In a post last year, I mentioned that I had rediscovered Thomas P. M. Barnett on substack. I just finished reading his new book, and plan to review it here soon. But first, I wanted to mention this recent post from him about the nature of the “Trump revolution” – the radical and destructive change that this administration is bringing:
1) Trump seeks to detach America from virtually all of its security obligations across the Eastern Hemisphere and focus on a truly aggressive drug cartel war in our hemisphere.
2) Trump seeks to re-negotiate America’s trade relations with the entire world through trade wars.
3) Trump seeks to trigger a Cultural Revolution inside America that simply defines all sorts of “undesirables” out of existence (e.g., Two sexes only! No DEI because zero racism! No foreigners because we only speak American here!).
4) Trump is dismantling the USG with no hint of what is going to replace all the discarded functions and roles and responsibilities.
He then points out how these revolutions dangerously combine, since there is no plan or forethought involved. Here’s two examples; click through to the post for more:
1+4: You hamstring our military and intelligence community in your destruction of the USG and HOPE Putin doesn’t take advantage as you seek to dump Ukraine. Putin keeps his word, right? He’s famous for it, plus he and Trump were similarly traumatized by Russia-gate!
1+2: You want allies to step up and pick up the slack created by America’s withdrawal from the world and you’re attacking their economies at the same time!
This is why I like Barnett and subscribe to his substack. He just gets to the point directly and frankly. Also the pop culture references. So Gen X!
*”Mump” was coined by Timothy Snyder to describe what I have called the current diumvirate. Hey, this is an era of reinvention!
After January 6, I wrote a post about the “state of the coup.” As I saw it then, the fury of the MAGA crowd had broken against the valiant defense by law enforcement at the Capitol, and the MAGA faction was in retreat. I linked to a video that explains how coups work: they require the support of “keys to power” in business, the military and the police, which Trump’s faction did not have. All the way back in 2021, he had been banned from Twitter, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had issued a statement affirming their loyalty to the Constitution. Without allies among these key elements of society, Trump could not succeed in overthrowing constitutional democracy, and it looked to me like he and his movement were sidelined, hopefully to expire. I really thought we were going “blue zone!“
My, how things have changed.
Since 2021, Twitter has changed ownership and transformed into an alt-right platform. With the help of that platform and other right-wing media, MAGA has seized control of all branches of the United States Federal government. After the reelection of Donald J. Trump by a popular plurarity (probably), the country’s billionaire overclass was quick to bend the knee. They read the writing on the wall.
That’s one key down.
With the help of a partisan and willing Senate, the President has installed loyalists in top government posts in the military and law enforcement. His white Christian nationalist pick for Secretary of Defense has already purged the Joint Chiefs of Staff of its members who were not white men (“DEI hires” is the code word). The Director and Deputy Director at the F.B.I, as well as the Attorney General, are all Trump loyalists, and will likely weaponize their departments as tools of political enforcement.
There go the other keys.
The new regime is openly white supremacist, complete with Nazi salutes. It is also nakedly authoritarian, ignoring constitutional constraints. The President has granted the billionaire owner of Twitter, who possibly did the most to help him get elected, the privilege to loot government data and terrorize federal workers, all in the name of “efficiency.” It’s plainly a tit-for-tat favor to let him lock in government contracts for his businesses and end the multiple investigations against them. The MAGA base, obsessed with Culture Wars touchpoints and easily fooled, plays along. It would be positively Orwellian if it weren’t so blatantly fraudulent.
The Musk-DOGE takeover or “billionaire coup” is an attempt at state capture under the cover of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. First, get rid of all officials actually preventing waste, fraud and abuse (Inspectors General). Then, weaken the agencies with demoralizing attacks and bullshit memes that the MAGA base laps up. Finally, steer all that taxpayer money into your own companies. Coup achieved!
If the courts try to stop you, that’s where you pull out your “unitary executive theory,” a.k.a. “Trump is King.” So now you have an authoritarian regime with a conservative agenda and total control of the government, in lockstep alliance with powerful business interests. This is just fascism, right?
I’ve been getting a lot of my info from substack lately, since it seems to be where all the intellectuals are hanging out these days. I was struck by a post from John Ganz, because of the insight it gave me into the coup event. The post looks into an academic book on the fascist movements of the early 20th century, which has as a thesis that (I quote Ganz) “fascism arose out of situations in Europe where there was dense civic association combined with a weak political class, unable to exercise hegemony – national political leadership.” To quote more from the post:
Fascism, a political project aiming to establish a new relationship between the nation and the state, can be expected to emerge where social elites fail to develop hegemonic political organizations in the context of rapid civil society development. The fascist political project arises as an attempt to redress this problem of hegemonic weakness by creating an authoritarian democracy: a regime that claims to represent the people or nation but rejects parliamentary institutional forms.
I’d say that describes the MAGA movement pretty well. I mean, millions of people voted for Trump to be King, it seems. Precisely because they wanted to redress the “hegemonic weakness” – that is, percieved ineffectiveness – of the existing political system. As a narrative it fits well with what is expected in a Fourth Turning or Crisis Era: changes in the social order outpaced the political order, which became unable to adapt, and is now being torn down and rebuilt.
It’s traumatic, to be sure, and it sucks that some real dipshit a*holes are going to be prime beneficiaries. It sucks that thousands will die needlessly from piss-poor social policies. That, sadly, is the price we pay for MAGA winning the 2024 election.
Last year, when it became clear during the primaries that Trump was rising up like some undead lich lord, seemingly immune to all the “lawfare” waged against him, and that the MAGA movement was alive and well, I warned about the red zone’s greater solidarity, and the need for the opposition to rally to counter them. We needed the same “group feeling” that MAGA has, but sadly we couldn’t match them.
The opposition now seems demoralized and leaderless. The resistance is much more muted than it was in 2017, with smaller numbers of protestors taking to the streets, and most blue zoners like me simply venting on social media. Does this mean the red zoners have won the Culture War, and are now going to consolidate their power?
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion just yet. While MAGA loyalists will be willing to endure the pain of Trump 2.0 (that’s also part of the Fourth Turning dynamic), there will be plenty of seething discontent for the opposition to exploit. Sooner or later the Trump-Musk diumvirate will overplay its hand.
Meanwhile, we should continue to champion our righteous causes: women’s liberation, equal rights for LGBTQ, rights for immigrants, social welfare. We absolutely should be calling our representatives and letting them know what we stand for, and expecting them to answer to us. We still have our Constitution, threatened though it may be, and as citizens we should assert our rights within its framework. And go ahead and assert your consumer power as well, by boycotting where you can, or particpating in Economic Blackouts like the one on February 28. I know I will be.
