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.”

The hardest—and crudest—form of social power is coercion: force, or a threat of force. Americans specializing in coercion, such as army generals and police officers, are generally thoroughly subordinated to other forms of power. Exceptions, such as J. Edgar Hoover, who was the first and most powerful FBI director, are rare.

The second kind of power is wealth (or accumulated material resources, more generally). Wealthy people can hire people to do what they want (within limits).

The third and more subtle kind of power is bureaucratic or administrative. Modern human beings belong to a variety of organizations. We have a variety of “bosses” whose orders we generally follow. There is an element of coercion to these relationships, of course, because not following orders may get you fired, fined, or arrested. But most of the time we follow orders simply because of the power of social norms. The bosses at various levels of organizations all wield different amounts of power, which tends to increase the larger their organizations and the higher their positions within them.

The fourth and “softest” kind of power is ideological—the power of persuasion. Soft power, or persuasion, is an extremely potent force that can sway multitudes. It includes the realm of thought influencers, such as famous “public intellectuals,” columnists at major newspapers, and, more recently, social media figures with millions of followers.

An even better metric for following the effect of overproduction of wealth holders on elections is the cost of running a successful campaign. After all, not all politically ambitious rich people run for office themselves. Many instead choose to fund professional politicians who can advance their policy agendas in Washington. According to the data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, the average spending of the House winner increased from $400K in 1990 to$2.35 million in 2020, while the same statistic for the Senate started at $3.9 million (in 1990) and grew to$27 million in the last electoral round.

Second, by 2016, the elite overproduction game had reached a bifurcation point where the rules of conduct in political campaigns had been tossed to the wind. The 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries had the largest number of major candidates in history to that point. A total of seventeen contestants entered the race.[15] Members of the stunned American public became involuntary viewers in a bizarre spectacle of an elite aspirant game reaching its logical culmination. The candidates competed in saying the most outlandish things and tossing out wild quotes in order to win press attention and stay in the race, while “serious” candidates declined in the polls and were eliminated.[16]

All complex human societies organized as states experience recurrent waves of political instability. The most common pattern is an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century. Integrative phases are characterized by internal peace, social stability, and relatively cooperative elites. Disintegrative phases are the opposite: social instability, breakdown of cooperation among the elites, and persistent outbreaks of political violence, such as rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars. There are variations on this common theme; later I’ll talk about why some cycles are shorter and others longer. Also, the crisis severity is variable. Despite this variability, the time of troubles always comes. So far, we haven’t seen an exception to this rule. No society that my team has studied had an integrative phase lasting more than around two hundred years.[1]

Because the most important driver of social and political instability is elite overproduction, let’s give some thought to how the details of elite reproduction (and overproduction) can affect the social pace—how fast a society gets into and out of crises. In preindustrial societies, in which gaining an elite status was difficult, although far from impossible, for a commoner, the speed with which the elite ranks could grow, and thus elite overproduction could develop, was strongly influenced by the biological reproduction of the elites—more specifically, by the reproduction rate of elite men. (Whether we like it or not, men dominated the upper reaches of power in those societies.) In humans, the greatest influence on male reproductive success is simply the number of mates men have access to.

In Western European kingdoms, such as France and England, Christianity restricted how many legal mates men could have. Of course, powerful men could, and often did, enter relationships with mistresses outside their marriages with lawful wives. And the offspring of such unions had a chance to enter the ranks of nobility. But this “bastard effect” did not significantly increase the rate of elite aspirant production in medieval and early modern European societies.

In Islamic societies, conversely, a man could have four legal wives and as many concubines as he could support. There was no stigma associated with being a concubine’s son. Extensive polygamy, the practice of marrying many spouses, was also the rule for steppe pastoralists, such as the Mongols. As a result, these societies churned out elite aspirants at a frightening rate. The faster the pace at which elite overproduction develops, the shorter the integrative phases.

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 to CrisisDB, in other European societies as well) conform to this theoretical prediction. What about polygamous societies?

It turns out that this question was answered many centuries ago by a remarkable Islamic historian and philosopher, Abu Zayd Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami, born in Tunis in 1332. Ibn Khaldun noticed that political dynamics in his native Maghreb (North Africa, west of Egypt), as well as in the rest of the Muslim world, tend to move in cycles. After a new dynasty is established, it lasts for about four generations before falling and being replaced by a new dynasty. And then the cycle is repeated.[17] Some dynasties last for only three generations, others five, but on average, the length of Ibn Khaldun’s cycles is four generations, which corresponds to about one hundred years. This is much shorter than the European cycles, as the theory predicts. But let’s see whether Ibn Khaldun’s cycles can also be observed in other polygamous societies, such as the nomadic herding societies of Central Eurasia.

