IIn the days since the Republican Party won a landslide victory in the US elections, giving them control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, pundits have been dissecting and analyzing the superiority and inferiority of the protagonists, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Ta. . Much has been said about their personalities and the words they uttered. Little is said about the inhuman social forces that drive complex human societies to the brink of collapse, and sometimes beyond. That’s wrong. It is precisely these tectonic shifts that we need to focus on to understand the roots of the current crisis and possible ways out.
The research team I lead studies cycles of political consolidation and collapse over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies organized as states can experience periods of considerable peace and stability lasting about a century or so. But inevitably we enter a period of social unrest and political collapse. Think of the end of the Roman Empire, the English Civil War, or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have accumulated data on hundreds of historical states entering and exiting crises.
We are therefore in a good position to identify only those inhuman social forces that foster insecurity and division, and we have discovered three common factors: mass dispossession, elite overproduction, and state collapse .
To better understand these concepts and how they impact American politics in 2024, read about the origins of the unwritten social contract in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. must be traced back to. The agreement balanced the interests of workers, businesses, and the state in a manner similar to more formal agreements found in the Nordic countries. For two generations, this tacit pact has led to unprecedented growth in well-being across large swaths of the country. At the same time, the “Great Compression” of income and wealth dramatically reduced economic inequality. For about 50 years, the interests of workers and owners remained balanced, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.
That social contract began to crumble in the late 1970s. The power of trade unions was weakened and taxes on the wealthy were cut. Wages for the typical worker, which had previously increased in parallel with overall economic growth, began to lag behind. Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated and at times declined. As a result, the quality of life for the majority of Americans has declined in many ways. One shocking way this has manifested itself is in the changes in life expectancy, which has stalled and even reversed (and this started long before the coronavirus pandemic). . That’s what we call “mass immersion.”
With workers’ incomes effectively stalled, the fruits of economic growth were instead reaped by elites. A perverse “wealth pump” has been created that sucks money from the poor and funnels it to the rich. The Great Compression was reversed. In many ways, the past 40 years are reminiscent of what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900: the era of railroad wealth and robber barons. If the post-war period was a golden age of widespread prosperity, the period since 1980 can be said to have entered a second Gilded Age.
Between 1980 and 2020, the number of ultra-rich people increased tenfold
While the extra wealth may be welcomed by the recipients, it ultimately creates problems for them as a class. The number of ultra-high net worth individuals (those with assets of $10 million or more) increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020, after adjusting for inflation. A certain percentage of these people have political ambitions, with some running for political office themselves (such as Trump) and others funding political candidates (such as Peter Thiel). The more members of this elite class there are, the more people in society seek political power.
By the 2010s, the social pyramid in the United States had grown to be exceptionally top-heavy. Too many would-be leaders and moguls were vying for a certain number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. Our model gives this situation the name “elite overproduction.”
Elite overproduction can be likened to a game of musical chairs, where the number of chairs remains constant and the number of players can increase. As the game progresses, there will be more and more angry losers. Some of them become “counter-elites.” These are people who are willing to challenge the established order. Rebels and revolutionaries like Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the English Civil War, or Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In contemporary America, we might think of media disruptors like Tucker Carlson, or maverick entrepreneurs seeking political influence like Elon Musk, and countless less obvious examples at the lower levels of the system. I don’t know. As conflicts between ruling elites and anti-elites intensify, the norms governing public discourse erode and trust in institutions declines. The result is a loss of citizen cohesion and a sense of national cooperation, without which a nation would quickly rot from within.
One result of this political dysfunction is the inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. With the loss of trust and legitimacy, the collapse of state capacity accelerates. It is worth noting that the collapse of state finances often triggers revolutions. This is what happened in France before 1789 and just before the English Civil War.
How is this landscape reflected in party politics? The American ruling class that has evolved since the end of the Civil War in 1865 has basically consisted of the top wealthy class (commonly known as the 1%). , a coalition of highly educated or “qualified” professionals and graduates (as we think of them). 10%). Ten years ago, Republicans were the party of 1% and Democrats were the party of 10%. Since then, they have both become completely unrecognizable.
The rebuilding of the Republican Party began with Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016. He was the classic political entrepreneur in history who seized power by inducing popular discontent (an example is Tiberius Gracchus, who founded a populist party in late Republican Rome). Not all of his efforts are against the interests of the ruling class. For example, he succeeded in making the tax code more regressive. But many did, including his policies on immigration (economic elites tend to support immigration because it keeps wages down). Rejects the traditional free market orthodoxy of the Republican Party and supports industrial policy. He has publicly stated that he is skeptical of NATO and has no desire to start new conflicts overseas.
When Joe Biden, a typical establishment figure, defeated Trump in 2020, it seemed to some that the revolution had been crushed. By 2024, the Democratic Party has essentially become the party of the establishment, the 10% and 1%. It has tamed its own populist faction, led by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. This realignment is due to Kamala Harris spending significantly more than Trump this election cycle, and mainstream Republicans like Liz and Dick Cheney, as well as neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, joining Harris. This was suggested by supporting Mr.
In the meantime, the Republican Party has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party, a party representing workers (according to its leaders) or a party representing radical right-wing policies (according to its critics). and transformed it. In the process, it largely excluded traditional Republicans.
Defeat on November 5th represents a battle in the ongoing revolutionary war
Trump is clearly the mastermind behind this change. But while the mainstream media and politicians are obsessed with him, it’s important to realize that he’s only the tip of the iceberg right now. A diverse group of counter-elites are rallying around the Trump ticket. Some of them, like J.D. Vance, rose through the Republican ranks like a meteor. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, among others, have left the Democratic Party. Others include business tycoons like Musk and media figures like Joe Rogan, perhaps America’s most influential podcaster. The latter was once a supporter of the populist wing of the Democratic Party (particularly Bernie Sanders).
The important point here is that in 2024, the Democratic Party, which had transformed into the party of the ruling class, had to contend not only with a wave of popular discontent but also with an anti-elite revolt. So we are in a predicament that has been repeated thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways forward.
One is the overthrow of established elites, as happened in the French and Russian revolutions. The other is that the ruling elite supports rebalancing the social system. The most important thing is to stop the wealth pump and reverse popular dispossession and elite overproduction. It happened about a century ago with the New Deal. There are parallels to the Chartist period (1838-1857). During this period, Britain was the only European power to avoid the wave of revolution that hit Europe in 1848 through major reforms. However, the United States has not learned the lessons of history.
What happens next? The November 5 election defeat represents a battle in the ongoing revolutionary war. The triumphant counter-elites hope to completely replace their counterparts (what they sometimes refer to as the “deep state”). However, as history has shown, achieving such goals is by no means certain. Their opponents are firmly entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in a winning coalition can cause it to collapse (as the saying goes, revolutions eat their children). Most importantly, the challenges facing the new Trump administration are of a particularly intractable kind. What is their plan to deal with the exploding federal budget deficit? How are they going to stop the wealth pump? And how will the Democratic Party respond? Will their 2028 platform include a new New Deal, a commitment to large-scale social reform?
One thing is clear: no matter what choices or actions the parties to the conflict take, they will not immediately lead to a solution. Public dissatisfaction has been building up in the United States for more than 40 years. It will take many years of real prosperity to convince the public that the country is back on the right track. So for now, we can expect a period of discord to continue. Let’s hope it doesn’t spill over into a heated civil war.
Peter Turchin is project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna and author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (Allen Lane).
