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

by Peter Turchin

cliodynamics (from Clio, the name of the Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change).

What, then, is this model? To put it somewhat wonkily, 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.

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.”

Who are the elites? You, reader, are you “elite”? If I were a betting man, I’d predict that 99 percent of my readers would answer “no!” So let’s define what I mean by “elites.” In sociology, elites are not those who are somehow better than the rest. They are not necessarily those who are more hardworking, or more intelligent, or more talented. They are simply those who have more social power—the ability to influence other people. A more descriptive term for elites is “power holders.”

To 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.

Historians of China see a similar pattern, which they call the dynastic cycles. Between 221 BC and 1912, from the Qin dynasty to the Qing dynasty, China was repeatedly unified (and reunified) and governed effectively for a while. Then moral corruption set in, bringing decline and fragmentation. As the Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms says, “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

The theory thus tells us that there should be a significant difference in cycle lengths between societies with monogamous ruling classes and those with polygamous ones. According to my calculations, the typical length of cycles in monogamous societies should be around two hundred up to three hundred years, but in societies with polygamous elites, it should be only about a century, or even less.[16] We saw that the cycles in France and England (and according

The startling conclusion from these data is that Americans without a four-year college degree—64 percent of the total population—have been losing ground in absolute terms; their real wages shrank over the forty years before 2016. But we are not done yet. So far, we’ve been focusing entirely on inflation-adjusted wages, or “real wages.” But what makes them real? Adjusting wages for inflation is not quite as straightforward as it may seem. Over the past decades, some goods became cheaper: TVs, for example, and many toys. The cost of other things, such as new cars, hasn’t changed much in current dollars, which means that new cars became cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars. But the cost of other items and products increased much faster than the official inflation rate. To estimate this rate, government economists must define a basket of consumables and then calculate how its cost changes from year to year. There are several problems with this approach. First, the baskets of Steve and Kathryn are utterly different. In other words, each experiences a different rate of inflation. Second, the basket of consumables changes dramatically over time. For example, people didn’t have smartphones in 1976, and now everybody uses them. How do we factor this in?

How can we understand this? Economic trends, such as growing inequality, play an important role, but it would be too crude to draw a direct causal arrow from inequality to immiseration. Here’s how I reconstruct the constellation of causes that resulted in shrinking American life expectancy—and declining well-being more generally. My explanation is consistent with that of Case and Deaton, and of economists such as John Komlos.[22] But I reach further back into the past and put it within the general framework of cliodynamics.[23]

The United States, like any other complex society, has gone through alternating integrative and disintegrative phases.

And, ironically, the opposite end of the wealth spectrum—the superrich—were also among the losers, because the tripartite agreement shut down and indeed reversed the wealth pump.

But it didn’t last. 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. The ideas of neoclassical economics, previously held by fringe economists, now became mainstream.[28] The Reagan presidency of the 1980s was the turning point when the idea of cooperation between workers and businesses was abandoned. Instead, we entered the age of “greed is good.”

A 2021 article by Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens provides further evidence that wage suppression between 1979 and 2017 was due to a shifting balance of power, not to automation and technological changes. Mishel and Bivens identify the following factors that together accounted for three-fourths of the divergence between productivity and median hourly compensation growth: Austerity macroeconomics, including facilitating unemployment higher than it needed to be to keep inflation in check, and responding to recessions with insufficient force; Corporate-driven globalization, resulting from policy choices, largely at the behest of multinational corporations, that undercut wages and job security of noncollege-educated workers while protecting profits and the pay of business managers and professionals; Purposely eroded collective bargaining, resulting from judicial decisions, and policy choices that invited ever more aggressive anti-union business practices; Weaker labor standards, including a declining minimum wage, eroded overtime protections, nonenforcement against instances of “wage theft,” or discrimination based on gender, race, and/or ethnicity; New employer-imposed contract terms, such as agreements not to compete after leaving employment and to submit to forced private and individualized arbitration of grievances; and Shifts in corporate structures, resulting from fissuring (or domestic outsourcing), industry deregulation, privatization, buyer dominance affecting entire ...