A good point of comparison is the Mongol conquests led by Chinggis Khan and his immediate successors. The huge territory conquered by the Mongols during the first half of the thirteenth century contained four large “cultural areas” inhabited by farming people. Working our way from east to west, they were China, Transoxania, Persia (including Mesopotamia), and Eastern Europe. From the middle of the thirteenth century, each of these four regions was ruled by a Chinggisid dynasty.[18] According to our theory, these four dynasties should be subject to Ibn Khaldun’s cycles of around a century. This is indeed what happened. In all four regions, Chinggisid dynasties collapsed by the middle of the fourteenth century.[19] A more formal statistical analysis of CrisisDB confirms that rise-and-fall cycles in societies with polygamous elites are substantially shorter than such cycles in monogamous societies.

Correlating societal collapse with climatic perturbations is a favorite pastime of collapsologists. But drawing a direct causal arrow from worsening climate to social breakdown doesn’t work very well.

…

In my view, external forcing due to climate fluctuations is not a direct cause of social breakdown. Its effect is more subtle. Here’s where metronomes swinging in odd sympathy can help. Think of empires as metronomes swinging between integrative and disintegrative phases. Now suppose that two empires in different regions of Eurasia start out of sync. Both are, however, affected by the same fluctuations of global climate. If one empire is “ahead” in its cycle, a period of good climate will allow it to last a little longer before it spins into crisis. A stretch of bad climate, to the contrary, will push an empire that is behind into crisis earlier. As the effects of such climatic “nudges” accumulate, the two empires will become increasingly synchronized, just as two metronomes on the same board do. Of course, imperial boom-bust cycles are much more complex than swinging metronome arms. But the general principle operates in both kinds of “oscillators” in a similar way. The external force need not even be periodic. Nudges can come at completely random times—their role is to synchronize cyclic tendencies, not to cause cycles themselves, which are driven by mechanisms internal to each empire.

About a year or two after Donald Trump astounded the world by getting himself elected, when our political elites were still trying to process this shocking turn of events, I had an interesting conversation with one of them. Kathryn, a one-percenter herself, lives in Washington, DC, and has extensive connections among both wealthy philanthropists and established as well as aspiring politicians. She often acts as an intermediary between the two groups. She had heard somewhere that years ago I had published a forecast predicting the coming instability in the US, and she wanted to know what this forecast was based on. More specifically, she was looking for insights into why so many people voted for Trump in 2016.

I started to give her my usual spiel about the drivers of social and political instability, but I didn’t get beyond the first one, popular immiseration. “What immiseration?” countered Kathryn. “Life has never been better than today!” She then advised me to read Enlightenment Now, a then just published book by Steven Pinker. She also suggested that I take a look at the graphs on Max Roser’s website, Our World in Data. Channeling both, she urged me to rethink my take: “Just follow the data. Life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise.”[2] Global poverty is declining; child mortality is declining; violence is declining. Everybody, even in the poorest African country, has a smartphone, which contains a level of technology that is miraculous compared to what previous generations had.

…

When Kathryn says that life has never been better, it’s based not only on what happens globally—there is also a personal angle. She and the people she talks to (predominantly other one-percenters, with a few ten-percenters mixed in) have done fabulously well in the past few decades. Her own experience is in agreement with the optimistic statistics cited by Pinker and Roser. But that’s not the personal experience of Steve and those in his social milieu. No wonder these two groups disagree about the direction in which the country is going.

…Another approach is to disaggregate the basket and look at different types of goods and services separately. For example, what are the most important big items that define the quality of life for the American middle class? One is clearly higher education. Another one is owning a home. Another is keeping yourself healthy. Curiously, the cost of all three of these major expenses has increased much faster than official inflation.

To bring this message home, let’s forget about real dollars (which turn out to be not quite real) and do a calculation using just nominal (current) dollars, thus skipping the step of adjusting for inflation. In 1976, the average cost of studying at a public university was $617 per year. That sounds almost unreal. **A worker earning the median wage in 1976 needed to work 150 hours to earn one year of college.** In 2016, the average annual cost of public university tuition and fees was$8,804. A median-wage worker needed to work 500 hours to pay for it—that’s more than three times longer. The challenge of affording a median house tells a similar story: a median worker must work 40 percent longer to earn it in 2016 compared to 1976. That 10 percent increase in real median wage starts to look even punier than before.

