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iIn the days since the Republicans’ landslide victory in the US election, which gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives, commentators have analyzed and dissected the relative merits of the main actors – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. . Much has been said about their personalities and the words they spoke; little about the impersonal social forces that drive complex human societies to the brink of collapse—and sometimes beyond. This is a mistake: to understand the roots of our current crisis and the possible ways out of it, we must focus precisely on these tectonic forces.
The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies organized as states can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting approximately a century. Inevitably, however, they then enter periods 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 countries that have fallen into crisis and then emerged from it.
So we are in a good position to identify only those impersonal social forces that fuel disorder and fragmentation, and we have found three common factors: impoverishment of the people, elite overproduction, and state collapse.
To better understand these concepts and how they affect American politics in 2024, we need to go back in time to the 1930s, when an unwritten social contract emerged in the form of Franklin D RooseveltThe new deal of. This contract balances the interests of workers, business and the state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in the Nordic countries. For two generations, this implicit pact ensured an unprecedented growth in welfare across a wide swath of the country. At the same time, the “Great Contraction” of income and wealth dramatically reduced economic inequality. For about 50 years, the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.
This social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions was undermined and taxes on the rich were cut. Typical worker wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, began to lag. Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated and at times declined. The result was a decline in many aspects of the quality of life for the majority of Americans. One shocking way this became apparent was changes in life expectancy that have stalled and even reversed (and this started well before the Covid pandemic). This is what we call “popular impoverishment”.
As workers’ incomes effectively stagnated, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” emerged, draining money from the poor and funneling it to the rich. The great compression has reversed. In many ways, the last four decades are reminiscent of what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900. – the time of railroad riches and robber barons. If the post-war period was a golden age of widespread prosperity, after 1980 it could be said that we have entered the Second Gilded Age.
However good the extra wealth may seem to its recipients, it ultimately creates problems for them as a class. The ultra-rich (those with more than $10 million) increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020 adjusted for inflation. A certain number of these people have political ambitions: some run for political office themselves (like Trump), others fund political candidates (like Peter Thiel). The more members of this elite class, the more candidates for political power a society contains.
Until 2010 the social pyramid in the US grew extremely hard: there were too many would-be leaders and tycoons competing for a certain number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, this state of affairs has a name: elite overproduction.
Elite overproduction can be likened to a game of musical chairs – except that the number of chairs remains constant while the number of players may increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers. Some of them become “counter-elites”: willing to challenge the established order; rebels and revolutionaries such as Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the English Civil War or Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In the modern US, we can think of media disruptors such as Tucker Carlson, or individual entrepreneurs seeking political influence such as Elon Musk along with countless lesser-known examples at lower levels in the system. As battles between ruling elites and counter-elites rage, the norms governing public discourse break down and trust in institutions declines. The result is a loss of civic cohesion and a sense of national cooperation – without which countries quickly rot from within.
One result of all this political dysfunction is the inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Along with the loss of trust and legitimacy, this accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It should be noted that the collapse of public finances is often the trigger event for a revolution: this happened in France before 1789. and on the eve of the English Civil War.
How does this landscape translate into party politics? The American ruling class, as it developed after the end of the Civil War in 1865, was basically a coalition of the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or “accredited” class of professionals and graduates (what we might call 10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, both have changed beyond recognition.
The remaking of the Republican Party began unexpectedly Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. He was typical of political entrepreneurs in history who channeled popular discontent to rise to power (one example is Tiberius Gracchus, who founded the Populist party in late Republican Rome). Not all of his initiatives are against the interests of the ruling class – for example, he managed to make the tax code more regressive. But many did, including his immigration policies (economic elites tend to favor open immigration because it depresses wages); rejection of traditional republican free-market orthodoxy in favor of industrial policy; skepticism towards NATO and a pronounced reluctance to start new conflicts abroad.
To some, it looked as if the revolution had been quelled when the quintessential establishment figure, Joe Biden, defeated Trump in 2020 Until 2024 the democrats have essentially become the party of the ruling class – from 10% and of 1% after taming its own populist wing (led by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders). This realignment has been signaled by Kamala Harris, who significantly outspent Trump this election cycle, as well as by mainstream Republicans such as Liz and Dick Cheney or neoconservatives such as Bill Kristol backing the Harris ticket.
Meanwhile, the GOP has transformed into a truly revolutionary party: one that represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical right-wing agenda (according to its opponents). In the process, she has largely purged herself of traditional Republicans.
Trump was clearly the main agent of this change. But while the mainstream media and politicians obsess over him, it is important to recognize that he is now only the tip of the iceberg: a diverse group of counter-elites has rallied around candidate Trump. Some of them, like JD Vance, had meteoric rises through the Republican ranks. Some, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, defected from the Democrats. Others include tycoons like Musk or media figures like Joe Rogan, arguably America’s most influential podcaster. The latter was once a supporter of the populist wing of the Democratic Party (and Bernie Sanders in particular).
The main point here is that in 2024 the Democrats, who had become the party of the ruling class, had to contend not only with the wave of popular discontent but also with the revolt of the counter-elites. As such, he finds himself in a predicament that has been repeated thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways things can go from here.
One is with the overthrow of established elites, as happened in the French and Russian revolutions. The other is with the ruling elites advocating a rebalancing of the social system – most importantly, stopping the wealth pump and reversing the impoverishment of the people and the overproduction of the elite. This happened about a century ago with the New Deal. There is also a parallel in the Chartist period (1838–1857), when Britain was the only European great power to avoid the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 through major reforms. But the US has so far failed to learn the lessons of history.
What’s next? The November 5 election defeat represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war. The triumphant counter-elites want to replace their counterparts – what they sometimes call the “deep state” – entirely. But history shows that success in achieving such goals is far from certain. Their opponents are quite well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in a winning coalition can lead to its collapse (as they say, revolutions devour 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 will they stop the wealth pump? And what will the Democrats’ response be? Will their 2028 platform include new New Deal, commitment to major social reform?
One thing is clear: whatever the choices and actions of the disputing parties, they will not lead to an immediate solution. Popular discontent in the US has been building for more than four decades. It will take many years of real prosperity to convince the public that the country is back on track. So for now we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope it doesn’t escalate into a heated civil war.
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