To understand why Donald Trump became the forty-fifth president of the United States, we should also pay less attention to his personal qualities and maneuvers and more to the deep social forces that propelled him to the top. Trump was like a small boat caught on the crest of a mighty tidal wave. 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….

[First, by 2016] a large proportion of Americans who felt left behind voted for an unlikely candidate—a billionaire. For many of them, this was not so much an endorsement of Trump as an expression of their discontent, shading into rage, against the ruling class.

Second, by 2016, the elite overproduction game had reached a bifurcation point where the rules of conduct in political campaigns had been tossed to the wind.

Excerpt from End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin, Penguin Random House, New York, USA, 2023 (pp. 13-14).

Footnotes

Elite Overproduction occurs when the number of elites among the top One Percent far exceeds the number of available power positions.

Popular Immiseration occurs when workers face years of wage stagnation and decline while the rich get richer. In the USA, “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdose spiked among the noncollege-educated during the period 2000 to 2016.

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Peter Turchin is a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, a research associate at the University of Oxford, and an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut. Trained as a theoretical biologist, he is now working in the field of historical social science that he and his colleagues call cliodynamics. Currently, his main research effort is directed at coordinating CrisisDB, a massive historical database of societies sliding into crisis—and then emerging from it. His books include Ultrasociety (2016) and Ages of Discord (2016).