An upside-down U.S. flag, a sign of national distress, hung by fired workers at Yosemite National Park
Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that the current administration has handed unprecedented power to a private citizen who is not an elected official or even a vetted official, and is acting outside of the legal framework defined by the U.S. Consitution. Another way to put it: he is acting illegally. As Timothy Snyder puts it, this, of course, is a coup.
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.
“It’s very hard not to see what’s going on as a constitutional crisis,” said Peter Shane, a law professor and one of the country’s leading scholars on the Constitution.
Well, yeah. It’s clear that the President does not intend to be checked by either the legislature or the courts. If no one stops him, the Constitution is a dead letter, and our status as citizens of the United States is in jeopardy.
Now one has to wonder why, with Congress in the hands of the Republicans, the party doesn’t simply undertake to rejigger the Federal bureacracy through legal, Constitutional means. Heather Cox Richardson argues that it’s because the deep cuts the President wants are unpopular, and Republicans in Congress prefer to distance themselves from responsibility for them. By doing that, of course, they are surrendering their role in government and their power.
But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.
But I have to wonder – could it simply be that this administration sees doing anything by Constiutiional means as too hopelessly complicated and process-bound? Neither of the two members of the diumvirate (if that’s what it is) is temperamentally inclined to ask for permission to do anything. They might see their election victory as a mandate to implement their agenda by any means necessary, rules be damned.
How did we get here? When I look back over my political posts over the years (many of which seem so pathetically naive now), the path is pretty clear.
For decades, our Federal government has been gridlocked by hyperpartisanship, following a takeover by the Boomer generation (the infamous “Gingrich revolution” in 1994). From then on, it was effectively hobbled by its system of checks and balances, combined with the nearly 50-50 split between the partisan factions. The Boomers were more interested in arguing than in governing.
Along comes a paticularly nasty Boomer, who sees an opportunity to exploit popular discontent with this state of affairs and offers himself as The Guy Who Can Fix It. He’s clearly a con man, he’s reckless and he’s lawless, but that doesn’t deter a significant percentage of voters. Despite his lawlessness, indeed possibly even because of it, he wins a second term to the Presidency after a disastrous first term followed by a respite.
Who could see lawlessness as a qualification for holding office? Well, how about the generation that brags online about how they were raised without boundaries and stalks your social media feed with mocking laughing emojis? You know the one I’m talking about:
We played outside all day without adult supervision and rode bikes without helmets. We’re anti-snowflake. We believe in morals but we shun moral preening. We have little tolerance for the speech police, laugh at off-color jokes (even when we’re not supposed to), and are almost impossible to offend (unless you say “that’s offensive.”)
Am I generalizing? Of course. People are individuals, and not everyone in Gen X embodies these traits. But Gen X, as a whole, does—and it might help explain why Gen X put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.
Trump’s vulgarity and coarse language, which offends so many Baby Boomers and Millennials, is less likely to bother people in my generation. Hell, for some, it’s what they love about him. He’s the Happy Gilmore of politics, the boisterous upstart the fans love but the elites despise.
The argument is simple here. The Gen X attitude is: if the laws don’t work, then fuck ’em. Just ignore them. That’s how you get to where we are today, with a government that ignores the U.S. Constitution.
Can the Constitution be restored? Rebuilt? Or is this a Humpty-Dumpty scenario, like trying to unscramble an egg? It’s possible that, after the colossal failures and depredations that are bound to come with the new administration, some semblance of the old ways can be brought back. Perhaps altered to accomodate all that has changed in the interim.
Another substacker (one of my favorites), Thomas P. M. Barnett, sees it too. He gets the generational angle, though he doesn’t treat it as rosily. He recognizes the danger were in, and the fact that we’ve created a Terror State – what you always get with authoritarian rule.
That deeply-but-evenly-divided electorate wasn’t changing, resulting in change election after change election (stretching back to 2006) with no real change ensuing even as the general angst and anger of the electorate ballooned over time.
As much as the Left wants to blame Trump’s win on his duplicity (like denying Project 2025 right up to the vote and then immediately implementing it upon inauguration), the scarier truth is that the majority of Americans are open to letting this Trump smash! dynamic unfold.
It’s so Boomer, right? One last crazy, self-destructive “revolution” by that generation?
He is spot on with the Boomers being a destructive generation. They burned down the college campuses in the 1960s, and now they’re burning down the halls of Congress in the 2020s. Gen Xers, their accomplices in government, are happy to stand back and watch the fire. It’s a dangerous combination of generations to be in charge, but unfortunately we’re stuck with them – at least for a while. Younger generations will get their chance eventually. At that point, we can probably say we’ve made it through the Crisis Era.
Your New Civic Order – Courtesy of the Broligarchy!
I am no fan of the current President, but there is no doubt that his ascendancy confirms a certain prediction from The Fourth Turning – namely, that during the era, the civic order will be transformed.
Even if this is done simply by ignoring the Constitution, that would do it. The opposition can complain that this is unlawful, but with no one to stop the administration, what does that matter? The vaunted “checks and balances” of the Constitution won’t work if the Supreme Court is bought and paid for and if Congress is weak and submissive, both of which look to be the case.
If the 14th Amendment can be ignored, that’s pretty much the end of the United States as it has been defined since the Civil War aftermath. And the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy means the end of the New Deal order. Even if these aren’t completely demolished, only stressed and transformed (“tempered,” to put it generously), what emerges in terms of new legal understandings could qualify as a new constitutional order.
Back in the Trump 1.0 days, I posted that we were seeing the emergence of a new constitutional order I jokingly called the “Mafia State” – rule by a criminal gang out to make as much money as possible grifting and extorting. Since version 2.0 of the administration is a little more prepared, it looks like a more profound change is forthcoming. Will it be the dreaded White Christian Nationalist Theocracy spelled out in Project 2025? Or something emerging from the fever dreams of the tech billionaires who surrounded Trump at his inaugration?
This cadre of billionaires, who took great pains to obey in advance, has been affectionately termed the “broligarchy” by the media and general public. They are indeed all men, mostly but not all white, and almost all Gen X. This last fact rarely gets commentary – all those billionaires behind DOGE that are ready to subvert democracy and seal in the new Gilded Age are from that often-overlooked generation, Generation X!
Strauss and Howe wrote about how my generation, with its scattered, individualistic, market-oriented mentality, would split into winners and losers as we aged. This tiny elite that comprises the broligarchy are indeed the big winners of the previous market-driven era, and they are ready to transform the civic order now in accord with their techno-utopian fantasies.
