Trump and the Triumph of America’s New Elite
The US is in the midst of a “revolutionary situation,” says the author of End Times
By Peter Turchin
20 de noviembre de 2024 at 13:00 CET
A future historian looking back at the social and economic trends of the past decade might be struck by how thoroughly dysfunctional the most powerful nation of Earth has become. Despite extraordinary technological change and respectable economic growth, the well-being of most Americans has been declining. Even many of the winners are deeply anxious about being able to pass success on to their children. And we’ve run up an unsustainable public debt, with no solution in sight.
So while Donald Trump’s election this fall was a surprise to many, the forces that underlay it have been fermenting since at least his first win, in 2016. As I wrote in my 2023 book End Times, our current predicament is not unique. Complex human societies organized as states have been around for 5,000 years. For a while, they can experience periods of high internal peace and order, roughly a century long, but inevitably they enter periods of high social unrest and political disintegration—end times. Think of the French and Russian revolutions or the American Civil War.
Why? An analysis of hundreds of crises over the past thousands of years by my research team identified a common precursor: a situation of “elite overproduction.” Simply put, it’s when too many elite aspirants (wannabe elites) are vying for a fixed number of power positions. It’s like a game of musical chairs, except the number of chairs stays constant, while the number of players is allowed to increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers. And some of those turn into “counter-elites”—those willing to challenge the established order; revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia, or Fidel Castro and the Barbudos in Cuba. This is the main reason why complex societies end up in end times.
Popular immiseration—declining well-being of the common people—is the second important ingredient for a crisis. Together with elite overproduction it creates an explosive mixture, because counter-elites organize and channel popular discontent in their quest to overthrow the ruling class.
How do these insights help us understand the current political turmoil in America? Somewhat simplifying, the American ruling class is a coalition of the top wealth holders (the so-called 1 Percent, until recently represented by the Republican Party) and the top university and professional degree holders (the 10 Percent, represented by the Democrats). Both mainstream parties underwent a rapid evolution in the past decade. This is especially true for the Republican Party, which is transitioning into a truly revolutionary party espousing radical right-wing populism, according to some, or becoming a party of the working class, according to others.
This transition began with the unexpected victory of Trump in 2016. Trump, of course, was not a revolutionary; he was a political entrepreneur who channeled popular discontent, especially of White Americans without college degrees, to propel himself to power. Once in power, however, he attempted to make good on his election promises (quite atypical for established politicians). Not all the initiatives that he proposed went against the interests of the ruling class. His tax legislation succeeded in making the tax code even more regressive. But on other fronts he went squarely against the priorities of the economic elites. His worst offenses included his anti-immigration policy (which economic elites favor, as it helps depress workers’ wages), rejection of the traditional Republican free-market orthodoxy in favor of industrial policy, and his NATO skepticism and unwillingness to start new conflicts abroad.
In 2020, America’s ruling class thought it had squashed the revolution. The Democratic Party had controlled its own populist wing and had become the party of the ruling class—of the 10 Percent and the 1 Percent. This realignment was signaled by Kamala Harris massively outspending Trump in the latest election cycle, as well as the support of the Harris ticket by such mainstream Republicans as Liz and Dick Cheney, or neocons like Bill Kristol. Meanwhile, Trump has had remarkable success in reshaping the Republican Party into a right-wing populist party. Some of his old-school Republican critics retired, others were defeated at the polls, many switched to the Democratic Party, and the rest are keeping a low profile while genuflecting to the resurgent leader.
Although mainstream media and politicians obsess about Trump, it’s important to understand that he’s merely the tip of the iceberg. What we saw in 2024 was a coalescence of a diverse coalition of counter-elites around the Trump ticket. Some of them, like JD Vance, rocketed their way up through the Republican ranks. Other politicians, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, defected from the Democrats. Nonpolitician counter-elites include media figures, like Tucker Carlson, who was fired by Fox News but subsequently started a hugely successful independent show on X. Or the tycoon Elon Musk, who was pilloried by the established media and politicians for taking over Twitter (now X) and using it to promote Trump’s candidacy.
I could go on, but the main point here is that what unified these counter-elites (and many I haven’t mentioned) was that they all have axes to grind against the ruling class. (One wonders whether Barack Obama now regrets having mocked Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011).
As I wrote in End Times, the American ruling class finds itself in the predicament that has recurred thousands of times in human history. Many common Americans have withdrawn their support from the governing elites. In the words of Carlson, they’ve flipped up “a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class.”
Large swaths of credentialed elite aspirants, frustrated in their quest for power positions, are breeding grounds for counter-elites, who dream of overthrowing the existing regime. Most wealth holders are unwilling to sacrifice any personal advantage for the sake of preserving the status quo. The technical term for this is a “revolutionary situation.” For ruling classes, there are two routes out of a revolutionary situation. One leads to their overthrow. The alternative is for the ruling elites to back reforms that will rebalance the social system, reversing the trends of popular immiseration and elite overproduction. It happened once in America, about a century ago with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Writing two years ago, I asked, “Can they do it again?” In the aftermath of the 2024 elections, the answer is becoming clearer. If Trump and his coterie of counter-elites have their way, as now seems increasingly likely, then we are on a trajectory to elite replacement, rather than gradual reforms.
