of each case, of course, but nonetheless honouring emergent tendencies if not rules.

The science of history starts with Big Data.  Apparently, we can mine diverse historical public records for all sorts of detailed data about different empires: their social practices (in great detail); their natural resources; their economies; their level of technological expertise (gunpowder was as crucial to the march of empires in the 15^th Century as high-tech weapons are today); their leaders and acolytes; the contingencies of natural events such as earthquakes, plagues and endemic diseases.  And then we can analyse that data to pull out expected and unexpected correlations between the characteristics of empires and the outcomes they experience.  Did you know that immiseration of the population at large by the elite leads vastly more often to revolution and the overthrow of the elite than when the elite has the good sense to treat the masses better ahead of time?  We could all have guessed that, I suppose.  But did you know that empires that practise polygamy tend to collapse much sooner than empires that don’t?

Correlations are interesting but only up to a point.  What makes End Times especially interesting is that Turchin claims to have developed a science of history that explains the dynamics behind those correlations.  Big Data can tell us that this particular characteristic tends to be correlated with that particular outcome but it can’t, on its own, tell us why.  Why, for example, does elite polygamy result in shorter-lasting empires?  What’s going on beneath the sea of data that makes that a reasonable and expected result?  What are the canonical components needed for a coherent scientific understanding of history and what are the dynamics by which those components interact?  Peter Turchin answers that, and his answer makes sense.

Turchin identifies just a handful of dynamic rules and pulls out four that seem to have the biggest effect.  I won’t spoil it by saying what those rules are – Turchin deserves his book sales – but they all sit somewhere between “that’s to be expected” and “unexpected but sounds sensible”.  I recommend the book; it pays back the time and attentiveness it demands.

Turchin wrote the book after Trump’s first term but before his second.  He applies his history dynamics to the American empire and predicts it is unlikely to last as a major empire beyond the end of the 21^st Century.  I expect few people on the political left outside the USA will be surprised or unhappy about that.  But, having finished my second reading of the book with three days of cruising still ahead of me, I fell to applying Turchin’s ideas to Trump II.  And to the UK where we have our own mini-Trump, Nigel Farage, hoping he will follow in his master’s footsteps.

The USA has a party political culture dominated by two established parties.  That makes it very difficult to found a third party and then win a presidential election.  Just look at any of the billionaires who have tried that in modern times; they have all failed.  The way to get electoral success in the USA is to hijack one of the existing parties and make it your own personal bandwagon.  And that is exactly what Trump has done.

But, having been elected POTUS, what is Trump’s vision for America?  MAGA is a slogan, a religious fantasy at best, but it lacks any clarity of vision for what he wants America to become or how to get there.  Trump’s aim goes no further than to get elected and break things.  He sees himself as a great dealmaker and there are no transformational deals to be made in a political climate dominated by sunshine and happiness.  His aim is to break things and exploit the chaos that results.  Who knows where that will lead?  Who cares?  Trump doesn’t.  Just so long as he gets everyone’s attention for as long as he’s around and a chapter written about him in the next generation of history books.

There is a void in Trump’s political vision, an emptiness that he has no idea how to fill.  That begs the question: if Trump has hijacked the Republican Party to win electoral success, who will hijack the Trump bandwagon to get their vision for America enacted?  Who could define a vision of what America could become, have the nous to define and plan a strategy and then get Trump to enact that strategy to attain that vision?  To borrow the phrase used by the Labour Party machine in reference to Sir Keir Starmer, who will put Trump at the front of the train so he thinks he is the driver in charge when, actually, all he is in charge of is a train on London’s Docklands Light Railway (DLR)?

I fear the answer is The Heritage Foundation.  The Heritage Foundation has been around for decades, not just the past few years, trying to get the Republican Party to adopt this or that part of its vision for what it wants America to become.  The Heritage Foundation is a reactionary, deeply socially-conservative, quasi-Christian fundamentalist organisation that will reverse many of the rights won by the American people in the past 150 years.  In its America, workers would be modern-day serfs with next-to-no rights and women would be confined to the home and child-rearing.  Refer to Margaret Atwood for the details.

The Heritage Foundation has outlasted all expectations of its founders as a wet-dream of fundamentalist billionaires.  With Trump, they realised they might have a chance to get somewhere at last, and from that Project 2025 was born.  Trump claimed at one point in his 2024 campaign that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 and didn’t even know what it was about.  That could be true but that doesn’t mean his bandwagon hasn’t been hijacked.  A remarkable amount of his first year’s executive activity has been perfectly aligned with Project 2025.  Trump believes he is driving the train but it is, in actuality, a DLR designed by The Heritage Foundation.

And what about the UK?  Our political system is not a two-party system.  Depending on which part of the UK you live in, you could have six or seven different political parties vying for your vote at the next general election.  It is much easier to set up a new political party in the UK than in the USA, and Farage has given that a try.  His first effort, UKIP, made a splash but its ripples faded and died away.  His second attempt, Reform, seems to have more substance to it.  And having set it up, he is now eating into the political territory of one of the large established UK parties.  Like a black hole relentlessly swallowing all the gas from an orbiting star, Reform is accreting Tory politicians and Tory voters at an accelerating rate.  Soon all that will be left of the Conservative Party will be a hard core of Tory traditionalists ever-fading in luminosity.

And what can we say of Farage’s vision for the UK?  To some extent it is an opportunistic mix of “translate Trumpism into English” and “blame everything on immigrants so voters won’t blame anything on billionaires”.  Again, more a religious faith than a programme for national renewal.  If there is an equivalent to The Heritage Foundation in the UK, it resides at 55 Tufton Street.  There are almost a dozen think tanks and policy lobbyists that give 55 Tufton Street as their registered addresses.  The one that caught my eye was The New Culture Forum.  Keeping itself in the shadows and with a public web site that alludes to “Big Ideas” but avoids saying anything specific, it looks like a poor-man’s Heritage Foundation in much the same way Farage looks like a poor-man’s Trump.  It seems to be espousing a similar mix of anti-liberal, quasi-Christian fundamentalism overlaid with plenty of denial – of the rights we naïvely take for granted as well as, of course, of climate change.

I wonder what motivates the people at the top of these foundations and what they expect to gain from making their regressive visions a reality.  Rather than looking for a global conspiracy theory that joins the New Culture Forum to The Heritage Foundation, they look like no more than 21^st Century religious sects that have Stephen Miller and Matthew Elliott as their High Priests.

What is it about billionaires that they care more about getting a chapter in the history books than about the devastation they might cause to billions of people in the process?  What is the price of immortality?