One of them, Marc Andreessen (he wasn’t at the inauguration but he is part of DOGE) even has a manifesto that spells it out. This is an excerpt from his manifesto that I found on a substack that is not too friendly to him, and it is blatantly Fourth Turning:
Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition…Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness. Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
It’s so very Gen X to oppose credentialism and expertise. We are the generation that believes that any savvy person can figure things out for themselves. You might say we’re the poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s also very Gen X for the ultimate winners of the previous competitive age to consolidate their power and impose their will, under the banner of a stupidly named pseudo-government agency, no less. Suck it up, snowflakes!
As a demonstration of how rule by a Boomer (the President) on top of a pyramid of Gen Xers (the broligarchs) might look, consider the recent action to purge the federal workforce. It looks exactly like what one of the broligarchs did when he took over a major social media company, as this substack post points out. This kind of ruthlessness is exactly what you would expect from Generation X.
Gen X broligarchs line up to kiss the ring while one of their Millennial counterparts looks on anxiously.
I break down the broligarchy by generation below. This is all the tech billionaires who were either at the inauguration or are affiliated with DOGE:
BOOMER Tim Cook (b. 1960)<-on the cusp!
GEN X Jeff Bezos (b. 1964) Peter Thiel (b. 1967) Elon Musk (b. 1971) Marc Andreessen (b. 1971) Sundar Pichai (b. 1972)
MILLENNIAL Mark Zuckerburg (b. 1984)<-wannabe; he tries so hard to be cool!
These two get a mention but don’t really count. Vivek got kicked out and Shou isn’t a U.S. citizen. Besides, nether one is technically a billionaire.
MILLENNIAL
Vivek Ramaswamy (b. 1985)
Shou Zi Chew (b. 1983)
The content of this post has already been shared, in modified form, on social media. If you are interested in generations and in the Fourth Turning, there’s a great discussion group on Facebook. Just search for “Fourth Turning Discussion Group.” All are welcome, so long as they agree to the rules.
I recently read The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, an academic historian and social scientist. This is a book about the rise of inequality in human society, and about the ways in which it has been reduced historically – which is, unfortunately, always through mass violence. The book appeared on my radar because it comes up in generational theory discussions online, and in fact is referenced in Neil Howe’s book, The Fourth Turning Is Here (I should know, as I worked on the bibliography and end notes). I was curious to learn how Scheidel’s study might relate to the historical cycles in generational theory. A big open question is: now that we are in a Fourth Turning, or Crisis Era, is some kind of leveling event on the horizon?
First, a review of the book.
Scheidel identifies four different kinds of violent ruptures which reduce inequality, and calls them the “Four Horsemen of Leveling.” They are: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. In his book, each horseman gets its own section with a few chapters. There’s also a section introducing the concept of inequality, and some final sections of analysis, plus a technical appendix.
This book is a heavy read, written with academic precision. Scheidel wastes no words, such that each of his paragraphs is replete with meaning. Sometimes I had to reread them to be sure I had caught every nuance. Nonetheless, his writing style is engaging enough that it carried me through the over 400 pages of detailed historical analysis. I was never bored, in other words.
The scope of Scheidel’s analysis is all of human history, and he even speculates on inequality in prehistory (he argues that it can be measured using burial sites, with evident nutritional health as a proxy for wealth and status). His overall conclusion about wealth and income inequality is that it is always present to some degree, and always grows in any stable and economically complex society. Basically, once you get civilization, with its ability to generate surplus wealth, an elite class will inevitably emerge, claim an unequal proportion of that wealth, and tenaciously hold onto it.
As he goes through the “horsemen of leveling” in each of their sections, Scheidel looks at specific occurrences across the world and the centuries, going into detail of just what they accomplished as they trampled through history. He uses a variety of measures of inequality, including the well known Gini coefficient, and proportions of wealth owned by the upper economic classes. A generous supply of charts and graphs complement the text.
Scheidel acknowledges that for much of the historical past, there is limited data with which to work. It’s easier to look at the modern period, with its ample records generated by the fiscal administrative state. So, for the distant past, much of his analysis is speculative. This is a common enough problem when historians attempt to apply a thesis across the entire breadth of human history.
One thing that is striking about Scheidel’s review of history vis-à-vis inequality is how rare leveling events of any significance are. This is the reason, I suppose, for the persevering aptness of the saying “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” In one graph of the long term trend for Europe – covering the past two millennia – there are only three events that produce significant, persistent leveling: the collapse of the Roman Empire, the “Black Death” bubonic plague pandemic of the late Middle Ages, and the so-called “Great Compression” that occurred in the World War era and birthed the modern-day middle class (now eroding away as inequality reasserts itself).
Those events cover three of the four horsemen. The fourth, transformative revolution, manifested in the Communist Revolutions in Russia and China in the first half of the twentieth century. But these also are distinct and rare examples where an event (revolution) produced persistent leveling. Notably, the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century did not. Scheidel argues that this is because effecting significant transformative change required the vast industrial economies of modern times, which earlier revolts and revolutions lacked.
In addition to mass violence events that persistently reduce inequality being rare, it is also the case that inequality eventually returns, as societies stabilize upon recovering from these events. This has been the story of the latter decades of the postwar era in which we currently live, during which all the leveling caused by the World Wars has pretty much reversed, and inequality is returning to what it was in the Gilded Age.
In the last chapters of the book, Scheidel examines the potential leveling effect from factors other than mass violence, such as progressive tax structures or social welfare, and concludes that they have only modest impact. He also speculates on the possibility of the horsemen returning, suggesting that this is unlikely. Modern civilization is complex and robust, with little chance of systemic collapse or revolution from below. Warfare has become hi-tech, precluding the need for mass mobilization. And with modern medicine, even plague has lost its power, as we saw with the Covid pandemic (which happened after the book’s publication).
It would seem that the only potential mass violence event that could erase inequality in our near future would be an all-out global thermonuclear war. As with historical instances of far-reaching violent ruptures, this would achieve leveling simply by destroying vast amounts of property and killing vast numbers of people. One must wonder, then, if inequality isn’t tolerable, given the drastically negative alternative. This is a somewhat depressing conclusion, which even the author himself acknowledges.
If there is any glimmer of hope in this book, it lies buried in the statistics. Redistributive policies are shown to have a greater effect on inequality of disposable income than on inequality of market income. In other words, they ease the burden of the cost of living, even if they can’t stop elites in the upper brackets from hoarding wealth in nominal terms. Better to have inequality but without immiseration, if nothing else.
