The Age of Disintegration: Political Disunity and Elites At War

In this war of the rising and fading elites, there is no common ground or incentive to compromise.

Historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling elite as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire.

The chapter titles of the book illuminate the complex causes of profound political disunity in the ruling elite:

The Gulfs Between the Classes: a.k.a. soaring income/wealth inequality: check.

The Credibility Gap: The Mainstream Media lauds itself and a self-serving, failing elite: check.

The Partnerships That Failed: the SillyCon Valley tech titans were supposed to "save" the neoliberal elite by managing social media the way the MSM managed broadcast propaganda/"news": check.

The Groups That Opted Out: nobody "important" noticed those who opted out of the neoliberal Kool-Aid: check.

The Undermining of Effort: if I don't get my way, I'll block yours. There is no common ground left.

Is there any doubt about the profound political disunity in America's ruling elite? I have addressed this many times over the past seven years, most recently a year ago in Profound Political Disunity Is Now Pitting Rising Elites Against Fading Elites (November 24, 2015).

Historian Peter Turchin explores the dynamic of social disintegration in his new book Ages of Discord. The cycle of social disintegration and integration is essentially universal to complex societies--a reality I recently discussed in Ungovernable Nation, Ungovernable Economy (October 11, 2016)

USA 2017-2020: An Ungovernable Nation? (October 10, 2016)

The globalist, neoliberal, neoconservative consensus in the Ruling Elite has splintered, a reality I have described as a splintering of the Deep State, the unelected government that continues on regardless of which party or elected politico is currently in office.

I explored this years ago in Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014) and more recently in Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? (August 8, 2016), Why the Deep State Is Dumping Hillary (September 26, 2016) and These Blast Points on Hillary's Campaign... Only The Deep State Is So Precise (October 31, 2016).

What few in the pundit class see is that significant segments of the Deep State view the neo-con neoliberal strategy as an irredeemable failure. But the camp of neoliberals and globalists will not concede defeat and relinquish their hubris-soaked power without a fight.

Indeed, it is clear that this fading sector of the Deep State is now throwing everything in its power at Trump, his appointees, and anyone who dares question the fake-progressive neoliberal neocon narrative.

The neoliberal Deep State's mouthpiece Foreign Affairs is darkly equating populism (i.e. Trump, Le Pen, et al.) with nascent fascism, the favorite fearmongering slander (along with racism) of the fading, discredited neoliberals.

Slander and managed news--and the slandering of any dissenting narratives as "fake news", the ultimate irony of a regime that depends on propaganda and collusion for its survival-- these are the weapons of a cornered, enraged beast that has lost the narrative battle but which refuses to cede its power or pay-to-play wealth.

In this war of the rising and fading elites, there is no common ground or incentive to compromise. Either the rising Elite's agenda and narrative are completely destroyed and the globalist neoliberals remain ascendant, or the rising Elite's narratives and agenda survive the furious onslaught of paid protesters, fake news protesting fake news, and the brainwashed supporters of the Neofeudal, Neo-Colonial pillaging machine known as (in the perfection of doublespeak) "progressive neoliberalism."

The sad truth is a system of pay-to-play global racketeering that has enriched the top .1% at the expense of the bottom 95% for decades cannot be "progressive" unless the word has been turned on its head. The hubris of the neoliberal "progressives" knows no bounds, and they still cannot quite believe the debt-serfs rebelled against the neoliberals' benign impoverishment of everyone outside their protected cliques.

The fading elite will render the nation ungovernable rather than concede its power, wealth and global influence. This is the inevitable result of profound political disunity, which arises when The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016).

I recently discussed ungovernability and the loss of the consent of the governed with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert: (from 12:50)

Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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The Great Con: Political Correctness Has Marginalized the Working Class

So when the protected class of well-paid institutional "progressives" speak darkly of "reversing 40 years of social progress," what they're really saying is we're terrified that the bottom 95% might be waking up to our Great Con of identity politics and political correctness.

To understand the Great Con of political correctness, we must first grasp the decline of the working class (self-described as "the middle class"), i.e. those who must sell their labor to earn their livelihood.

Labor's share of the national economy has been declining for 46 years:

So where has the wealth that's been generated ended up? In the hands of the .1%:

And where did the wages gains end up? In the top 5% technocrat/ managerial class:

And what is the technocrat/ managerial class response to this staggering decline in wealth and wages suffered by the bottom 95%? Political correctness.