Today we dispose of very detailed data that allow social scientists to reconstruct the trends in life expectancy or, alternatively, death rates for different population strata within the society. When a person dies in the United States, for example, they are issued a death certificate, which provides all kinds of data on the deceased, including their educational attainment. The distinguished economists Anne Case and 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]

… For example, David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald used the surveys conducted monthly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to measure the level of “extreme distress.”[36] They found that the proportion of Americans in extreme distress nearly doubled—from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. The strongest effect, consistent with previous findings by Case and Deaton, was observed in white working-class Americans. In this group, extreme distress—despair—increased from less than 5 percent to more than 11 percent over the same period. Another study showed that an increasing degree of unhappiness has a strong predictive effect on political behavior. Using a different data set (from the Gallup daily poll, aggregated by county), George Ward and coauthors showed that low subjective well-being is a powerful marker of discontent and is highly correlated with anti-incumbent voting. In 2016, in particular, it was the strongest predictor of county-level voting for Trump.[37] 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]

By 2016, then, the American population had sorted itself out into two social classes: the educated and the “immiserated”—à la Les Misérables. These are not classes, according to Marx, because they are not defined by their relations to the means of production. And neither of them is a cohesive actor in the political arena. The less educated “miserables,” in particular, are deeply divided by race. (We will talk about the divisions within the educated class in the next chapter.) Instead, the two groups are sharply distinguished by a whole host of characteristics: psychological (higher versus lower levels of “extreme distress”), social (lower versus higher marriage rates), political (tendency to vote Republican versus Democratic), economic (declining versus increasing economic prospects), and, perhaps most tragically, biological (decreasing versus increasing life expectancies). The divide between the classes has become harder to cross due to the runaway growth of college costs.

But perhaps, reader, your heart does not bleed for the plight of the poor. There are many perfectly fine human beings who believe that meritocracy should be the chief organizing principle of our society. Those who contribute a lot should be rewarded commensurably; CEOs who generate billions in revenue for their companies should become billionaires. 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] Additionally, you may not feel sympathy for many in the less educated class—the gun-toting racists, white supremacists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, and xenophobes. According to Hillary Clinton’s famous estimate, about half of those who voted for Trump are such deplorables. In most complex human societies, the upper classes feel a measure of disdain for the lower classes. “The peasants are revolting.”

But then you should consider another and very serious reason why the declining well-being of the working class is a bad thing—because it fundamentally undermines the stability of our society. Most obviously, when large swaths of the population experience falling living standards, this undermines the legitimacy of our institutions and thus weakens the state. Popular immiseration increases mass mobilization potential. In the past, peasants revolted when their misery could not be borne anymore. The Peasants’ Revolt in England and the Jacquerie in France were such eruptions during the Late Medieval Crisis. Forward-looking 0.01-percenters, such as Nick Hanauer, have been warning us that the pitchforks are coming if we don’t do something to fix glaring inequities.[40]

Jane The cops rushed a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters next to Jane, beating them with clubs and pepper-spraying them at point-blank range. Screaming bodies were convulsing on the ground as the police handcuffed them and started hauling them away. She had never faced such violence before in her life. It was horrifying to see.

Jane grew up in an affluent Manhattan family. Her father was a senior partner at a corporate law firm in New York. Her mother, a photographer and patron of the arts, served as a MoMA trustee. They lived in a large, two-level apartment on the Upper East Side and in the summer shifted to their Hamptons retreat.

Jane’s parents sent her to one of the most exclusive private schools in the city. It was a harrowing time for her. In fact, she considers the last year before she graduated the worst time of her life. Egged on by their “tiger” moms and dads, students strived to get the highest grades and build up extracurricular portfolios that would improve their odds of getting into the top Ivy League colleges. When one of the students got an A- in French, the teacher had to endure a forty-minute harangue from his irate mother. Not surprisingly, the student graduated with a perfect grade point average. The pressure to match such performances was tremendous. For months, Jane felt so anxious, stressed out, and exhausted that she found herself unable to sleep. Her doctor prescribed sleeping pills.