In the appendix, there is some technical discusssion about a measurement called the “extraction rate.” This is Gini divided by its maximum possible value, and thus a measure of how close a society is to achieving maximum possible inequality. What is found is that the rate gets close to 100% in simpler, pre-modern societies, but that it is attenuated in the modern age, with its more complex economies and its higher expectations of what constitutes an acceptable quality of life.
The attenuation of the extraction rate is the one way that economic development and growth could be said to be a “rising tide that lifts all boats,” even though the wealthy benefit far more from a stable, growing society than the rest of us do. Yes, we ordinary folks are peasants compared to the likes of Elon Musk, but we still enjoy a standard of living that is much better than that of most of humanity that came before us. For that, I suppose, we should be grateful, and not be wishing for the return of the horsemen and some sort of disruptive leveling event.
Unless, of course, you’re eager to scrabble for survival in a post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland.
Next, some more thoughts on Scheidel’s study, including how it relates to the question I posed above about the Fourth Turning.
In his introduction, Scheidel emphasizes that his thesis is that mass violence events reduce inequality, not that inequality necessarily leads to mass violence. And while he doesn’t mention it in the introduction, it emerges later in the text that mass violence isn’t guaranteed to lead to leveling – it’s just that when leveling occurs, it is always because of a preceding mass violence event. These are important logical distinctions!
Turnings theory predicts that there will be some kind of disruption at the end of the saecular cycle, based on generational drivers. While this doesn’t have to involve mass violence, the likelihood of that occurring does increase in the Fourth and final Turning of the cycle. That’s because, in the Fourth Turning, society acts with a sense of urgency in the face of the problems that beset it, and is open to drastic action.
It could be the case that wealth inequality is one of these problems, but it could be something else instead. So Turnings theory is in accord with Scheidel: inequality per se is not necessarily what will lead to drastic social action, which might include mass violence. Though one could argue that even if wealth inequality isn’t a proximate cause of social upheaval, it could be an ultimate cause, through its relation to other social factors – for example, through its corrosive effect on social trust, making it easier for leaders to foment division. In other words, inequality could be understood as symptomatic of a general break down of the social order.
When we look at historical Fourth Turnings, the event that seems most like a social crisis precipitated by inequality is the French Revolution. But here, Scheidel is clear in his analysis. However historically momentous the event might have been, it didn’t have much effect on wealth inequality. I have written about the French Revolution before, in another book review. What I learned from the book I read is that the impetus for the Revolution was not merely that the poor peasantry of France was oppressed; there was a drive for change up and down the social scale, coming out of the political philosophies of the Enlightenment. It was a transformative revolution, no doubt, but it wasn’t a leveling event.
The point is, the cataclysmic events of a Fourth Turning will certainly transform the civic order, but there is no guarantee that this will result in a more equal society afterwards. Take the American Civil War – arguably the most destructive war the U.S. has fought, certainly so if measured strictly by total casualties. Afterwards came the Gilded Age, renowned for its wealth inequality. While the Civil War was in some ways a modern war of mass mobilization, featuring conscription and industrial-scale combat, in its outcome it was more like a traditional war where one elite (Northern industrialists) becomes enriched at the expense of another (Southern planters). This is Scheidel’s conclusion, anyway.
Scheidel might dismiss events like the American Revoluition or American Civil War for not meeting the criteria to be considered “great levelers,” but in my opinion this simply exposes a limitation of his approach. These were clearly hugely signicifant events historically, because they transformed the political order, indeed the very identity of the nation. But this can’t be captured by measuring income and wealth shares and ratios. Those graphs might look pretty steady within the timeframe of these events, but that’s because they simply measure a material fact, whereas human history and the human experience are more than a material phenomenon. They involve ideas and passions, which are never going to be visible in a coefficient based on monetary values.
Now, in the World War era, when mass mobilization warfare did achieve leveling, it was in part because of the accompanying physical destruction and the ruination of elites, but also because mobilizing the masses required elevating them materially. It wasn’t strictly the violence of war that produced leveling; it was to a great degree the policies that came about because of the needs of war. For example, the Japanese government enforced high rates of taxation to support their war effort, effectively redistributing wealth from the very rich. Non-belligerents in both world wars (such as Switzerland and Sweden) were affected by the need to mobilize and experienced leveling, even though they didn’t fight. Democratization, unionization, and the social welfare state all came out of mass mobilization for the world wars.
This observation reminds me of the famous essay by William James, The Moral Equivalent of War, written just before World War I. James gets that war, while brutal and atrocious, also galvanizes a society toward achieving a common purpose. He speculates on whether it would be possible to harness that dynamic to some purpose other than militaristic destruction; he suggests infrastructure-building projects (he calls it an “army enlisted against Nature“). Interestingly, his idea aniticpated the organized labor corps of the later New Deal era in the United States.
Could something like that be done today, so we don’t have to start World War III just to get to another Golden Age? What William James misses in his essay is that in order to muster the social will to fight a war, or its equivalent, there has to be a sense of emergency – a sense that the nation faces high stakes. This was provided in the 1930s by the Great Depression and the rise of the Axis powers. What could provide it today – and what could provide a sense of emergency that’s not a military conflict? Climate change, maybe? There is not a good record of a society-wide willingness to face the realities of climate change, but here Nature might force our hand.
To conclude, and reiterate points already made, Turnings theory and Scheidel’s study of economic leveling teach some of the same lessons. While it is true that crisis conflicts involving mass violence can result in a more economically equal society, there is no guarantee that they will. Nor is there any reason to predict that the social tensions created by inequality will necessarily lead to violence, and given the former lesson, it’s hardly something to wish for.
One last point. In Scheidel’s first chapters, where he discusses inequality in general, it’s notable that he argues that the tendency for a stable society to gravitate towards states of material inequality is not tied to any particular economic system. In other words, it’s not specifically a fault with free-market capitalism, our current system. It’s a fault with human nature, and all civilized societies face the issue.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t critique capitalism, just that we can’t exclusively blame it for inequality and expect that jettisoning it as a system (were that even possible) would lead to a more equal society. The lessons of the Communist revolutions are plain. I do think that baking wealth redistribution into a market-capitalist system makes sense, as argued earlier, because it improves quality of life for the masses, even as the Gini curve keeps pushing the asymptote toward the maximum possible extraction rate. In my mind, that’s a good reason to continue supporting progressive causes, rather than simply hoping that the cycles of history will take care of our problems for us.
One of my New Year’s traditions is posting a list of the ages of the current living generations in the United States.
