The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win
Our research
shows that political breakdown, from the Roman Empire to the Russian
revolution, follows a clear pattern: workers’ wages stagnate, while elites
multiply
Peter
Turchin
Sat 30 Nov
2024 12.00 CET
In the days
since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which gave the party
control of the presidency, the Senate and the House, commentators have analysed
and dissected the relative merits of the main protagonists – Kamala Harris and
Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been said about their personalities
and the words they have spoken; little about the impersonal social forces that
push complex human societies to the brink of collapse – and sometimes beyond.
That’s a mistake: in order to understand the roots of our current crisis, and
possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these tectonic forces we need to focus
on.
The research
team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the
past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can
experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a
century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods of social unrest and
political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire, the English civil
war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data on hundreds of
historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged from it.
So we’re in
a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces that foment
unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors: popular
immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.
To get a
better understanding of these concepts and how they are influencing American
politics in 2024, we need to travel back in time to the 1930s, when an
unwritten social contract came into being in the form of Franklin D Roosevelt’s
New Deal. This contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses and the
state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in Nordic
countries. For two generations, this implicit pact delivered an unprecedented
growth in wellbeing across a broad swath of the country. At the same time, a
“Great Compression” of incomes and wealth dramatically reduced economic
inequality. For roughly 50 years the interests of workers and the interests of
owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably
low.
That social
contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions was
undermined, and taxes on the wealthy cut back. Typical workers’ wages, which
had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag
behind. Inflation-adjusted wages stagnated and at times decreased. The result
was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of Americans.
One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average life
expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started well
before the Covid pandemic). That’s what we term “popular immiseration”.
With the
incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth were reaped
by the elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, siphoning
money from the poor and channelling it to the rich. The Great Compression
reversed itself. In many ways, the last four decades call to mind what happened
in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad fortunes and
robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of broad-based
prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second Gilded Age.
The
uber-wealthy increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020
Welcome as
the extra wealth might seem for its recipients, it ends up causing problems for
them as a class. The uber-wealthy (those with fortunes greater than $10m)
increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020, adjusted for inflation. A certain
proportion 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 there are, the more aspirants for
political power a society contains.
By the 2010s
the social pyramid in the US had grown exceptionally top-heavy: there were too
many wannabe leaders and moguls competing for a fixed 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 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. Some of those
turn into “counter-elites”: those 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
contemporary US we might think of media disruptors such as Tucker Carlson, or
maverick entrepreneurs seeking political influence such as Elon Musk alongside
countless less-prominent examples at lower levels in the system. As battles
between the ruling elites and counter-elites heat up, the norms governing
public discourse unravel and trust in institutions declines. The result is a
loss of civic cohesiveness and sense of national cooperation – without which
states quickly rot from within.
One result
of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal
budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that
accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It’s notable that a collapse in
state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what
happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.
How does
this landscape translate to party politics? The American ruling class, as it
has evolved since the end of the civil war in 1865, is basically a coalition of
the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or
“credentialed” class of professionals and graduates (whom we might call the
10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the
Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, they have both changed out of
all recognition.
The
recasting of the Republican party began with the unexpected victory of Donald
Trump in 2016. He was typical of political entrepreneurs in history who have
channelled popular discontent to propel themselves to power (one example is
Tiberius Gracchus, who founded the populist party in late Republican Rome). Not
all of his initiatives went 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 favour open
immigration as it suppresses wages); a rejection of traditional Republican
free-market orthodoxy in favour of industrial policy; a scepticism of Nato and
a professed unwillingness to start new conflicts abroad.
It seemed to
some as though the revolution had been squashed when a quintessentially
establishment figure, Joe Biden, defeated Trump in 2020. By 2024 the Democrats
had essentially become the party of the ruling class – of the 10% and of the
1%, having tamed its own populist wing (led by the Vermont senator Bernie
Sanders). This realignment was signalled by Kamala Harris massively outspending
Trump this election cycle, as well as mainstream Republicans, such as Liz and
Dick Cheney, or neocons such as Bill Kristol, supporting the Harris ticket.
The GOP, in
the meantime, has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party: one that
represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical rightwing
agenda (according to its detractors). In the process, it has largely purged
itself of traditional Republicans.
The defeat
on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war
Trump was
clearly the chief agent of this change. But while the mainstream media and
politicians obsess over him, it is important to recognise that he is now merely
the tip of the iceberg: a diverse group of counter-elites has coalesced around
the Trump ticket. Some of them, such as JD Vance, had meteoric rises through
the Republican ranks. Some, such as Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard,
defected from the Democrats. Others include tycoons such as Musk, or media
figures, such as Joe Rogan, perhaps the most influential American 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, having morphed into the party of the
ruling class, had to contend not only with the tide of popular discontent but
also a revolt of the counter-elites. As such, it finds itself in a predicament
that has recurred thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways
things play out 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 backing a rebalancing of the
social system – most importantly, shutting down the wealth pump and reversing
popular immiseration and elite overproduction. It happened about a century ago
with the New Deal. There’s also a parallel in the Chartist period (1838–1857),
when Great Britain was the only European great power to avoid the wave of
revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, via major reform. But the US has so far
failed to learn the historical lessons.
What comes
next? The electoral defeat on 5 November 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 assured. Their
opponents are pretty well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively
resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in the winning coalition may
result in it breaking apart (as they say, revolutions devour their children).
Most importantly, the challenges facing the new Trump administration are of the
particularly intractable kind. What is their plan for tackling the exploding
federal budget deficit? How are they going to shut down the wealth pump? And
what will the Democrats’ response be? Will their platform for 2028 include a
new New Deal, a commitment to major social reform?
One thing is
clear: whatever the choices and actions of the contending parties, they will
not lead to an immediate resolution. Popular discontent in the US has been
building up for more than four decades. Many years of real prosperity would be
needed to persuade the public that the country is back on the right track. So,
for now, we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope that it won’t spill
over into a hot civil war.
Peter Turchin is project leader at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, and the author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (Allen Lane
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