Nevertheless, Jane did well and was admitted to Columbia. But having successfully passed the hurdle of getting into an Ivy League school, she now felt that she was on the wrong track. What did she have to look forward to? The next four years of college and then three years of law school—her father wanted her to follow in his footsteps—would be more of the same: a grueling rat race. Then she would have to endure years working seventy-hour weeks as a junior associate at a law firm, with unclear prospects of becoming partner. What was the point? The work her father did for big international companies didn’t seem worth such a tremendous effort. Most of the time it was mind-bogglingly boring and occasionally evil, as when he helped a mining concern defend a case against Indonesian villagers whose water supply was poisoned by its operations. A life as the wife of a wealthy lawyer or CEO equally lacked appeal. She wasn’t even sure she liked abstract art.

She decided to major in history and became fascinated by the history and politics of Latin America. Much of it was a depressing story of the US messing up Latin America’s economies, imposing crushing debt burdens on populations, and supporting or even installing fascist regimes. But there were bright spots of successful anti-imperialist resistance. She read about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; Chavez socialists in Venezuela; the Zapatistas and Subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas, Mexico; and, above all, Cuba. A small country that, despite decades of crushing American embargoes, managed to achieve a better life expectancy for its people than a much wealthier and more powerful United States.

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.

After coming back from Guatemala, she joined a radical student group at Columbia. Other students came from a variety of ideological backgrounds: anarchists and Trotskyists, pro-Palestinian activists and Iraq War protesters. They talked about the myth of democracy and the reality of living in a divided country, where Black people were oppressed and where millions of the poor were in debt peonage to finance capital. Despite being surrounded by middle-class privilege, she became aware of the injustices and inequities surrounding her. She wanted to effect change; stop state brutality and oppression; and build a just, peaceful world.

She became active in the Occupy Wall Street movement, camping in a tent in Zuccotti Park in October of 2011. The attack she experienced came after days of demonstrations in New York and other American cities from Atlanta to Portland, during which the police used tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets on peaceful protesters. In Oakland, a cop shot Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen in the face with a beanbag round, fracturing his skull. Olsen was lucky to survive, but he was maimed for life. More police brutality followed, and the coercive apparatus of the state eventually suppressed the Occupy movement and evicted Jane and others from Zuccotti Park. This was a life-changing experience. Before, her revolutionary ideals were rather theoretical and abstract. Now it felt personal.

She became deeply concerned about the explosive growth of violent racist and white supremacist groups. The surging alt-right movement and the election of Trump brought home the need to fight against the authoritarian tide. Jane became active in the anti-fascist movement’s fight against the resurgent far right.

She came to accept that the authoritarians had to be stopped by any means, violent if need be. However, she was not a frontline fighter punching the fascists, burning cars, or breaking shop windows. Instead, her role was to organize and to mind the logistics.

Although she dislikes ideological labels, her current views can be described as anarchist. She works with Trotskyist comrades, but she thinks that classical Marxism is now somewhat outdated. She doesn’t feel much solidarity with the working classes. Too many of them are racists and homophobes. They are too willing to support a fascist, having voted for Trump. The Marxists explaining working-class support for authoritarianism by invoking their “false consciousness” sound lame to her. Those in the violent far right often work with the police to suppress the progressives.

Then her trajectory took a sharp turn. I ran into Jane in the fall of 2020 and was surprised to learn that she was already in her second year of Yale Law School.

“Your father must be happy!” I needled her.

She laughed. “I am not going to become a corporate lawyer, however.”

Jane told me that she had become somewhat disillusioned with antifa activism. The state is the enemy, but scuffling with racists, throwing bricks at the police, and breaking shop windows didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Also, Trump was now out of Washington, but the same old established elites were back in charge. “We don’t want Biden, we want revolution” became a new slogan for the far left.

The law degree is the springboard for going into politics. Once she graduates, Jane plans to run for office in a liberal, left-leaning area—perhaps as a DA, perhaps as a member of a city council. As an elected official, she will have real power to advance her life’s ambition. The ultimate goal is still to build a world without police, prisons, and states. But to get there, she first needs to work within the existing power structures.

Mao famously said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. But in the twenty-first century, Jane thinks, revolution may grow out of a ballot box. She intends to find out, at least.

Things are great for a while, but others quickly catch on. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of doctorate degrees granted at US universities more than tripled—from less than ten thousand to thirty thousand. Soon enough, we are back in elite overproduction territory; only, the cost of a ticket got higher.

We’ve been playing this game in which the number of chairs is fixed. In the real world, of course, the number of elite positions changes all the time. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a huge demand for PhD holders by universities who needed to hire professors to teach the baby boomer generation. One of my professors once confided to me that universities at that time were scraping the bottom and willing to hire anybody who had the degree. “I would never get hired today,” he said in 1985, as I was finishing my own PhD. When I started looking for an academic job, I thought the market for newly minted PhDs was tough at the time, but it is much, much worse today.