Let's look at political correctness and identity politics through the lens of class warfare and class consciousness. Those enjoying enormous gains in wealth and income have a problem: they must fragment and distract the bottom 95% who have lost income and wealth to the top 5%, lest the bottom 95% realize:

1. We have lost the undeclared economic war

2. We have more in common economically with others in the bottom 95% than we do with our neofeudal technocrat/ managerial overlords.

This unifying class consciousness would threaten the wealth, power and perquisites of the neofeudal technocrat/ managerial class, so they had to undermine an economic awareness of class.

They found the perfect weapon in identity politics and political correctness.What better way to fragment the working class than to carve it into cultural subclasses that could be manipulated into declaring war on each other?

What better way to mask the collapse of working class political agency than to distract the bottom 95% with fake-Progressive double-speak about "empowerment," "safe spaces" and "micro-aggression"?

The heart of the Great Con of identity politics and political correctness is a tragic irony: the more wealth, income and power that slip through the fingers of the bottom 95%, the more their overlords rely on social "empowerment," as if a "safe space" on campus is a substitute for real political and economic agency.

That's the Great Con of political correctness: using worthless speech acts about empowerment to distract the working class from its disempowerment in the real world. No amount of "safe space" and happy talk about empowerment can replace meaningful opportunities for economic security and advancement--precisely what is abundant for the protected technocrat/ managerial class and scarce for the unprotected 95% that's been sold down the river.

The propaganda beauty of class-consciousness-destroying political correctness is its deceptive claim of "progressive." If you set out to design the perfect tool to enforced neofeudalism (the political and economic dominance of the protected few at the expense of the exploited many), you'd choose an Orwellian fake-Progressive agenda of cultural fragmentation and conflict that undermines any class consciousness of shared economic disempowerment.

This is why the protected technocrat/ managerial class is freaking out about Trump's victory: the inchoate sense that the few have profited at the expense of the many is an expression of an emergent class consciousness that has the potential to threaten the neofeudal dominance of the New Nobility and its self-serving technocrat/ managerial class.

So when the protected class of well-paid institutional "progressives" speak darkly of "reversing 40 years of social progress," what they're really saying is we're terrified that the bottom 95% might be waking up to our Great Con of identity politics and political correctness.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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The Pressing Problem Nobody Dares Discuss

Perceptions may well change when the global illusions of solvency and "growth" collapse in a heap.

The list of pundits jostling for air time to add their two cents to discussions of hot-button issues such as immigration is endless. The airwaves and social media are overflowing with people wanting to comment on hot-button social issues, but when it comes to the the one truly critical dynamic that will shape the future--everyone's strangely silent.

The reason nobody dares address this problem is that it has no solution within the current mode of production, i.e. the status quo. The problem is an oversupply of labor.

One of the key takeaways from historian Peter Turchin's new book Ages of Discord is that real wages stagnate or decline in periods of labor oversupply and rise in periods of labor shortages.

This is common sense: the price/value of everything is ultimately set by the dynamics of supply and demand: the price/value of anything that is overly abundant drops. Or put another way: if demand is outstripped by supply, prices decline as long as there is surplus supply.

If supply continues to exceed demand by a wide margin, price can drop to near-zero. Consider the cost of telephony bandwidth. With the advent of fiber optics, the quantity of bandwidth available globally for telephony far exceeded demand, and the cost of bandwidth fell to pennies.

What generates an oversupply of labor? David Hackett Fischer discussed the core demographic dynamic in The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History: as labor productivity/land under production increases, food supplies increase. This increase supports a higher birth rate /population, and eventually the population of workers swells to the point that the supply of labor exceeds the demand for labor by employers.

Once the available productive land is under cultivation, the surplus population is pushed onto marginal lands that cannot reliably sustain high yields. The net results are famines and food shortages as crop failures on marginal lands are inevitable.

With labor in permanent surplus, wages stagnate or decline, and the result is a generalized immiseration of the laboring class that eventually leads to instability/upheaval.

In the current era, Turchin identifies three sources of surplus labor: the increase in population from birth rates above replacement levels; immigration and the mass movement of women into the work force after 1970.

Each of these demographic sources added tens of millions of laborers to the work force.

If we set aside the many emotions generated by immigration and just consider statistics, we find that the U.S. added almost 14 million new immigrants in the decade 2000-2010. A Record-Setting Decade of Immigration: 2000-2010.

In periods of strong job growth, demand from employers is high enough to absorb the added supply of labor from native population growth and immigration. In periods of stagnant job growth, immigration adds to the oversupply of native labor from population expansion.

Common sense suggests high immigration becomes an economic issue when job growth no longer absorbs net native population expansion and the influx of immigrants.

