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

by Peter Turchin

The first population group in which Case and Deaton documented growing death rates was working-class white men between forty-five and fifty-five years old. The trend reversal for this group came in the late 1990s.[20] The rise in mortality rates was driven by a combination of causes, which Case and Deaton refer to in aggregate as “deaths of despair.” Deaths of despair are caused by suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse—all ways of escaping physical and psychological pain. Suicide is the fastest way out, but deaths from drug overdoses and alcoholic cirrhosis are equally self-inflicted; they simply take longer. What was particularly striking was that whereas deaths of despair increased fourfold for less educated men, they hardly budged for more educated men.[21]

As John F. Kennedy said in 1963 (when the relative wage was at a peak), a rising tide lifts all boats. But in the past forty years, relative wages have been declining. The yachts of the top earners have been soaring, while the boats of everybody else have been sinking, with those of the lowest ten-percent plunging into an abyss. Relative wages have not declined in such a sustained manner since the three decades between 1830 and 1860.

Basic considerations of fairness and equity suggest that declining relative wages do not make for a happy state of affairs. Why should most workers be excluded from equitably sharing in the fruits of economic growth? People in low-paying jobs perform critical tasks for society. It doesn’t seem right that their wages do not go up as society grows more affluent.

The antebellum ruling class in the US was a direct offshoot of the English squirearchy. Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were settled by the Cavaliers, the faction of supporters of Charles I that lost the English Civil War. They brought with them their aristocratic ways and indentured servants. The latter were soon replaced by imported Africans, enslaved for life.

Strong economic growth created enough prosperity to lift all boats; a sense of national unity argued against exclusion of people of color; and ideological rivalry between Cold War adversaries provided an additional push. (Constant reminders by Soviet propaganda of pervasive racism in the US were embarrassing.) Nurtured by these conditions, the civil rights movement became an irresistible force for social change. The gradual expansion of the social contract to include Black workers, however, provided an opening for those plutocrats who were unhappy with America as a quasi-Nordic country in which their power was constrained by the other two interest groups: workers and the state. They used the Republican Party as a vehicle to push their own agenda, aiming to dismantle worker protections and reduce taxes on the wealthy. This agenda was translated into action by politicians such as Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, initially, and later by Ronald Reagan as the “Southern strategy,” whose goal was to make the Republican Party the dominant party in the former Confederate states by appealing to Southern white voters using explicitly or implicitly racist issues.

The final factor in Walter’s list of causes is the advent of the internet, the massive adoption of smartphones, and the rise of social media. In her view, the algorithms of social media serve as “accelerants” for violence by promoting a sense of perpetual crisis, a feeling of growing despair, and a perception that moderates have failed. “It’s at this point that violence breaks out: when citizens become convinced that there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means.”[13]

We start the engine in 1960 and first run it for the sixty years for which the history is fixed. From the MPF point of view, the most important trend during this time is the decline in the relative wage. The decline in the relative wage turns on the wealth pump, and elite numbers begin to increase in an accelerating manner. By 2020, both immiseration and elite overproduction, and thus the PSI, reach very high levels. The radicalization curve, tracking the number of radicals, which had been staying flat near zero, starts to grow after 2010 and literally explodes during the 2020s. So does political violence. At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers. Remember that MPF is a model, which means that it abstracts reality into mathematical equations.

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.

Complex human societies need elites—rulers, administrators, thought leaders—to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.