End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

by Peter Turchin

when a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars), a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability. And here we are.

All complex societies go through cycles of alternating stretches of internal peace and harmony periodically interrupted by outbreaks of internal warfare and discord.

While the wages and incomes of workers stagnated, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The Great Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the past forty years resemble what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900. If the postwar period was a true golden age of broadly based prosperity, after 1980 we indeed entered the “Second Gilded Age.”

At whose expense did the wealth held by the elites swell in recent years? Wealth is accumulated income; in order for it to grow, it has to be fed by directing a portion of GDP to the elites. The proportion of GDP consumed by the government has not changed much over the past four decades.[9] The main loser has been the common American.

understand why Donald Trump became the forty-fifth president of the United States, we should also pay less attention to his personal qualities and maneuvers and more to the deep social forces that propelled him to the top. Trump was like a small boat caught on the crest of a mighty tidal wave. The two most important social forces that gave us the Trump presidency—and pushed America to the brink of state breakdown—are elite overproduction and popular immiseration.

Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical

factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.

The Great Famine coincided with a trough in solar activity known as the Wolf Minimum (1280–1350). Most climatologists agree that lower solar activity produces cooler global temperatures. The primary cause of crop failures in Europe north of the Alps is cool and wet weather, which delays the ripening of crops and increases the chance that they will rot before being harvested. Other periods of low solar activity, including the Spörer Minimum (1460–1550) and the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715), are also correlated with cooler-than-average temperatures and incidences of crop failure.

each secular cycle comprises an integrative trend followed by a disintegrative one. In the beginning of the cycle, the population grows from the minimum and is still far from the ceiling of the carrying capacity (the total number of people that the territory can feed, depending on both the amount of arable land and the current agricultural technology). As a result, real wages are high, and labor productivity is also high because land is still plentiful. In addition, most of the agricultural surplus is consumed by the producers themselves, making this period a golden age of the peasantry.

Angus Deaton recently used these statistics to discover a highly troubling trend in this measure of well-being. They found that life expectancy at birth for white Americans fell by one-tenth of a year between 2013 and 2014. In the next three years, life expectancy fell for the US population as a whole. Mortality at all ages rose, but the most rapid increase happened to white Americans in midlife. “Any decline in life expectancy is extremely uncommon. With a three-year decline, we are in unfamiliar territory; American life expectancy has never fallen for three years in a row since states’ vital registration coverage was completed in 1933,” Case and Deaton write.[17] The decline in the life expectancy of Americans began several years before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic delivered a major punch. By 2020, life expectancy at birth lost 1.6 years, as compared to 2014.[18]

In other words, we aren’t imagining it—in very important ways, things are worse in America. The problem is, our government is so dysfunctional that it cannot address the loss of lifespan because there’s short term power and gain to be had by denying climate change and the associated rise of diseases, and railing against wearing masks while long Covid destroys people.

In the 1970s, a new generation of elites began replacing the “great civic generation.”[27] The new elites, who didn’t experience the turbulence of the previous age of discord, forgot its lessons and started to gradually dismantle the pillars on which the postwar prosperity era was based.

Today an advanced degree is not a perfect, or even reasonably effective, defense against precarity. In fact, Guy Standing, who injected the term precariat into the public consciousness, sees degree holders as one of the precariat factions. Of this group (the “progressives”), he writes: It consists of people who go to college, promised by their parents, teachers and politicians that this will grant them a career. They soon realize they were sold a lottery ticket and come out without a future and with plenty of debt. This faction is dangerous in a more positive way. They are unlikely to support populists. But they also reject old conservative or social democratic political parties. Intuitively, they are looking for a new politics of paradise, which they do not see in the old political spectrum or in such bodies as trade unions.[4]

At a recent family brunch, this became clear as the next generation talked about their precarious situations. Home ownership is unlikely given student loan debt; children are unlikely given their housing challenges; tying decent health care to tenuous employment is a great way to extract money, but a terrible way to build a thriving society.

This instability is due to one of the most fundamental principles in sociology, the “iron law of oligarchy,”[16] which states that when an interest group acquires a lot of power, it inevitably starts using this power in self-interested ways. We see this general principle operating in both premodern and contemporary societies.

What is little appreciated is that although democratic institutions are the best (or least bad) way of governing societies, democracies are particularly vulnerable to being subverted by plutocrats. Ideology may be the softest, gentlest form of power, but it is the key one in democratic societies. The plutocrats can use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and to handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their messages. In other words, they wield enormous power to sway the electorate toward the opinions that promote their interests.