The fourth dynamic generating labor supply/demand imbalances is automation.Though automation has been a dynamic force reducing the demand for human labor for hundreds of years, the pace has increased as software and robotics are now increasingly replacing higher-skill workers.

The widespread quasi-religious faith that technology "always creates more jobs than it destroys" is misplaced. As I explain in my books Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform and A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology & Creating Jobs for All, this was true in the first three industrial revolutions but not in the current Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

As software eats the world, it eats higher-level skills that were once immune to automation. This means that the strategy that worked for 200 years--moving up the skill-value chain to tasks that could not be profitably automated--no longer works.

Few conventional economists/pundits understand this, or are willing to confess that the problem of permanent labor surplus cannot be solved by status quo policy tweaks. As I explain in my book, guaranteed minimum income is no solution--humans need the purpose, meaning and goals provided by meaningful work.

This why my book is subtitled The Future Belongs to Work That Is Meaningful.

If you still doubt labor is in permanent oversupply, please glance at these charts of the labor participation rate and the civilian employment/population ratio.

Over 90 million adults (out of a total population of 317 million) are counted as "not in the labor force," i.e. not working or seeking work due to disability, being in school, domestic duties, early retirement, etc.

The percentage of the population working or seeking work has fallen significantly.

There is a basic structural problem with supporting 100+ million non-employed adults. The economy has to be productive and profitable enough to support this vast populace without relying on debt, which is as we all know borrowing from future workers and taxpayers to fund consumption today.

Given the vast expansion of public and private debt since 2008, it's clear that we are not supporting the populace out of cash flow, so to speak; we're borrowing trillions of dollars from future workers/ taxpayers to generate the temporary illusion of solvency.

We need a new mode of production to generate meaningful work for all, and I've done my best to lay out a systemic solution. Right now this solution seems "crazy" to the conventional mindset, but perceptions may well change when the global illusions of solvency and "growth" collapse in a heap.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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Thank you, Michael S. ($10/month), for your outrageously generous subscription to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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Now Is the Winter of our Discontent: Our Era of Rising Discord

It becomes increasingly difficult to believe central planning policy tweaks can ensure a permanent extension of cooperation and prosperity.

Mao Zedong supposedly said, "There is great disorder under the Heavens and the situation is excellent." For those seeking to replace the existing social and economic order, chaos is a good first step.

Those with a stake in the system decaying into disorder feel differently: for them, disorder is threatening and frightening.

Do we control the slide into disorder and the emergence of a new order? The short answer is no: the forces at work are systemic and structural, and not controllable with the usual political/economic tools.

Historian Peter Turchin explores historical cycles of social disintegration and integration in his new book Ages of Discord.

Turchin proposes a model of rising discord that eventually leads to a new cycle of cooperation and compares the expected result with historical data. He finds 25-year cycles that combine into roughly 50-year cycles, comparable (though not identical with) Kondratieff's proposed economic cycles (see chart below).

These 50-year cycles are part of longer 150 to 200-year cycles that move from cooperation through an age of discord and disintegration to a new era of cooperation.

This work draws upon his previous books, including War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, which I referenced in Following in Ancient Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Wealth Inequality (September 30, 2015) and The Lesson of Empires: Once Privilege Limits Social Mobility, Collapse Is Inevitable (April 18, 2016).

These long cycles parallel the cyclical analysis of David Hackett Fischer, whose masterwork The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History I've referenced many times over the years, most recently in We've Entered an Era of Rising Instability and Uncertainty (July 18, 2016).

Turchin's model identifies three primary forces in these cycles:

1. An over-supply of labor that suppresses real (inflation-adjusted) wages

2. An overproduction of essentially parasitic Elites

3. A deterioration in central state finances (over-indebtedness, decline in tax revenues, increase in state dependents, fiscal burdens of war, etc.)

These combine to influence the broader social mood, which is characterized in eras of discord by fragmented loyalty to self-serving special interests (disintegration) and in eras of cooperation by a desire and willingness to cooperate and compromise for the good of the entire society (integration).

Rising discord can be quantified in a Political Stress Index. Do we find evidence of Turchin's disintegrative forces in the present era?

1. Stagnating real wages due to oversupply of labor: check.

2. Overproduction of parasitic Elites: check.

3. Deterioration in central state finances: check.

Is it any wonder that political stress, however you want to measure it, is rising?

Cycles are the result of the interaction of complex, non-linear dynamics, and so they are not entirely predictable in terms of pinpointing the exact moment of crisis or the outcome of a systemic crisis.