Arguably, on December 31st, everyone has had their birthday for the year. If generations are defined by birth year boundaries, then each generation fits neatly into an age bracket on that day (just ignore time zones, please). I use the birth years defined by Strauss-Howe generational theory, which gives us this age breakdown:
GI or Greatest Generation (b.1901-1924): 100+ years old
Silent Generation (b.1925-1942): 82-99 years old
Boomer Generation (b.1943-1960): 64-81 years old
Generation X (b.1961-1981): 43-63 years old
Millennial Generation (b.1982-2004): 20-42 years old
Homeland Generation (b.2005-20??): 0-19 years old
All living members of the GI (or Greatest) Generation are now centenarians, a fact underscored by the death on December 29 of former US President Jimmy Carter at age 100. His generation will still be with us for years to come, as we always have a few people alive who are supercentenarians (110+). As I write this, the oldest living American is 114 years old. So if just one 100 year old alive today makes it to that age, there will still be living members of the Greatest Generation in 2038.
Each generation’s age bracket currently lines up well with a phase of life. Meaning, Millennials fill the age bracket corresponding to young adulthood (21-41 by Strauss-Howe reckoning), Gen Xers that corresponding to midlife (42-62), and so forth. This means we should be close to the end of the current social era, the Fourth Turning or Crisis Era. In the next era, the First Turning of the new saeculum, the generations will be aging into their new life phases (Millennials will become midlifers, Gen Xers will become elders, etc.).
This Crisis Era has been dragging on, probably because of the influence of the Silent generation, which is holding back change. They are just on the edge of leaving elderhood (63-83) but still in power; President Biden is a member of the Silent Generation, for example. You could think of it as the long shadow cast by the last generations that were alive in World War II, whose legacy defines the postwar order which is now coming to an end.
As the Silents age out of public life in the near future, we will lurch our way to the end of this era and into the next saeculum (the true New World Order), however chaotically and however painfully. The inexorable logic of time and generational change demands it.
Congratulations, living generations, you made it through 2024!
One type of post I’ve made a lot on this blog is the “strategy review,” where I either review a theory of social and political change, or examine current events through the lens of such theories. Considering recent historical developments, I feel like it’s time for another one.
Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of traction on this blog out of Philip Bobbitt‘s concept of the “market state” – a new constitutional order which he theorized was forming in the wake of America’s Cold War victory. In his framework, this was caused by changes in the security environment. With the ideological conflicts of the World Wars to Cold War era resolved, and free market capitalism ascendant, the state no longer derived legitimacy from controlling the economy and maximizing benefits to its citizens, in competition with other economic systems. Instead, it’s purpose was to keep its citizens safe and free markets functioning, to maximize economic opportunity.
This jibes with what other strategists, like Thomas P.M. Barnett and Peter Zeihan, have identified as the grand bargain the United States made with the world after WWII: we opened up our vast consumer market and invited other countries to embrace free trade, in return for which we stood as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc. Then we simply outlasted the Communists’ failure of an economic system. With Great Power conventional warfare a bygone in the nuclear age (the MAD doctrine), Pax Americana reigned over the Earth. Some even called it “the end of history.”
Things got messy after 9/11. It seemed history wasn’t interested in ending after all. The way Bobbitt understood it, in terms of his market state theory, is that in the new security environment, the threat wasn’t other nations making war on the West. Instead, it was transnational organizations taking advantage of the open networks of market state societies to infiltrate and cause harm – the 9/11 terror attacks being a spectacularly dramatic example. The point is, the market state had to adapt and develop countermeasures against these threats, with minimal reduction of economic opportunity for its subjects: that would be the test of its legitimacy.
The War on Terror and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq could be thought of as the emerging market state’s efforts to assert just such legitimacy, led by the hegemonic “sole superpower” United States. We would just reformat failed states and turn them into free market democracies like us, with a few tricks (like Guantanamo Bay) to get around any legal concerns. It ultimately didn’t turn out so well, and we gave up after the Bush era, but arguably there were a lot of lessons learned about the shape of modern warfare that carry forward to this day (send in the drones!).
I’ve argued in other posts on this blog that what Bobbitt calls the “market state” is really just the zeitgeist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – an inner-driven, individualistic, commerce-minded social era. It was the age of neoliberalism, brought on by the Reagan revolution: a regime of free market principles aggressively pursued by government, on a global scale. The term “neoliberalism” is a bit fuzzy, and generally is used in the pejorative these days. Ever since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, there’s been kind of a consensus that neoliberalism was a bad idea, that it wrecked the middle class, and that we need to turn away from it, and from globalization in general.
In other words, what could be called the “neoliberal market state” was a creature of a relatively prosperous and stable era, when it was conceivable to have faith in markets and be comfortable with low regulation and an open, globalizing society. It wasn’t the end of history so much as a reprieve, during which the United States basked in its Cold War victory and enjoyed peak global hegemony. But the mood has shifted now. The public clamors for a more closed and orderly society, and a retreat from global affairs, which every President since Obama has provided.
This takes me to the recent Presidential election and the curious return of Donald Trump. Didn’t the people know that Biden-Harris was rolling back neoliberalism already, and was the best bet for the middle class? That Trump’s plans to cut taxes on the rich and impose tariffs on imports would hurt ordinary consumers? That his adminitration will deregulate capitalism to the benefit of the very wealthy, one of the hallmarks of the neoliberal regime we are supposedly rejecting? So why did they vote for him?
The election result could just be attributed to the incumbent-punishing effects of seething populism: everything sucks, and heads must roll! Alternately, the market state viewpoint might offer another explanation: informational warfare.
What I mean is, in the new constitutional order of the market state, the citizen is primarily a consumer. That includes being a consumer of media; that is, of information. In our somewhat free-for-all media envrironment, dominated by social networking sites, consumer-citizens tend to get pulled into either of two media bubbles, each one replete with the messaging of one of the two political factions vying for control of the government. It’s like two different versions of reality fighting for control over the minds of the masses. I’ve described this before as the “red-blue wars.”
It seems that in the recent skirmish that was the 2024 election, the red zone faction prevailed on the information warfare front. I have read post-mortem posts (there were so many this year!) that state just as much. The red zone faction simply has a more robust media ecosystem, which gives it a significant advantage. And, as I’ve noted before, they might also have more “group feeling,” or solidarity of purpose – another advantage.
But here’s another way to think about information war: it could be waged from outside! Meaning that, with the open and global nature of the Internet, “bad actors” who are not subjects of your government can infliltrate your media networks and influence your elections. This is a true test of the market state’s ability to sustain itself – is it even possible to govern at all in a wide-open society?
