It is the destiny of all elites to be born as saviors and die as parasites. The US elite may be going the same way that the old Soviet Communist Elite went: condemned by its inefficiency and pushed out to make space for another elite. It was expected, although not so soon. The attempt may still fail, but one thing is clear: this is a revolution.
“Popular Revolutions” aren’t
The adjective “popular” is often attached to “revolution.” And indeed, in their hot phases, revolutions often see a consistent participation of “the people.” But history shows that their role is mostly that of musket fodder.
A revolution may delude people into thinking that they are taking power into their own hands, but the final result is the replacement of an old elite with a new one. Think of how the French got rid of their king in 1793; then, little more than 10 years later, they had an Emperor (Napoleon) in exchange. Think of the Russian revolution: Lev Tolstoy gives us a magistral portrait of the Tsarist elite in the mid-19th century in his “Anna Karenina” (1877): a band of parasites interested in nothing but money and self-promotion. They were swept away by the Communist Revolution in 1917. But it would be hard to say that workers were ever in power in the Soviet Union. Rather, the government was managed by a new elite sometimes called the “Nomenklatura,” in turn swept away by a new revolution in 1991.
Elites are indispensable for the functioning of the state and, no matter how we may reason that a perfect society shouldn’t need an elite, we can’t find a real one in history that was “eliteless.” The problem is that all human organizations tend to become inefficient, costly, and often counterproductive, showing “diminishing returns to complexity,” as Joseph Tainter noted. You can say that they accumulate entropy; it is typical of complex systems. (See at the end of this post some mathematical models of this story).
The problem is especially serious when the economic system is undergoing a contraction: military stress, resource depletion, pollution, and more, reduce the capability of the system to sustain its elites. Then, the elites become a huge parasite sucking out vital resources from the rest of society. The size of the elite class has to be reduced, but the elites are not good at that; they have no structures to cut down their own number. In practice, they keep increasing it.
The results are known: a top-heavy social structure, the ruthless exploitation of the poor, the diffuse inefficiency, the brazen injustice, and more. It all tends to generate a police state where the dominating elites desperately try to maintain their power using force. It can’t normally last for long: by beggaring commoners, the elites destroy their source of wealth, and the result is collapse. In states, collapse is normally traumatic, and it involves a lot of violence, blood, and destruction. In corporations, it is called “corporate restructuring.” It is not, normally, bloody, but it is surely traumatic for those being restructured.
The current situation in the US is a clear example of the start of a revolution. The old US elite, aka the “deep state,” has become too large, too inefficient, too parasitic, and too violent. It has to be replaced with a new one. It has been surprisingly fast, but it is happening. The momentum of the “Magaist” revolution is tremendous, and the opposition is reduced to little more than old leftists yelling at clouds. It may still not succeed, but its time has come.
The US and the USSR — Similar elite reshuffling
The current situation of the US looks remarkably similar to that of the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Dmitri Orlov already noted in his Reinventing Collapse (2008) how the two superpowers had similar social and economic structures and that, hence, they had to follow similar paths toward collapse.
In the USSR, the state was in the hands of a clique of oligarchs who absorbed most of the state’s resources. The collapse arrived shortly after the retreat from Afghanistan, which had taken a heavy toll on Soviet resources. A little more than 30 years later, the US would retreat from Afghanistan as well, although their unwinnable war may be more the conflict in Ukraine. In any case, the US is also in the hands of a bunch of parasitic oligarchs who don’t seem to be doing anything except funneling the country’s wealth into their bank accounts. Similar conditions lead to similar outcomes.
Note also that the elite shuffle in the USSR corresponded to the stalling of Soviet crude oil production. Today, the US elite shuffle is taking place exactly when the peak of shale oil is arriving. We’ll have to wait to see whether shale oil is really facing a phase of terminal decline, but it appears to be the case. Reduced oil production constrains the system's economic output, highlighting the need for an elite shuffle. And that’s how certain things happen.
Revolutions are unavoidable but not good
Revolutions may be unavoidable, but they are not good things - rarely bloodless. The ongoing one in the US has incredible forward momentum but also plenty of chances to fail. The old elites still control the US military apparatus: they may decide to do nothing, as the Red Army did in 1991, or they may decide to use force to stop Trump and his followers. Tanks rolling in Washington? Why not? History rolls when it decides to. In this case, the problems with the overexpanded US elite will be postponed but not solved. Waiting before reforming the system is the recipe that leads to an even worse Seneca Collapse.
The new Elite taking power in Washington seems to be mainly a group of technocrats who earn their wealth and power by controlling the Internet and the communication system in the West. They come together with an ideology, “Magaism,” that carries a nasty streak of violence and racism. Fortunately, our times seem to be a little less violent than old ones. We may see plenty of heads rolling in the near future but, hopefully, only in a virtual sense. The old oligarchs will be told to retire to their mansions and stay quiet. And they will be very happy to have gotten off so lightly!
In any case, apart from Trump’s unhinged ramblings and his followers’ mad proclaims, the US badly needs to abandon its imperial ambitions, reduce its military presence overseas, concentrate its resources on its territory, and rebuild an economic system that doesn’t depend on robbing other countries. Whether that will be possible is all to be seen. Russia succeeded at doing that, but it was not painless for the Russian people. Not at all.
The biggest risk: the collapse of the US scientific research system
One specific risk of Magaism is the collapse of the US scientific research system. The MAGA ideology carries with it a strong anti-science streak. This is understandable: the research system in the US and the West has evolved with the rest of the government bureaucracy, becoming a bloated and inefficient system that mainly wastes public money to enrich bureaucrats and assorted parasites (most scientists are the underpaid and exploited peons of the system).
Surely, the research system badly needs radical reform. At the very minimum, it needs to regulate the interactions between academia and industry, which often result in scams to sell useless (and sometimes harmful) products to the public. To say nothing of the scandal of the scientific publication system. It works by having scientists use public money to pay publishers to take control of work made with public money that they then proceed to resell, siphoning even more money from the public. And there is more, but let’s not go into the details.
The risk is that the reform of the scientific research system will not be just a reform but a wholesale takedown obtained by defunding (it is already happening). That would be a disaster because you can’t freeze-dry scientists and rehydrate them when needed. When scientists stop doing research for more than a few years, they become obsolete and useless, very difficult to re-train and insert back into the system. So, we risk losing the competency built in several decades of work. That’s especially true for areas that Magaists find objectionable, including pollution control, climate science and ecosystem studies. So, we would lose the very tools we need to understand what’s happening and what is likely to happen in the near future.
Something similar happened to the Soviet research system, defunded and neglected for more than a decade. Soviet scientists had to abandon their research, move abroad, or become bank employees or janitors. Fortunately, Russian science managed to recover and return to the earlier levels of excellence, but it was a hard blow. Will the West be able to avoid this destiny?
Models of Revolution
A way to see the collapse of the elites is to consider them as “predators” of the lower classes, (the “preys”). You can use simple mathematical models of the kind developed long ago by Lotka and Volterra to show that the predators tend to go in “overshoot.” They deplete their prey so badly, that the can’t sustain themselves any longer, and then they have to crash down. That happens fast according to the “Seneca Effect.”
Click on the image to enlarge.
Here are two of the articles (slightly edited) that I published in 2014 on “Cassandra’s Legacy” commenting on the role of the elites in the trajectory of an economic system. They illustrate how it is possible to model the growth and decline (more like collapse) of the elites. Incidentally, I am not writing any more on that blog because it was de-platformed by the Googlish powers that be. In itself, it is a good illustration of how power comes today from the control of the information flow.
Why the elites are so ruthless that they destroy themselves
How to destroy a civilization