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]

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, a prescient book published in 2004, David Callahan analyzes the consequences of the cultural shift that, starting in the 1980s, unleashed unfettered competition, exploding inequality, and a winner-takes-all mentality. He writes about corporate scandals, doping athletes, plagiarizing journalists, and students cheating on exams. Cheating had become pervasive, a profound moral crisis. His argument that “an increase in cheating reflects deep anxiety and insecurity in America nowadays, desperation even, as well as arrogance among the rich and cynicism among ordinary people” resonates with a number of threads with which this chapter has engaged. On the corrosive effects of elite overproduction, in particular, Callahan writes:

As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition, in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper tiers of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic—or sleazy—efforts don’t guarantee a superior edge.[6]

Since 2004, things have become even more dire. For her article “Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene,” published in The Atlantic in April of 2021, Caitlin Flanagan interviewed Robert Evans, a psychologist who studies the relationship between private schools and their students’ parents. “What’s changed in the last few years is the relentlessness of parents,” Evans told her. “For the most part, they’re not abusive; it’s that they just won’t let up. Many of them cannot let go of their fears that somehow their child is being left behind.” By the time their kids get to the upper grades, parents want teachers, coaches, and counselors entirely focused on helping them create a transcript that Harvard can’t resist. “This kind of parent has an idea of the outcome they want; in their work life they can get it,” Evans told Flanagan. “They’re surrounded by employees; they can delegate things to their staff.” Of the economic anxiety underpinning these parents’ actions, Flanagan writes:

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.

In 2019, the college admissions bribery scandal engulfed top universities, including Stanford, Georgetown, and Yale.[7]

The basic dynamic here is completely generic to what happens in aspirant games as they progress to their late stages. 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. And this brings us to the topic of radicalization.

Up until this point, I have been focusing on “structural-demographic” forces for social instability, with an emphasis on popular immiseration and elite overproduction. These are structural factors because they relate to societal structures, such as the distinctions between commoners and elites (or between less educated and more educated) and between different segments of elites. They are demographic because we track the changes in numbers and in the well-being of different population groups. The structural-demographic theory is an important part of cliodynamics because it helps us understand rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars. This theory was first formulated by the historical sociologist Jack Goldstone and later developed and articulated by Andrey Korotayev, me, and other colleagues.[8]

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.

Because there is a general perception that the country is going in the wrong direction and that society has become vastly unjust and hugely unequal (not only between commoners and elites but also between the winners and losers among the elites), appeals to set things right by restoring “social justice” gain a lot of traction. Another general feature is that divisive—sectarian and identitarian—ideologies gain an upper hand over unifying ones, giving us ages of discord.

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] To understand the ideological landscape of today, it is useful to start with its opposite, the Era of Good Feelings II, during which there was remarkable consensus among the elites governing America. I’ll refer to this ideological accord as the Postwar Consensus. It lasted for roughly thirty years, from 1937, when the New Deal was cemented, through World War II and the 1950s (the peak), and into the early 1960s.>

On the cultural side, we can identify the following elements of the Postwar Consensus:

The normative family was one consisting of a man and a woman, whose union was typically consecrated in church or another religious establishment, plus their children. People living “alternative lifestyles” were largely forced to do so in the shadows.

Gender roles were clearly defined: men as breadwinners, women as homemakers.

The Postwar Consensus frowned on nearly all attempts to change the “natural body” artificially. Most forms of body modification, from mild ones, such as tattooing and body piercing, to more severe ones, such as foot-binding and castration (to create eunuchs), were considered things that only “uncivilized” foreigners did. (There was one major exception to this rule, as male genital mutilation—circumcision—was not only allowed but also normative.) Abortion was heavily discouraged and illegal in most states.

Institutionalized racism, including the Jim Crow laws in the Southern states, fundamentally rendered Black Americans second-class citizens, denying them most of the fruits of the Postwar Consensus.

Although the WASPHNM elite were predominantly Protestant, there was no state religion in the US. However, belonging to a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or another religious denomination was normative. Divorce was deeply problematic for elected officials; atheism was disqualifying.

The secular ideology of the Postwar Consensus is sometimes referred to as the American Creed. The main elements of this ideology were democracy (whose principles are enshrined in the Constitution), laissez-faire economics, and American patriotism.