You might recall that this was the big story after the 2016 election: it was a successful Russian cyberwarfare operation, as Timothy Snyder bluntly put it. It was the first step to installing a Russian-style oligarchy in the U.S., and it seems like the 2024 election might be the last. In this interpretation, it wasn’t that the blue zone lost to the red zone. Instead, the United States lost to a foreign adversary, and was defeated in a market state war. The Russians outlasted us in the end, and we became like them!
I used to joke, during Trump’s first term, that we were transitioning from the “market state” to the “mafia state.” It doesn’t seem so funny now. The U.S. Constitution, stressed by decades of partisan gridlock, is fragile and might not survive a second Trump Presidency. He has no respect for the rule of law, and is enabled by cronies in the other branches of government. So it looks like we might end up with an entrenched criminal oligarchy. The only hope I have is that Trump is unfocused and distractable. But, as Tom Waits puts it, if you live in hope, you’re dancing to a terrible tune.
Arguably, “change voters” who put Trump in office this cycle were hoping for some kind of shake up that would at least put us on the path to fixing our broken system. That’s the only credit I can give them. But what will replace the market state that ostensibly has been trying to emerge these past decades? Trump’s cabinet of media personalities and tech bros are like a perverse enshrinement of the Reagan revolution – conservative pundits and Ayn Rand aficianados large and in charge. Isn’t that embracing the neoliberal market state?
Well, no, since the new regime promises to pull back from free trade, globalization, and military interventionism – all hallmarks of the neoliberal order. And the oligarchs at the top of the economic pyramid, like Bezos and Musk, are not interested in free markets. They want monopoly power, and the new administration will surely not stand in their way. It really is looking like we are reverting to isolationism and the rule of robber barons – because, you know, things were so great during the Gilded Age in the 19th century.
Were voters not aware that this was the future they were choosing? I mean, isn’t MAGA supposed to be a populist movement? Why did it put oligarchs in power? That’s where the idea of rightwing propagandists scoring an information warfare victory applies. Democracy is the tyranny of the uninformed.
Alternately, maybe MAGAs did intentionally vote for this bleak new order. Snyder has invented a term for this type of regime: sadopopulism. This is a kind of government that inflicts harm, but then deflects blame to stay in power. Certainly on brand for Trump. MAGA voters might be willing to suffer, so long as other people that they blame for their woes (immigrants, queers) suffer even more.
An even bleaker prospect: MAGA is an alliance between criminal oligarchy and a vicious backlash from social conservatives against the multiculturalism of the post-1960s era. It wants to replace the market state with a new version of the nation state that yokes powerful business interests to White Christian nationalism. If the nation state was legitimate because it looked out for the people’s welfare, then the Trumpian White Christian nation state is legitimate (in some people’s minds) because it looks out specifically for white Christians – maintaining their privilege over the rest of society.
At what point do we just go ahead and call it fascism?
If a MAGA takeover is resisted, it might only be because our judicial system allows that, in the “emerging market state” in the United States, consumer-citizens are empowered to define at the state level what their particular constitutional rights are. So states that are in the blue zone could reject White Christian nationalism, and institutionalize rights according to blue zone values – obvious examples being abortion access or sanctuary for immigrants.
This would amount to a fractionalizing of the U.S. along red zone-blue zone lines, which sounds quite plausible in today’s political environment. The problem with this, which Bobbitt himself has reflected on, is that it goes against the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights for all citizens under federal law. This may well be the direction in which our state is evolving. For many citizens of the United States, that would be a human rights disaster. There are already women dying in red states from lack of reproductive healthcare, and God help us if deportation camps become a reality.
Another problem with fractionalizing along red zone-blue zone lines is that it denies the United States a national identity. Can we then truly be a nation? Each side in our partisan conflict has a different vision of how our national identity should be defined. The red zone’s vision is exclusive and looks backwards in time, while the blue zone’s vision is inclusive and confront’s the realities of today’s world. Obviously, I favor the latter vision. But until the conflict is resolved, one way or another, the definition of our national identity – and with it our understanding of what makes government legitimate – will be unclear. Until then, we can only keep dancing to that terrible tune.
Well, there you have it. Another long post that probably overthinks the politics of our time by trying to force fit it into theoretical frameworks. I mean, is “information warfare” really a feature unique to the new “market state” of the 21st century? Wasn’t propaganda a big part of the political struggles and wars of the 20th century as well? Haven’t other societies faced political conflict with an ideological dimension, where persuasion and the spread of ideas was a factor – for example, the Religious Wars of the 16th century, or the Enlightenment Era Revolutions of the late 18th century?
Theories are useful for making sense of events and for structuring narratives, but might also impose limitations on our thinking. And while the past can inform us of what is possible, it cannot be a perfect guide to the future. Ultimately, the shape of things to come is determined by our unique choices, based on our needs and perspectives, in our specific location in history. Whatever version of “the state” is coming into being, and whatever name we give it, it will be one that makes sense to today’s living generations.
All I know for sure is that everyone is getting a copy of this book in their stocking this Christmas:
As I write this, authorities have just arrested a person of interest in the case of the “Healthcare assassin,” who murdered a CEO on his way to an investor meeting. This guy, if it is him, has been treated by the public like a folk hero. I’m sure you’ve seen the memes. People really hate the healthcare system in the United States.
…the second wave of newly aging-in Trump voters entered adulthood… hoping only to grind out a living through scams. But this is fundamentally an anti-social and anti-humanist mode of economic activity that contributes nothing to society and offers nothing but alienation to its victims. The result is people willing to vote for someone they know will cause immense harm to others, hoping it will help them personally.
As I put it, voters tapped into their inner Joker and embraced the breakdown of the society. This latest incident certainly supports that idea: if we can’t reform healthcare by legal means, well…shall we say the Purge is underway?
I will point out that insensitivity about the death of the rich has already been on display, during an earlier story that took place before the election. I’m referring to the submersible that imploded while taking some wealthy clients on a tour. There wasn’t much sympathy for them, either, and they were just some folks out on a lark, not supervillain-esque corporate executives on their way to plot how to ensure that the maximum proportion of a firm’s revenues went to its shareholders and not its customers.
A mural in Seattle, made after the Ocengate Titan implosion
Celebaring someone’s death is pretty harsh. Is Trump’s reelection making us all worse as a society, or is it that we’ve become less civil, making Trump’s rise possible? Arguably, Trump’s election win simply exposed us for the uncivil society that we’ve already become. I’m sure the two phenomena feed back on each other, in a vicious cycle. This is how social moods are reinforced; by collective reactions to events.