In this account, as we see, social, cultural, and psychological factors play a very important role. These noneconomic influences include corrosive ideologies, such as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and the new mainstream economics, which extolled economic efficiency and market fundamentalism at the expense of improving broadly based well-being. Another development, with somewhat unexpected consequences, was the rise of meritocracy. The philosopher Michael Sandel put it best: Winners are encouraged to consider their success their own doing, a measure of their virtue—and to look down upon those less fortunate than themselves. Those who lose out may complain that the system is rigged, that the winners have cheated and manipulated their way to the top. Or they may harbor the demoralizing thought that their failure is their own doing, that they simply lack the talent and drive to succeed.[38]

When we consider the dynamics of relative wages in the United States from the beginning of the Republic to the present, the data show a remarkable pattern of two waves. Between 1780 and 1830, the relative wage nearly doubled. After the peak of 1830, however, it lost most of its gains by 1860. It fluctuated at this low level until 1910, when there was another sustained period of growth that lasted until 1960 and again nearly doubled the relative wage. Starting in 1970, the relative wage declined, and continues to decline as I write this chapter. Between 1976 and 2016, the relative wage lost nearly 30 percent of its value.

Relative wages have not declined in such a sustained manner since the three decades between 1830 and 1860. Together with relative wages, biological indicators of well-being, such as stature and life expectancy, have gone through the same two great cycles.

Between 1910 and 1960, the relative wage nearly doubled. This means that the boats of the common people were actually lifted faster than the overall economy. It was the wealthy who were losing ground. But strangely, the wealthy and powerful were not unhappy about it. They became unhappy during the 1970s. We’ll talk about the revolt of the elites later.

Those falling behind need to get their acts together—obtain the right skills or work harder and smarter. As the ironic Russian saying goes, “Rescuing drowning people is the business of the drowning people themselves.”[39]

It takes time, but eventually the wealth pumped from the common people to the elites results in elite overproduction, intraelite conflict, and, if not checked in time, state collapse and social breakdown. The rich are perhaps even more vulnerable than common people during such periods of social and political turbulence, as outcomes of social revolutions suggest. Another non-obvious insight from cliodynamics is that the general worsening of the well-being of the working class creates powerful incentives for its members to escape into the credentialed class. Getting education is, of course, a standard remedy for the problems we’ve discussed in this chapter. In nineteenth-century America, the advice to the immiserated masses on the East Coast was “Go west, young man!” Today it is “Go to college or, better, get a professional degree.” And at the individual level, for those who want to escape precarity, this is good advice. But what happens at the collective level, when massive numbers of aspirants seek to enter the ranks of the elite?

Our database, CrisisDB, shows that while popular immiseration is a big contributor to social and political turbulence, elite overproduction is even more dangerous.

To improve her speaking Spanish, she signed up for a language school in rural Guatemala, where she lived for three months with a local family. This was an eye-opening experience. Her hosts were very poor. Their diet was almost entirely based on corn and beans, with a little bit of chicken or pork consumed once or twice a week. Yet they were generally happy, warm, and welcoming, and they freely shared what little they had with her. It was a remarkable contrast with her other world, the elite private schools populated by stressed-out, self-centered superachievers. A world of solidarity and cooperation, where everybody had time to stop and chat, against the world of frenzied competition and limitless vanity.

History (and CrisisDB) tells us that the credentialed precariat (or, in the jargon of cliodynamics, the frustrated elite aspirant class) is the most dangerous class for societal stability. 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. Interestingly, different professions have different propensities for producing revolutionary leaders. You might not think of a teacher as a likely revolutionary, but Hong, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion, whom we encountered in chapter 1, was a village teacher before he became an insurgent. So was Mao.

Why do these parents need so much reassurance? They “are finding that it’s harder and harder to get their children through the eye of the needle”—admitted into the best programs, all the way from kindergarten to college. But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career.

Structural studies of revolution and state breakdown, however, have often been criticized for their neglect of ideological and cultural factors.[9] The goal of cliodynamics, in contrast, is to integrate all important forces of history, whether they are demographic, economic, social, cultural, or ideological. We saw, for example, that such basic characteristics of society as the social norms regulating marriage (polygamy versus monogamy) have a fundamental effect on the characteristic lengths of boom-and-bust cycles (chapter 2).

Following Goldstone, we can distinguish three phases of ideological evolution as societies slide into, and then out of, crises. During the first phase, or precrisis phase, the period leading up to state breakdown, the state is struggling to maintain control in the face of a multitude of ideological challenges coming from different elite factions. In the second phase, when the old regime has completely lost legitimacy (which often results in the state’s collapse), numerous contenders who seek to establish a new monopoly of authority struggle among themselves for primacy. In the final phase, when one group gains the upper hand over its opponents and moves to stabilize its authority over the state, it focuses on gaining routine acceptance of the reconstructed political, religious, and social institutions.

A nearly universal feature of precrisis periods is thus the fragmentation of the ideological landscape and the breakdown of elite ideological consensus that underlies routine acceptance of state institutions.

By the same token, the low polarization period of the 1820s was no comfort if you were a laborer held against your will in a slave labor camp in the fertile lands of the American South that had recently been cleared of their previous inhabitants. However, the main point here is not to pass a value judgment on this trend but simply take note of it.

