“Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily ‘elite overproduction’—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.”
“Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. ‘You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,’ Turchin said.”
“Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations… Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a ‘paradigmatic example’ of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. ‘He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge.'”
– Graeme Wood, quoting Peter Turchin in the Dec 2020 edition of The Atlantic
“Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t buy his own jet, paint it as Trump One and fly around after January doing what he does best … selling bigoted BS to dwindling throngs of idiot mongrels in middle America.”
– Tom Grimes, Nov. 21, 2020, 10:39AM