Generations theory has its own take on why this is an age of callous attitudes and lack of sensitivity: it has to do with the archetypes of the generations that fill the adult age brackets. The “sensitive artist”-type generation that is left is the Silent generation, but they are very old now, and on their way out of public life. President Biden is from that generation, and his departure when his Presidency ends will likely mark the end of his generation’s influence.
The next generation to fit that archetype is the current child generation, the Homelanders. Not until they have come of age in significant numbers will we see the return of an attitude of empathy and humaneness. By then, we will have entered another social era.
It’s been two weeks since the election, and we now wait with dread for the MAGA regime to take over and reformat, or at least attempt to reformat, American society. I’ve already written one post – I called it an election post-mortem, but it was really more of a reaction to the gut punch, immediate thoughts post. Like many of us, I’ve been consuming tons of post-election content as we all process this historic event. Here are some deeper thoughts, bringing in a little social theory.
Now that the votes are mostly counted, it is plain that Trump will beat his 2020 popular vote, by 3 or 4%. Harris will fall far short of Biden’s 2020 vote, which is the essential story of her loss. It’s a shame, given that she will likely have the third highest total of votes in Presidential election history, after only Biden in 2020 and her opponent in this election. As I put it earlier, she wasn’t unpopular – she just wasn’t quite popular enough, for a post-2020 candidate.
Assuming that there was no fraud (let’s not go down that conspiracy hole), the problem for Harris was clearly turnout, which then intersected with the brutal equation of the swing states and the electoral college. Where did those millions of Biden 2020 votes go, that might have tipped the balance?
One answer I’m reading goes back to that famous quote from 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid.” The narrative goes something like this: neoliberalism and globalization have hollowed out the middle class, and those corporate Democrats just don’t offer any solutions, instead pushing a bunch of woke nonsense.
This narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson explaining it. She states that Biden was actually stepping away from neoliberalism, and that Trump will take us back. The economy was working more in favor for the working class under Biden than it has in 40 years. Under Trump, it’s back to the old ways. The rich will keep getting richer and working class Americans will get the shaft.
Harris, in her bid to be elected, offered economic policies, with specifics, clearly addressed at helping working people – she calls them the middle class. Some examples, listed on her campaign web site, are a $6,000 Child Tax Credit, and up to $25,000 assistance for down payments for first-time home buyers.
On top of that, Democracts, including Harris, ran decidedly un-woke campaigns this cycle. I’ll let Jon Stewart take it away.
The fact is, President Biden handled the economy well, considering that his administration started in the midst of a global pandemic. As this MSNBC article puts it:
In what will be a generous gift to his successor, President Joe Biden beat inflation, brought down gas prices, created millions of jobs, spurred strong growth, boosted retirement savings and revived American manufacturing — just in time for Donald Trump to take credit for all of it.
But MAGA partisans on social media and the pundits in Jon Stewart’s video alike are echoing this “Democrats are too woke and are ignoring real-world problems” idea. Why are they falling for it? The answer in one word could be: misinformation. As the MSNBC article puts it: “Democrats need to realize that they have less a policy problem than a propaganda problem” – in other words, their messaging just doesn’t resonate.
Democrats have earnestly tried to steer away from identity politics and focus on the material needs of voters, but unfortunately for them, MAGA Republicans have been able to make the “too woke” label stick. As this excellent substack essay points out, Trump is the one who ran on identity politics, and for him it worked. His promise to his base is a future that is white and Christian, just like in the good old days. Nothing could be more identitarian.
Let’s face it, the partisan conflict was always about the right-wing backlash to the emancipation of women and minorities, and to the rise of multiculturalism, that came in the wake of the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s. As another substacker starkly puts it, this race was about race. Whites will lose their majority status in the United States in the next couple of decades, and for many millions of them, that is too much to take. Hence their slogan, “take America back,” which they will now proceed to do, with a vengeance.
But then why did Trump gain support compared to 2020 from almost every demographic group, including non-whites? Even including undocumented immigrants, who presumably know he wants to have them deported. Could it be that misinformation thing – all that money poured into ads to undermine the Harris campaign’s messaging and the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, with the help of Trump’s billionaire mascot (or is it co-President?), who owns one of the Internet’s largest social media platforms? But then what about all the money poured into the Harris campaign – she both outraised and outspent her opponent – was it not applied effectively?
Was it just a case of tactical errors in the info wars? I’ve argued on this blog before that in this partisan age, when most voters know where their loyalty lies, political messaging is largely about rallying the troops, so to speak. The specifics don’t much matter. Except they might, when it comes to those crucial swing voters, who are the ones who actually decided the last three elections. Trump’s crude identity attacks and simplistic points (he literally just called Biden and Harris “the worst” and “failures” and left it at that) might amount to a blunter but better instrument of information delivery. People have thick heads, after all.
Let’s allow, however, that average folks, while maybe not intellectual giants, are not complete morons, and understand what their interests are. As this election post-mortem article puts it, “politics are material and people actually do know their conditions.” Yes, the Biden-Harris administration made great strides in improving the U.S. economy. By the standards that are conventionally used to measure the economy – inflation rate, employment rate, economic growth – we’re on the right path.
But people are still feeling the pain of high prices. It was the rate of price increase that was tamed, not prices themselves, which are still higher than four years ago. And young people – the demographic whose loss may well have been the hardest for the supposedly Gen Z-appealing Harris – face a future where jobs do not pay enough to achieve major life milestones such as buying a home or raising a family. In the face of this hard reality, rosy economic statistics are not much of a palliative.
That last article from The Guardian makes another point, one I have not seen anywhere else, but it rings true to me:
I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.
Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.
It’s like the American people got a taste of life in a Scandinavian-type socialist society, then had the rug pulled out from under them, and for that they punished the incumbent. We almost got there, people! We were on our way to fully automated luxury communism! But then Biden did the bidding of his corporate masters, and back to normal it was. Only someone forgot to tell him that for most Americans, “normal” sucks.
For most Americans, normal sucks so bad that they were willing to vote in, or allow to be voted in, a convicted felon and known degenerate who is probably also a national security threat. Like some kind of Hail Mary play to shake things up and maybe, somehow, end up better off on the other side.