Furthermore, we have entered a new era dominated by radical ideologies. The term radical politics, by popular definition, denotes the intent to transform or replace the fundamental principles of a society or political system, often through social change, structural change, revolution, or radical reform.[15]

As of 2022, we are clearly in transition from the precrisis phase, when the state is still struggling to maintain control of the ideological landscape in the face of a multitude of counter-elite challengers, to the next phase, when numerous contenders struggle among themselves for primacy. Politicians who still cling to old-regime values, which emphasize moderation and intraelite cooperation, have been retiring, or losing elections to challengers with more extreme views. The ideological center today resembles a country road in Texas, almost deserted save for the yellow stripe and dead armadillos. As a result of the center’s collapse, ideological infighting is shifting from the struggle against the old regime (or in defense of it) to the struggle between different elite factions. Ideological differences are now used as a weapon in intraelite conflicts, both to pull down members of the established elites and to draw ahead of rival aspirants.

In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of—historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility. In America today, the losers are treated in milder ways, at least so far.

The Communist Manifesto proclaims, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.” But old Marx turned out to be wrong. Immiserated proletarians are not the ones who run successful revolutions. The truly dangerous revolutionaries are frustrated elite aspirants, who have the privileges, training, and connections to enable them to wield influence at scale. Even the minority of newly credentialed youth who get into elite positions right away, like the 20 percent of law school graduates with $190K salaries,

Finally, as their domains became larger and more populous, they ran into the limitations of direct rule and reluctantly had to share power with administration specialists, the bureaucrats. Our analysis of a worldwide sample of historical societies has determined that polities with populations of up to a few hundred thousand could be ruled by chiefs and their retinues without full-time administrators.[4] But once you have a million or more subjects, you either acquire a civil service or suffer from such inefficiencies that your polity sooner or later collapses. Or loses in competition with bureaucratic empires.

As Kevin Phillips wrote in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, at the same time that the Civil War destroyed Southern wealth, it immensely enriched Northern capitalists. Holding Union debt was extremely lucrative. Supplying the Union war effort was even more profitable. “A surprising number of the commercial and financial giants of the late nineteenth century—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, Collis Huntington, and several other railroad grandees—were young Northerners who avoided military service, usually by buying substitutes, and used the war to take major steps up future fortune’s ladder,” Phillips wrote.[10] In just ten years, from 1860 to 1870, the number of American millionaires exploded, from 41 to 545.

The third face is the most subtle, perhaps even insidious, kind of power. My favorite example of its effectiveness is the “death tax” meme, invented by some brilliant, if evil, propagandist at one of the think tanks to kill the inheritance tax on top fortunes. Common people agitate against the government to “take your dirty paws off my money that I am leaving to my children” without apparently realizing that the proposed tax would affect only the superrich.[29]

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. After they won the Revolutionary War against the British Empire, the winners set about building their own state. Southern planters and Northern merchants largely copied the cultural forms of governance with which they were familiar. The early American Republic was an oligarchy modeled after the United Kingdom, although without a monarch (who, by that point, was on the way to becoming just a figurehead in the British Empire anyway). As a result, the United States inherited plutocracy as part of its “cultural genotype.”

During its formative post–Civil War years, the plutocracy had no significant rivals, whether internal or external. Once it was entrenched, it became exceedingly difficult to displace without a social revolution. Thus, the rise of the American plutocracy can mostly be explained by its historical antecedents and geographical circumstances. But its continuing survival and efflorescence into the twenty-first century is largely due to a second cause—race and ethnicity.

key development in shutting down the wealth pump was the passage of the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924. Although much of the proximate motivation behind these laws was to exclude “dangerous aliens,” such as Italian anarchists and Eastern European socialists, their broader effect was a reduction in labor oversupply, something that business elites were well aware of. Shutting down immigration reduced the labor supply and provided a powerful boost to real wages for many decades to come.

As we examine one case of state breakdown after another, we invariably see that, in each case, the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites—whether they belonged to the antebellum slavocracy, the nobility of the French ancien régime, or the Russian intelligentsia circa 1900—were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled. Let’s talk now about state breakdown in deep history and in recent history.

When Stalin joined the Bolshevik Party, Russia was suffering from a huge problem of elite overproduction, which was a fundamental cause of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.[4] By 1941, when the Soviet Union entered World War II, Stalin had taken care of this problem by ruthlessly exterminating this elite “surplus.” He essentially created a pipeline for ambitious aspirants to enter the elite, progress up the ranks, and then be executed or sent to labor camps.

