Entertainment as a Business Strategy Trends Shaping U.S. Corporations

Turchin's concept of a counter-elite is noteworthy. The archetype would be Julius Caesar or Robespierre—successful rebels who degraded and deposed a dormant patrician regime. In our own day, Donald Trump symbolized the "throbbing middle finger in the face of America's ruling class," as Turchin put it. That phrase comes from Tucker Carlson's 2018 book Ship of Fools, which is essentially an account of all of the elite mistakes that led to Donald Trump's election. Turchin considers Carlson to be "a very dangerous man". Though the Trump administration failed, the counter-elite insurgency has many supporters and will continue under the leadership of Tucker Carlson and others. Turchin's book was published before Rupert Murdoch removed Carlson from Fox News, but Carlson's new Twitter platform, which is more popular than ever, indicates that Turchin's diagnosis is correct. If Trump returns to the White House, or if another president succeeds in deposing the American elite, Carlson's influence will be a major factor.Return to the Trump Administration. Steve Bannon, one of Trump's top aides, was a self-proclaimed Leninist. "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that is also my goal," Bannon famously declared. "I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today's establishment." Bannon and his followers (of whom he still has some) are not part of the Republican heritage established by Reagan and the two Bushes. They are revolutionary. In one clear manner, this should come as no surprise. America's founding myth is around a real revolution; the Tea Party, a populist, fiscally conservative movement founded in 2009, was conceptually inspired by the revolutionary spirit of 1776. But something different is brewing right now.

Enter Patrick Deneen's new book, Regime Change

It is allegedly a follow-up to his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, which rehashed several long-standing critiques of liberalism but made no political solutions. Regime Change blames liberalism for popular misery, similar to Turchin's observations. I'm torn about assigning blame. On the one hand, it appears that liberalism was designed to loosen or destroy attachments to places and people, as John Stuart Mill and others planned. Everyone from de Maistre forth has complained about this propensity. Liberalism, because of its ability to break down interpersonal relationships, includes the seeds of despotism.This concept was most famously advanced by Alexis de Tocqueville and has been investigated by others since the early nineteenth century. Deneen reminds us that J. S. Mill endorsed the concept of liberal dictatorship, believing that the majority of the population was fundamentally conservative and averse to the individual autonomy that a dictatorial elite would have to enforce. Contemporary liberals appear to have forgotten this: they will dismiss Deneen's reiteration of the same analysis, even though they would benefit the most from taking it seriously.On the other hand, I'm wondering if American social decay drew more attention to liberalism's atomising tendency. This is a subject worth considering because the societal collapse currently observed in the liberal West may also be found in clearly non-liberal countries such as Russia and China. So the true culprit could be modernity itself, or the type of rapid technical growth that liberalism cannot control or temper.

Whatever the case may be, Turchin and Deneen 

appear to concur with the new American revolutionaries that the American elite is obese, parasitic, and ineffective. And the insurgents agree that the elite's ever-increasing emphasis on personal liberty, unlimited economic freedom, market domination, and the notion of a borderless, globalized society are all self-serving and damaging ideas.However, unlike Bannonism-Leninism, Deneen's vision of deposing the American elite is founded on a broad intellectual framework. Regime Change revives Aristotle's political study of the Many and the Few, urging the balance of opposing class interests within a "mixed constitution". The political proposals all boil down to replacing a self-serving and ham-fisted elite with one that shares the qualities of the middle and working classes, such as a desire for stability, loyalty to family and religion, localism, patriotism, and so on. Deneen defines this as "the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism". Elites will scoff at the term for no apparent reason. Something similar to Deneen's vision occurred in America when the Gilded Age of the robber barons gave way to the New Deal, causing many elites to fade into obscurity and a new middle class to emerge—a shift that Peter Turchin also sees as one possible path out of the current issue.

But that's an extraordinarily tranquil example

More common in human history would be outright civil war, in which one group of elites kills another, or mass executions and exiles, such as those at the end of the Roman Republic, the Glorious Revolution in England, or the French revolutionary Terror. Deneen fears and condemns violence, but Turchin emphasizes that civil war is a serious possibility.Despite historical precedence, I feel that in this age of intellectual paralysis and tiredness, civil war is unlikely to occur. Furthermore, the current non-aristocratic elite, unconnected to any particular location and gaining power through the manipulation of narratives and abstract concepts, would be difficult to track down and eradicate. However, they may be defeated, not by a new political alliance, but by the very market forces and long-term trends in which they formerly had so much faith.