The Guardian article has an even more depressing take:
Perhaps most emblematic of this is at the heart of Trump’s campaign: his embrace of extremely online tech billionaires, crypto currency and online influencers. If the archetype of Trump’s win in 2016 was the left-behind post-industrial Rust belt manufacturing worker – or, perhaps more accurately, the car dealership or McDonald’s franchise owner in a left-behind post-industrial Rust belt town – this year it is the crypto scammer, the dropshipper, the app-based day trader, the online engagement farmer.
That embrace was Trump’s message, and at the core of his gains, especially with young men. Without civil society and without strong unions, people believe the only path to success is getting one over on someone else. And who is better at that than Trump?
While the core of the resurgent-left generation of Sanders was downwardly mobile college-educated professionals, selling their labor for wages without the prospect of buying a house or retiring on a pension, the second wave of newly aging-in Trump voters entered adulthood without even those prospects, hoping only to grind out a living through scams. But this is fundamentally an anti-social and anti-humanist mode of economic activity that contributes nothing to society and offers nothing but alienation to its victims. The result is people willing to vote for someone they know will cause immense harm to others, hoping it will help them personally.
In other words, America has thrown up its collective hands and declared, “fuck it, let’s all be criminal degenerates now.” If a toxic mashup of white supremacy and billionaire kleptocracy is the best we can get, then let’s tap into our inner Joker, embrace the breakdown of society, and get on with the Purge.
That’s a dark view of the American electorate, and the sense that it might be true contributes to the dread that Harris voters like me feel. It’s the real kick in the face to the almost 50% of voters – almost! – who rejected Trump. We thought our society could be both civil and multicultural. But enough other Americans decided, I guess, that those two ideas are incompatible.
I will now turn to generations and turnings theory. I note that the brief experience of the Covid welfare state came about because of an emergency. In the Crisis Era or Fourth Turning, the perception of emergency creates urgency and acceptance of the need for drastic measures, shifting power from the market to the state. This reshapes society, and lays the foundation for a new understanding of civic community.
If the public indeed got a taste of that during Covid and liked it, that just shows how receptive the living generations are to radical change, as well as to authoritative leadership taking control. It could simply be that Republicans prevailed in the election because they are promising both of these things – radical change and authoritative leadership.
The Democrats offered sensible policies that have a track record of actually working – but to a majority of voters, that wasn’t satisfactory. They wanted sweeping reform of the system. I’ll let Jon Stewart make the point for me again. He might be the commentator out there who gets it the most.
If our government is indeed, as Stewart puts it, “an overly regulated system that is no longer responsive or delivering for the needs of the people,” then no wonder the party that shows that it is willing to break the rules is the one that got the most votes. The MAGA Republicans are more attuned to the social mood, and more aligned to where we are in the generational cycle – whether by craft or by instinct, who knows.
This is also connected to how the non-college educated working class has been migrating to the Republican party, in what has been called America’s 7th party system. A political party realignment pretty much always happens in a Fourth Turning. In the last cycle, it was the rise of the New Deal coalition, which gave the U.S. its modern social welfare state, such as it is.
The new MAGA coalition, if that’s what is forming, wants to dismantle the New Deal and make the Reagan revolution – that is, neoliberalism – a permanent fixture of American life. They want to add a heavy dose of social conservatism, rolling back civil rights that have been hard-won over this generational cycle. And also tariffs, Trump’s way of giving the middle finger to globalization.
None of this will close the wealth gap between the working class and the wealthy elites. So why is the working class supporting it? It’s hard not to conclude that lower educated, less informed voters are simply more susceptible to the rightwing’s superior media ecosystem. Or just go ahead and call it idiocracy.
It remains to be seen if MAGA will fully consolidate their power. Their victory is no mandate; the margins are too thin, and there was support for progressive causes despite Trump winning the popular vote. But unlike in 2017, Republicans in 2025 will control all three branches of the United States government. There might not be any “guardrails” or “checks and balances” to contain the MAGA policy agenda. The Constitution is about to get a major stress test (save us, John Thune!) which it might not survive in its current form.
In 2016, Trump’s election galvanized the Democratic opposition, which launched a “resistance” movement, so that partisan conflict was always in the background during Trump’s first administration. Today, the mood among Democratic partisans is one of retreat to nurse their wounds. We’re all over on Bluesky, sharing tips on how to manage life under tyranny. I don’t see much coming from the Democratic party’s leadership, if they even have any at this point. Is it possible they will cave, and give the Heritage Foundation the bloodless revolution it wants?
I suspect not, given how radical the MAGA agenda is. MAGA’s definition of the emergencies which require an empowered state (immigrants! gays! reproductive rights!) mean they are prescribing fixes that will not be popular, including mass deportations, and – potentially – banning abortion and gay marriage nationwide. It’s hard to imagine this will all proceed without friction.
Could we have avoided all of this if only Biden had kept the Covid welfare state going, as the Guardian article suggests? He could have pushed the idea of an ongoing pandemic emergency and used it to instigate more radical change, and taken us to a better resolution of the Crisis. Instead, we’re going to create our own emergency here.
There’s no way to know what could have happened, so it’s beside the point. We missed our chance. The future ahead can’t be known either; we see through a glass darkly. All we can be sure of is that somewhere in that undiscovered country lies the climax phase of this Crisis Era. God help us to get through it.
This is possibly the longest post I have ever written on this blog. I keep going back to it and rewriting it. It’s been a lot to process these past weeks. Thanks for bearing with me, dear reader, in these trying times.
I am interested in theories of historical cycles, particularly as they apply to this land of freedom in which I live, the United States of America. One idea I’ve come across is that as the U.S. has gone through its cycles of evolving regimes, it has gradually expanded the number of ethnic groups that get to be considered bona fide Americans.
In his book, The Next American Nation, which I’ve reviewed here already, Michael Lind is explicit about it. In the beginning, only Anglo-Americans counted – that is, the original Mayflower-descended W.A.S.P.s. Gradually, other northern Europeans got included, and then all Europeans (the melting pot). This is where it makes sense to think of an expanding concept of “whiteness” – “white” didn’t include Southern and Eastern Europeans at first, but then it did, and Italian and Polish surnames came to be thought of as American surnames.
In this cycle, with the Civil Rights revolution, we were on our way to a multiracial, multicultural definition of “American” that might have lived up to Martin Luther King Jr’s color-blind ideal. But then MAGA happened, which is not a racially inclusive movement, and if they win this time around, we might not be expanding the definition at all.
Except in one small way, perhaps. Take a look at Trump’s cabinet picks; there’s one member of an ethnic group famous for being staunchly Republican and anti-Communist:
That’s right, the Cuban-Americans might get into the club this cycle. Hell, if they were good enough for Lucille Ball, then they must be good enough for America.
