<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/30/the-deep-historical-forces-that-explain-trumps-win>
"In the days since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which
gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House,
commentators have analysed and dissected the relative merits of the main
protagonists – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been
said about their personalities and the words they have spoken; little about the
impersonal social forces that push complex human societies to the brink of
collapse – and sometimes beyond. That’s a mistake: in order to understand the
roots of our current crisis, and possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these
tectonic forces we need to focus on.
The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and
disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies,
organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability
lasting, roughly, a century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods
of social unrest and political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire,
the English civil war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data
on hundreds of historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged
from it.
So we’re in a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces
that foment unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors:
popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.
To get a better understanding of these concepts and how they are influencing
American politics in 2024, we need to travel back in time to the 1930s, when an
unwritten social contract came into being in the form of Franklin D Roosevelt’s
New Deal. This contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses and the
state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in Nordic
countries. For two generations, this implicit pact delivered an unprecedented
growth in wellbeing across a broad swath of the country. At the same time, a
“Great Compression” of incomes and wealth dramatically reduced economic
inequality. For roughly 50 years the interests of workers and the interests of
owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably
low.
That social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions
was undermined, and taxes on the wealthy cut back. Typical workers’ wages,
which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started
to lag behind. Inflation-adjusted wages stagnated and at times decreased. The
result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of
Americans. One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average
life expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started
well before the Covid pandemic). That’s what we term “popular immiseration”.
With the incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth
were reaped by the elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being,
siphoning money from the poor and channelling it to the rich. The Great
Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the last four decades call to mind
what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad
fortunes and robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of
broad-based prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second
Gilded Age."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