On the economic side, although the US was an avowed capitalist country (and repressed the Communist Party), in practice it was a social democratic or even socialist country along the lines of the Nordic model. The Postwar Consensus included the following economic elements:

Support for strong labor unions.

A commitment to increasing the minimum wage faster than inflation.

Extremely progressive taxation, with taxes of over 90 percent on top incomes.

Support for the welfare system, which included universal retirement pensions (Social Security), unemployment insurance, and welfare benefits for disabled or needy children.

A low-immigration regime that favored workers and promoted cultural homogeneity. (In this category, economic and cultural issues overlap.)

Clara met Andy when she interviewed him for a tech magazine. This was when he was a young entrepreneur, years before he made his first billion. They dated, then moved in together and eventually married. Andy’s mathematical and engineering brilliance and Clara’s social skills and judgment made them a great team.

Clara’s parents came to America as poor migrants from Central America. They worked hard to start a restaurant and grow it into a success. When she was young, Clara often helped in the kitchen or with waiting tables. After high school, she went to UCLA, where she studied journalism.

Andy grew up in Central Europe. Both his parents were scientists, his father a physicist and his mother a biologist. From an early age, he showed great aptitude for mathematics. When the time came to go to college, he set his sights high and sent applications to several top American schools, including MIT, Caltech, and Stanford. He chose to go to Stanford because they gave him a scholarship, and because he was eager to leave gloomy winters behind.

He decided not to follow in the footsteps of his parents, and he chose to become an entrepreneur. His first start-up, co-organized with two fellow Stanford students, was up and running even before he graduated summa cum laude. Other start-ups followed, interspersed with time Andy spent serving as chief technology officer of two Silicon Valley companies that did very well and made him a great deal of money. He is now the CEO of one of his start-ups, which has grown into a large corporation.

With wealth comes responsibility. Some years ago, Clara and Andy launched a charitable foundation, to which they give generously. Their foundation supports a variety of progressive causes. One that they both feel passionate about is immigration. Clara’s parents and Andy came to the US in search of the American dream, and it worked very well for them. They want others who dream big and work hard to succeed. There is also a bit of a selfish motive here. Andy’s firm needs a constant supply of bright, well-educated workers. In Andy’s view, Americans mostly don’t cut the mustard. To put it bluntly, they are mostly ignorant and lazy, and they want to be paid too much for the kind of work they produce. Of course, it’s not the fault of young people that the American education system has fallen so far behind those of Europe and China. But that’s the reality, and so Andy’s company hires a lot of workers coming from East Asia, India, and Eastern Europe. They are well trained, willing to work long hours, and satisfied with reasonable salaries.

Clara also has an ulterior motive, or at least an influence on her thinking. Coming from a bohemian LA milieu, to which the overwhelming majority of her old friends belong, she knows that for most of them, maintaining their standard of living would not be possible in the absence of cheap immigrant labor. Salaries are not that great, and dry spells can hit at any time. What allows her fellow intelligentsia to live like the gentry are the affordable house cleaners, nannies, Uber drivers, and food deliverers. Such factors are not what she or Andy would necessarily admit to a stranger. And anyway, humans are complex, and there is a confluence of idealistic and materialistic motives underlying their support for loose immigration laws.

Andy and Clara also contribute generously to political campaigns. Their giving is strategic and not limited to their home state. The main client of Andy’s corporation is the US government, as nearly 90 percent of his revenues come from federal contracts. He needs sympathetic congressmen in Washington to help ensure that lucrative contracts go to his company rather than to his competition. They give about equally to Democrats and Republicans. They like the Democrats’ progressive agenda, but they also appreciate the Republicans’ economics, especially their stance on lowering taxes. This is one thing about which they both feel strongly. They came to this country penniless and achieved their American dream entirely through their own efforts. Why should the government lay its greedy hands on their money? Most of their taxes, in any case, will be wasted as a result of corruption. They prefer to give directly to deserving causes through their foundation, rather than have their money wasted by corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucrats. As repellant as Trump is to them, they reluctantly give him credit for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed in 2017. It noticeably reduced their taxes. Still, it’s a relief that Trump is out of the White House. Joe Biden represents a return to normal politics, and he wouldn’t raise taxes on them, no matter what he might have said during the election campaign. He knows which side his bread is buttered on. And if the left wing of his party manages to get a tax-the-rich bill on the floor, they can trust the Republicans to filibuster it to death.