And this leads us to the central questions of this chapter: What explains social breakdown? Why do states collapse? How do civil wars start? There are two opposite ways to approach these questions. The sociological approach is to ignore individuals and focus entirely on impersonal social forces that push societies into breakdown. But many people (who are not sociologists) find this approach unsatisfying. They want to know who was responsible. Whose fault was the French Revolution? Was it Louis XVI? Marie Antoinette? Robespierre?

An alternative to the sociological approach, then, is to analyze what leaders such as Louis XVI, Nero, and Gorbachev did wrong. This view is rooted in the great-man theory of history, which was particularly popular in the nineteenth century and is still the default mode for pundits, politicians, and the lay public.

The disagreements between the conservatives and the progressives within the ruling class focus almost entirely on cultural issues. The economic elites, who dominate the American polity, can tolerate a great diversity of views on such issues, as long as the consensus on promoting their collective economic interests (keeping their taxes and worker wages low) is strong.

At the beginning of the book, Carlson asks, “Why did America elect Donald Trump?” And he immediately answers: Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do. This answer, which is also a diagnosis, sets the tone for the rest of the book. America is in trouble; what are the root causes? His critique of the American ruling class in many places parallels our analysis of the social forces driving the United States to the edge.

As Jason Zengerle wrote in The New York Times, “Depending on your point of view, NatCons are either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse-engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard-brain populism.”[33] And even established Republican politicians are moving in the populist direction, having started to question their allegiance to big business.

What can we learn from these two success stories? Despite obvious differences between Britain and Russia—one was a liberal empire, the other an autocratic one—they also shared certain similarities, which may help explain why they managed to navigate their mid-nineteenth-century crises without major revolutions, unlike the rest of the contemporary great (and not-so-great) powers. Possessing a growing empire was, undoubtedly, an important advantage, because each state could afford to export surplus population and elites to recently annexed territories. Additionally, building a large and durable empire is not simple. Success at this business suggests a certain competency of the ruling class and at least some degree of broadly based cooperation within society. This competency can be, and was, directed to the business of reforming the empire to face new challenges. At the same time, both empires were simply lucky in having leaders who were willing to sacrifice short-term selfish advantage for the sake of long-term collective good. Finally, both states faced stiff external competition, from each other and from other great powers.

Analysis of the success stories (Chartist Britain, Reform Russia, the Progressive Era in the United States, and other cases[15]) is a source of both optimism and pessimism. The optimistic take is that it is possible to shut down the wealth pump and rebalance social systems without resorting to a revolution or catastrophic war. Death may be the “great leveler,” as Scheidel argues, but it is not the only one. Fear—or putting it a bit more charitably, intelligent foresight—can also work, and did work in the success stories.

An even more worrying development is the transition in Western democracies from “class-based party systems” to “multi-elite party systems.” Earlier in the book (chapter 8), we discussed this transition in the United States, where the Democratic Party, a party of the working class during the New Deal, became by 2000 the party of the credentialed 10 percent. The rival party, the Republican Party, primarily served the wealthy 1 percent, leaving the 90 percent out in the cold. Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty studied hundreds of elections and found that political parties in other Western democracies also increasingly cater to only the well educated and the rich.[21] When political parties abandon the working classes, this amounts to a major shift in how social power is distributed within society. Ultimately, it is this balance of power that determines whether the selfish elites are allowed to turn on the wealth pump.

The more variation there is, the more informative the data are for testing these theories against each other. Furthermore, we have clearly entered a particularly turbulent period of world history. In the coming years, the resilience of countries will be severely tested by climate change, pandemics, economic depressions, interstate conflicts, and massive immigration flows. Will those countries that did not permit their inequality levels to increase be more resilient to such shocks? We need to know.

The final thought with which I want to end this book is that humanity has come a long way since our species appeared some two hundred thousand years ago. The last ten thousand years have seen a particularly rapid evolution. Despotic elites who oppressed common people repeatedly arose and were repeatedly overthrown. We are now again in the disintegrative phase of this cycle, but while we live through our own age of discord, it’s worth remembering that humanity has learned from previous such debacles. Cumulative cultural evolution equipped us with remarkable technologies, including social technologies—institutions—that enable our societies to deliver an unprecedentedly high—and broadly based—quality of life. Yes, this capacity is often not fully realized—there is great variation between different states in providing well-being for their citizens. But in the longer term, such variation is necessary for continuing cultural evolution. If societies don’t experiment in trying for better social arrangements, evolution will stop. Even more importantly, when selfish ruling classes run their societies into the ground, it is good to have alternatives—success stories. And it falls to us, “the 99 percent,” to demand that our rulers act in ways that advance our common 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.