Peter Schwartz

Cities are hubs for growth and innovation, but stereotypes of urban decay and depravity have long been red meat for Republicans. Right-wing populism in the United States is rooted in the antagonism of rural voters to cities, which they almost uniformly view as liberal havens for unhoused people, criminals, and deviants. In 2020, 65% of rural voters voted for Donald Trump, according to the Pew Research Center.

The directing of anger and fear toward cities dates to President Ronald Reagan’s conjuring of an image of “welfare queens” who own Cadillacs. Trump has disparaged cities as “disgusting” places “infested” with crime, rodents, and political enemies he has characterized as “vermin.”

Rural and working-class voters — dispossessed and looking for those at fault — are not voting for their own interests when they embrace the messaging of Trump and the Republican Party. Rather, they are voting against cities and everything cities represent. What is new in this urban-centered antipathy is the specific scorn reserved for educated and wealthy elites in cities.

In 2017, Trump claimed the greatest domestic threats don’t come from domestic terrorists but from “the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites.” That view appears to have resonated among the disaffected. From 2015 to 2023, for instance, the percentage of Republicans with “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education plunged from 56% to 19%, according to Gallup polling.

Some of this anger comes from anti-intellectual cultural currents and a broad suspicion of “experts” that is ingrained in populist movements. However, much of it has emerged from the perception that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and become the province of professional urban elites in the United States who are arrogant, entitled, and dismissive of their less-educated counterparts in the heartland.

Complexity scientist Peter Turchin, in his new book “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration,” looks at these populist-versus-elite and rural-versus-urban dynamics in our nation as it struggles to maintain its democratic institutions and avoid political violence and collapse. His historical research spotlights the impact of urban elites who enrich themselves and consolidate power via “parasitic” relations with other social classes.

Complex societies across thousands of years have experienced recurring cycles of intense conflict and instability, driven by the same sets of forces, according to Turchin. When a society impoverishes its workers through stagnating and declining wages and overproduces its elites, generating a surplus of young people with advanced degrees, public trust crumbles. Institutional and legal norms collapse.

In these moments, a “counter-elite” emerges, made up of alienated parts of the elite surplus.

Under these conditions, Turchin tells us, nation-states will often descend into long periods of civil conflict between these competing groups of elites, leading to political violence, civil war and collapse. Consider the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution in China.

According to Turchin, the United States, following decades of economic prosperity that Americans shared, entered a “disintegrative” phase during the 1970s. At that time, a counter-elite group of right-wing businessmen, lawyers, and politicians — many from rural states — systematically began to shred the social contract between elites and everyday Americans that had been in place since the New Deal.

Throughout the next three decades — regardless of which political party was in power — economic and environmental regulations were loosened, taxes on the rich and on corporations were cut, companies moved factories overseas, union membership plunged, and real wages declined. The fruits of the labor of American workers increasingly became concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. The fabled American middle class hollowed out. A widening gap emerged between the rich and everyone else.

Turchin profiles counter-elite conservatives such as Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance, and Peter Thiel who use populist rhetoric that idealizes small-town life and demonizes cities as violent, decaying, depraved, multicultural hellholes governed by the graduates of elite schools.

Turchin only briefly discusses the political impact of climate change. However, he leaves no doubt that its destabilizing effects geopolitically have intensified conspiracy theory thinking and political divisions in the United States, accelerating the threat of civil conflict and political violence that the counter-elites and their supporters almost seem to hunger for.

Turchin cites the influence of the Heartland Institute, which undermines the science behind climate change. Climate denialism correlates closely with the ethnic nationalism, institutional distrust, and the propensity for political violence of Trump’s base of supporters.

Turchin’s belief that the United States will slide into authoritarianism and experience civil conflict — perhaps on a scale unprecedented since the Civil War — does not preclude less stark and disturbing outcomes. But these less extreme outcomes require elites to enact reforms that sacrifice their short-term interests for long-term benefits, such as what happened during the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

Unfortunately, these are sacrifices that we do not see ruling elites in the Democratic Party contemplating on a scale that could prevent a political crisis. And these are reforms that the Republican counter-elite absolutely do not favor because this would render them inconsequential.

Environmental sustainability is about adaptation. The capacity of elites in the United States to bridge the gap between them and the masses who live outside cities also calls for adaptive skills. Without adaptation, the sustainability, not merely of our environment but of this privileged class itself, is doubtful.

Peter Schwartz writes at the broad intersection of philosophy, politics, history, and religion. He publishes the Wikidworld newsletter on Substack.