A contemporary example of a militocracy (a state governed by military elites) is the Arab Republic of Egypt. Egypt is a military dictatorship, although it runs elections for cosmetic purposes. The roots of this form of governance go back many centuries. Let’s take a short historical detour to trace the development of the institutional frameworks that eventually resulted in the current ruler of Egypt as of this writing: Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. There is a remarkable cultural inertia that informs what kinds of institutional arrangements different regions of the world return to even after serious perturbations, such as revolutions and state collapse. Culture is persistent.

Remarkably, the Mamluks maintained their grip on Egypt for nearly three centuries. They accomplished this feat by forbidding the sons of Mamluks to inherit their fathers’ positions. Instead, they continued to purchase boys originating from Central Asia and the Caucasus on the slave market and train them as soldiers, officers, and ultimately rulers. Whether intentionally or not, avoiding elite overproduction made the Mamluk regime particularly stable. To give you an idea of how effective the Mamluks were, consider that they were the only military force that managed to stop the Mongols (at the Battle of Ayn Jalut in 1260).

Affluence and Influence The theory of how the American state functions that is taught in school is neatly encapsulated by Abraham Lincoln’s reference to government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Sociologists refer to this idea of governance as “majoritarian electoral democracy.” This theory assumes that government policies are shaped by the collective will of common citizens, which is transmitted through the process of democratic elections. The theory predicts that policy changes, such as new legislation adopted by Congress, will primarily reflect the preferences of typical citizens, or “median voters.” Class-domination theory, in contrast, predicts that policy changes will reflect only the preferences of the economic elites. So who’s right?

The political scientist Martin Gilens, aided by a small army of research assistants, gathered a large data set—nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002. Each case matched a proposed policy change to a national opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. The raw survey data provided information that enabled Gilens to separate the preferences of the poor (in the lowest decile of the income distribution) and the typical (the median of the distribution) from the affluent (the top 10 percent).[28] Statistical analysis of this remarkable data set showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes. This is not entirely unexpected. What is surprising is that there was no—zilch, nada—effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

This doesn’t mean that ordinary citizens always lose out. There are a number of policy issues on which they agree with the affluent, and these policy changes tend to be implemented. But, on the evidence, issues on which the common people and the economic elites disagree are always—always—resolved in favor of the elites. That is plutocracy.

So much for the majoritarian electoral democracy theory. Let me add that this analysis had several features that actually slanted the results against the class-domination theory. We would really want to distinguish the effects of preferences of the top 10 percent from those of the top 1 percent (and, even better, the top 0.01 percent). After all, the members of the power network, identified by Domhoff, constitute a tiny proportion of the population. But making such nuanced distinctions was not possible given the data that Gilens and his crew had access to. Another consideration is that this analysis addressed only what political scientists call the “first face of power”: the ability of citizens to shape policy outcomes on contested issues. But the “second face of power,” shaping the agenda of issues that policy makers consider, is a subtle but extremely powerful way for the elites to get their way. Finally, the “third face of power” is the ability of ideological elites to shape the preferences of the public.

Now that we have a better understanding of how power works in America, let’s use it to reflect on one puzzle about American democracy: the contentious politics of immigration. According to multiple polls, Americans strongly oppose illegal immigration.[31] There is E-Verify, a Department of Homeland Security website that allows businesses to determine the work statuses of potential employees, but no federal mandate requires employers to use it. Many believe that such a mandate would be a much more effective and humane way to reduce illegal immigration than the current system. Obviously, there are many sides to this complex issue. Yet one has to wonder when a solution that involves spending billions of dollars on border security and detention of migrants is implemented—with imperfect results, to say the least—but a solution that involves cutting off the money that draws migrants to this country in the first place has never been adopted. Cui bono, as the Romans used to say.

The economic argument is very clear. Massive immigration increases the supply of labor, which in turn depresses its cost—in other words, worker wages. Clearly, such development benefits the consumers of labor (employers, or “capitalists”) and disadvantages the workers.

