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

by Peter Turchin

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.