Trump and the Triumph of America’s New Elite

A future historian looking back at the social and economic trends of the past decade might be struck by how thoroughly dysfunctional the most powerful nation of Earth has become. Despite extraordinary technological change and respectable economic growth, the well-being of most Americans has been declining. Even many of the winners are deeply anxious about being able to pass success on to their children. And we’ve run up an unsustainable public debt, with no solution in sight.

So while Donald Trump’s election this fall was a surprise to many, the forces that underlay it have been fermenting since at least his first win, in 2016. As I wrote in my 2023 book End Times, our current predicament is not unique. Complex human societies organized as states have been around for 5,000 years. For a while, they can experience periods of high internal peace and order, roughly a century long, but inevitably they enter periods of high social unrest and political disintegration—end times. Think of the French and Russian revolutions or the American Civil War.