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

by Peter Turchin

Overproduction of youth with advanced degrees has been the most significant factor in driving societal upheavals, from the Revolutions of 1848 to the Arab Spring of 2011.

Unlike its milder versions, extreme competition does not lead to the selection of the best candidates, the candidates most suited for the positions. Rather, it corrodes the rules of the game, the social norms and institutions that govern how society works in a functional way. It destroys cooperation. It brings out the dark side of meritocracy. It creates a few winners and masses of losers. And some of those failed elite aspirants convert into radicalized counter-elites who are motivated to destroy the unjust social order that has bred them.

Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1964 on the platform of low taxes and anti-union rhetoric. By today’s standards, Goldwater was a mild conservative whose policies wouldn’t be that different from those of, say, Bill Clinton. But he was regarded as a dangerous radical, and business leaders abandoned his campaign in favor of Johnson. Goldwater was defeated by a landslide.

But such a gradual, gentle decline assumes that the social system maintains its stability. Analysis of historical cases in CrisisDB indicates that the much more frequent scenario of downward social mobility, which eliminates elite overproduction, is associated with periods of high sociopolitical instability, the “ages of discord.” In such cases, downward mobility is rapid and typically associated with violence. Political instability and internal warfare prune elite numbers in a variety of ways. Some elite individuals are simply killed in civil wars or by way of assassination. Others may be dispossessed of their elite status when their faction loses in a civil war. Finally, general conditions of violence and lack of success discourage many “surplus” elite aspirants from continuing their pursuit of elite status, which leads to acceptance of downward mobility.

Finally, there is no permanent solution. A balanced social system with the wealth pump shut down is an unstable equilibrium that takes constant effort to maintain—like riding a bicycle. 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