If we study Turchin's model and Fischer's work on Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe central planning policy tweaks can ensure a permanent extension of cooperation and prosperity.

Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

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The New Nobility Uses Political Correctness to Fragment the Precariats

Combine identity politics with political correctness, and the New Nobility/Oligarchy can laugh their way to the bank while their pawn-serfs fight over how many politically correct angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I have long held that our economy is, stripped of propaganda, nothing but an updated version of feudalism, i.e. neofeudal: a vast class of precarious laborers (i.e. precariats--precarious proletariats) who own little to no wealth-producing capital ruled by a New Nobility/Oligarchy that owns the vast majority of wealth-producing capital and control of the political system.

I explained this structure in America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014),Neofeudalism 101: Strip-Mining the Upper Middle Class (April 8, 2015) and The Class War Has Already Started (November 14, 2015).

In the Marxist analysis, there are only three classes: those who must sell their labor to earn a livelihood, those who earn their livelihood from owning wealth-generating capital, and the dispossessed/ marginalized who are dependent on the state (bread and circuses) or who scrape out a living on the margins of the lawful economy.

In this view, there is no meaningful class difference between the well-paid liberal technocrat with the $1 million (mortgaged) house on the Left/Right Coast and the rural conservative "deplorable" wage earner. Both must sell their labor and neither earns a livelihood from wealth-generating capital.

If we extend this analysis, we find that the entire self-described "middle class" is in fact nothing but the better paid slice of the working class, i.e. the class who must sell their labor to pay their rent/mortgage, buy food, etc.

Both are precarious, but not equally so. The well-paid technocrat believes his skills will protect him from unemployment, and he is equally confident that the "wealth" in his mortgaged house and stocks/bonds 401K retirement account is secure and permanent.

He feels superior to the "deplorable" wage earner, but this superiority is contingent on 1) asset bubbles never popping (ahem, which they always do, eventually; 2) software that's eating the world will not eat his job or the premium he is currently being paid, and 3) the skills he currently has won't become over-supplied as the global work force expands into the sectors that require high levels of education.

So what inhibits the awareness of shared class membership and interests? Two dynamics come to mind: the liberal/conservative ideological divide, and the politically correct speech acts that differentiate the two.

The urban liberal technocrat feels morally superior to the "deplorable" wage earner because he 1) considers himself a "winner" and the "deplorable" a loser and 2) he has mastered the politically correct speech acts that signify his superior "progressive" status.

There are two ironies in this presumed superiority:

1. The urban liberal technocrat is one credit/asset crash and one pink slip away from a rapid and catastrophic decline in living standards to "loser" status

2. Making politically correct speech acts the defining factor in establishing moral and political superiority depreciates the "difficult" (costly) act of actually behaving morally with the "easy" (cheap) act of mouthing sanctimonious politically correct signifier phrases.

Anyone can repeat politically correct signifier phrases; it takes no effort, risk, commitment or sacrifice. Actually acting in a sustained, coherent, morally superior fashion takes real effort, risk, commitment and sacrifice, and results in a healthy sense of humility, for no human can be saintly all the time.

The problem with acting in a sustained, coherent, morally superior fashion is that you won't get public credit for being a morally superior "winner." Acting in accordance with high moral standards is a private compact one makes with oneself; it is not a public display broadcast with the intent of establishing "progressive" political correct credentials.

This elevation of "cheap" and "easy" politically correct speech acts depreciates moral behavior to zero and enables the media-savvy Nobility to effortlessly divide and conquer the laboring class. In effect, the liberal technocrat laboring class submits to its own exploitation because our Nobility uses politically correct phrases in their public utterances.

One of the oldest control techniques is divide and conquer, and political correctness is an incredibly cheap and effective way to fragment the laboring class into subclasses who have been manipulated into declaring war on each other.

Combine identity politics with political correctness, and the New Nobility/Oligarchy can laugh their way to the bank while their pawn-serfs fight over how many politically correct angels can dance on the head of a pin.

As noted above, the class war started long before Trump won the election. This Class War is illustrated by this chart: a tiny financial-political Elite (the top 1/10th of 1%) now own as much wealth as the bottom 90%:

The absurd elevation of politically correct speech acts that anyone in the New Nobility can utter with practiced ease has a curiously profitable result for the New Nobility: the urban liberal Precariat willingly embraces his/her servitude and despises his/her fellow Precariats, thereby serving the interests of the New Nobility while fragmenting the only truly progressive class identity.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Greg C. ($5/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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