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

Turns out we can make a lot of progress in quantifying the fighting spirit. More recently, my colleagues within the field of cultural evolution have been probing the psychology of readiness for extreme sacrifice, using such concepts as “devoted actors,” “sacred values,” and “identity fusion.

What are the features of conspiracy theories that distinguish them from scientific theories? One, the conspiratorial theory is often vague about the motives of the behind-the-scenes leaders or assigns them implausible motivations. Two, it assumes that they are extremely clever and knowledgeable. Three, it places power in the hands of one strong leader or a tiny cabal. And, finally, it assumes that illegal plans can be kept secret for indefinitely long periods of time. A scientific theory, like the class-domination one, is very different.

The two most important social forces that gave us the Trump presidency—and pushed America to the brink of state breakdown—are elite overproduction and popular immiseration.

Other indicators focus on what happened to the elites. In nearly two-thirds of the cases, the crisis resulted in massive downward mobility from the ranks of the elites to the ranks of the commoners. In one-sixth of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent. Bad news for the elites. Even more bad news for everybody was that 75 percent of crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in one-fifth of cases, recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of exits led to the death of the state

Group minds are a result of collective discussion and working out of a consensus, which can be listened to (unlike an unreadable mind). Arriving at a common program of action often leaves physical traces, such as meeting minutes and programmatic documents. Of course, some groups are quite secretive about their inner decision-making processes. Here’s where whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden become essential for a sociologist of power.

Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.

It is difficult for us to grasp that many consequential events happen not because they have been engineered by shadowy plotters but because they were driven by impersonal social forces.

The victory of the North in the war resulted in the overthrow of the antebellum ruling class and its replacement by the new economic elite that has dominated the American state since then.

as slavery provided the economic basis for Southern dominance, a political attack on the slaveholders could be strengthened by an ideological attack on slavery.

History textbooks tell us that the American Civil War was fought over slavery, but this is not the whole story. A better way to characterize this conflict is to say that it was fought over “slavocracy.