Of course, as we saw in chapter 3, immigration is only one of the many forces affecting wages. My statistical analysis of long-term data trends indicates that immigration has been a significant contributor to the stagnation/decline of wages in the United States over the past several decades, particularly for workers without college educations, although far from the only one.[33] There is a reason why the greatest surge of immigration in American history in the late nineteenth century coincided with the first Gilded Age, the period of extreme income inequality and popular immiseration comparable only to our own. Any such external input into a social system, of course, has multiple effects. Immigrants to America during the Gilded Age enriched this country immeasurably, just as immigrants today do. But they also tilted the balance of power away from workers and toward owners, accelerating the wealth pump. Unless there are strong institutions protecting workers’ wages, an oversupply of labor is going to depress wages—it is simply the law of supply and demand in action. In his 2016 book, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, the Harvard economist George Borjas (himself an immigrant) explains that the main effect of immigration is not on whether it benefits the economy or is a drag. (It has a slight positive effect.) Rather, it is that it creates winners and losers. A massive influx of unskilled immigrants depresses the wages of less educated native-born workers. Already disadvantaged communities, like noncollege-educated Black Americans, are particularly badly affected. But their lower wages translate into higher profits for those who employ immigrants—business owners and managers.[34]

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.”

The Great Leveler, a book by my good colleague and friend Walter Scheidel, is about the opposite process that reduces inequality. Amassing an impressive number of historical examples, he argues that “death is the great leveler.”[16] Typically, it takes a major perturbation to reduce wealth inequality, and this perturbation usually takes the form of a social revolution, a state collapse, a mass-mobilization war, or a major epidemic. As we shall see in chapter 9, where I review the results of the first one hundred cases in CrisisDB, Scheidel’s pessimistic view is only 90 percent right.

The structural part of the analysis seems to be quite pessimistic—the wealth pump is so lucrative for the ruling elites, it appears that shutting it down would require a violent revolution. But when we shift to the dynamic part of the analysis, some hope emerges. It is possible for a ruling class itself—or, more accurately, for prosocial factions within it—to rebalance the system to stop the wealth pump and reverse elite overproduction in a relatively peaceful way. (Other such hopeful examples will be discussed in chapter 9.) But such an outcome requires prosocial forces to persuade economic elites to endure reforms that go against their self-interests in order to prevent an impending crisis. And we are not there—yet.

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.

For a particular country that is currently at peace, what is the probability that it will still be peaceful two years from now, and what is the probability that it will slip into a civil war?

To answer this question, the PITF project collected data on onsets of political instability in all world countries from 1955 to 2003 and developed a statistical model that related country characteristics to the probability of a civil war starting there. The results of this study were published by Goldstone and his coauthors in 2010.[9] They discovered that their model was capable of predicting instability onsets with 80 percent accuracy. What came as a surprise was that, even though the researchers tested about thirty various indicators, the model needed to know only three or four country characteristics to achieve this level of accuracy.

Returning to Mizruchi, he concludes that the corporate elite, by “starving the treasury and accumulating vast resources for itself,” is “leading us toward the fate of the earlier Roman, Dutch, and Habsburg Spanish empires… . It is long past time for its members to exercise some enlightened self-interest in the present.”[11] So far, so good. But Mizruchi ends up overstating the degree to which today’s corporate elite has become an “ineffectual group that is unwilling to tackle the big issues, despite unprecedented wealth and political clout.” On the contrary, despite the ideological cracks that we discussed in the preceding paragraphs, the American ruling class continues to be very effective at advancing its narrow, short-term, parochial interests. With every piece of tax legislation, the tax code is becoming more regressive; today the effective taxes on corporations and billionaires are at the lowest levels since the 1920s. By successfully arguing that money is “free speech,” corporations have largely dismantled constraints on using their wealth to shape American politics. The federal minimum wage continues to decline in real terms, despite inflation reaching levels not seen since the 1980s.[12]

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. [Ed: how true!]

The conclusion from this analysis, then, is that no existential challenges to the current ruling class are going to arise within it, at least not in the near future. Which interest group, then, is likely to be a credible threat to the current regime?

Currently, the most interesting phenomenon, which may or may not turn out to be the crystallization nucleus, is that of Tucker Carlson. Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media. Whereas media such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are losing credibility among the general population (and especially among the noncredentialed Americans), Carlson is growing ever more popular. He is currently the most listened-to political commentator in America. He is also interesting in that he has a clearly formulated and coherent ideology, which is conveniently laid out in his 2018 book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution.

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. Although not necessarily using the same terms, his book is about the unraveling of social cooperation (“the glue strong enough to hold a country of 330 million people together”), popular immiseration (“the decline of the middle class”), and the selfish elites (well, “selfish elites”). He does, however, miss a key driver of instability—elite overproduction—and gets hung up on cultural issues. And it is one thing to intuitively understand the significance of various social forces I have discussed in this book, but it is quite another to grasp how these parts—the trunk, the tusks, and the columnar legs—are connected together to make a whole elephant.[27]