A politics for a disintegrating
world.
The western democracies face a time of upheaval that could lead to breakdown and chaos. But only if we let it.
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| Neo-fascists at Trafalgar Square |
Across much of the democratic world, the neo-fascist far
right is, once more, ascendant. Riots and mass-scale marches in England,
Northern Ireland, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Portugal and
Poland have pursued an identical agenda: to transform concern about housing
shortages into a far-right political agenda with immigrants as a ready-made
scapegoat.
Most of those who marched are not fascists. Nevertheless,
large numbers of ill-informed people are being led down a dangerous path that
has been trodden too many times before. The housing-versus-immigrants formula
has appeared simultaneously across many democratic nations, replacing the
previous anti-transgender agenda that failed to get sufficient traction. The
switch from lavatories to houses, sex to migrants, happened with remarkable
synchronicity across many countries.
The phenomenon has appeared many times in the past century,
waning and waxing with the fortunes of the time. It fell when economic and
political conditions produced a sense of communal cohesion and rose again when
things turned sour and concord turned into fragmentation. When incomes were
rising in the postwar era of the welfare state, the market for far-right
populism retreated, only to advance again in our own time. The inflection point
can be traced to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Reagan-Thatcher
“conservative revolution” wound back the welfare state, decreased the shares of
income and wealth going to wage-earners and increased the share going to the
owners of capital. We can see that splintering of social cohesion in international
data on the sense of grievance held by large majorities of people in western
democracies.
The Edelman Trust Barometer tracks measures of social
cohesion with annual surveys of (currently) 28 nations. It finds across the
most developed democracies a pervasive, unfocused sense of grievance – a sense
of betrayal – against business, government and the wealthy. This sort of
grievance is much less visible in nations that are less developed and more
authoritarian.
It's roughly in line with a sense of declining hope for the
future. For generations, it was reasonably assumed that someone’s children
would have a better, more satisfying and more prosperous life than they did.
That assumption has now been reversed, particularly in the richest democracies.
Two factors drive a sense of pessimism and grievance: an
actual decline in living standards and changes in the gap between you and those
at the top. Often, the perception of unfairness is more powerful than an actual
decline in income and wealth.
The biggest lie of all
Across the developed world, the neoliberal era which began
in 1980 with the Reagan/Thatcher “conservative revolution” delivered both. The
agenda involved waves of anti-union legislation, tax cuts for the rich,
restrictions on welfare and – above all – a small-government ideology of
rampant privatisation and the near-religious faith that the private for-profit
sector could do almost anything better than the public sector. This was the era
of trickle-down “supply-side” economics: the idea that money given to the
wealthiest would be invested in new productive capacity which would, in turn,
boost employment and incomes for those lower down. It was perhaps never
intended to succeed in this, but it certainly delivered massive wealth to the
top echelons. Nowhere was that more pronounced than in the United States, but
the pattern was repeated across most developed countries.
In Britain and Germany, the share of national income going
to the bottom half of society has fallen by around a quarter since the
beginning of the conservative revolution; in the US, it almost halved.
But when measuring inequality, income is not the main game.
Wealth is.
Across the democracies, the share of income going to the
bottom 50% presents a very different impression from the distribution of
wealth. Ireland and Sweden both have a relatively high proportion of income
going to the least-prosperous half. But these people have negative wealth: they
owe more than they own. All these figures show that very large numbers of
people across the world’s richest countries live from one pay-packet to the
next, never managing to save or to acquire assets. They are likely to
experience a sense of precariousness: constant worry about money. For hundreds
of millions in the world’s richest countries, facing a big bill is a disaster
and losing a job is a catastrophe.
All of this can be seen in its primal form in the United
States, where the neoliberal agenda has been pursued with a relentless
fortitude few other countries have managed. So we can detect, in the American
experience, the logical outcome of the path that other democracies have also
taken. If the rest of us don’t turn back now, this is where we will all go.
We’re more than halfway there already.
How wage suppression subverts
democracy
A large body of research confirms the connection between
low-wage work and political alienation. A Swiss study
found low wages were a profound threat to liberal democratic systems.
“Repeated low-wage work experiences substantially decrease
workers’ satisfaction with democracy,” the researcher wrote. “This makes sense,
as low political efficacy [the ability to effect change] can be regarded as a
necessary condition for low political trust. As low-wage work experiences
accumulate over time, these sceptics develop a strong form of political
alienating, eroding their perceived legitimacy of the political system.”
Other studies have shown the links between people’s
perceptions of their status
and voter turnout, precarious employment
and political protest, income shocks
and voter behaviour, inequality and political trust,
and the effect
of unemployment on electoral participation.
The perception of inequality in the economic and
social system can be to be more significant in political
alienation than the actual
amount people are earning. In the US, for instance, the proportion of income
and wealth going to people in the bottom
half of society have remained low, but have risen as the economy has grown. But
the blatant difference between the bulk of the population and those right at
the top has corroded social cohesion to a breaking point.
And those in the
bottom 25% own nothing of significance or have negative wealth, owing more than
they own.
The political
alienation that results from low wages and accurately-perceived unfairness is
the most obvious cause of the fracturing of American society. None of Donald
Trump’s ideas is capable of producing the fairer, richer, better nation he
promised. But so many millions of Americans, understanding that
politics-as-usual were not working, put him back into the White House on the
off-chance that blowing the place apart might produce something better. What
did they have to lose?.
There is a clear relationship between low income and support
for Trump. This map shows median household income by state. The richer states
(mostly on the west and north-east coasts, plus Illinois, Colorado and Utah)
are dark blue and purple; the poorer states (in the south, the midwest ands the
plains states) are in brown and yellow.
And here’s a map showing the distribution of the Trump vote.
With few exceptions, the rich states voted for Harris and the poor states voted
for Trump.
According to the polls, if a general election was held in
Britain now, Reform UK would be by far the biggest party and Nigel Farage would
be Prime Minister. A multiple regression analysis by YouGov shows a probable
vote share for Reform UK across almost all constituencies. Again, areas with a
high vote for the right-wing populist insurgent is shown in blue and purple.
The distribution is clear. The Reform vote is almost
entirely confined to England and, to
limited extent, Wales. Although both of the traditional major parties
have suffered heavily, Reform’s new heartland is in the areas traditionally
dominated by Labor – the north, Midlands and East. This seat-by-seat analysis
provides far greater insight than the overall national figures.
And, as in the US, support for the right-wing insurgent
coincides with income and wealth. The poorest areas are in dark blue and
purple.
Other
polling shows that disappointment with both Labour and Conservative parties
over immigration and the state of the National Health Service are behind the
swing to Farage and Reform UK. But the watershed moment appears to have
occurred in April, during a bitter dispute over Labour’s plans to slash welfare
expenditure. Reform overtook Labor – and then kept going.
But the clearest example of the correlation of income with
right-wing populist support is seen in Germany. At the federal election in
February 2025, the second-biggest party was the neo-fascist
Alternative für Deutschland. AfD has now been classified
as extremist organisation by the German domestic intelligence agency, which found
the “ethnicity-and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates
within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order.”
Since then, AfD has become even more popular, with the
Politico polling
average (in late September 2025) showing it to have more support than the
centre-right CDU/CSU (26% to 25%) and far ahead of the Social Democrats (14%).
And again, the support for the far-right insurgent
correlates with areas of low income. Both the AfD heartland and the lowest
incomes are in the former East Germany. Another relevant factor is that until
re-unification in 1990, the only experience those eastern states had of
democracy was the 14 years of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933.
Since 1990, many federal policies have been aimed at
reducing or eliminating that difference. Some have partially worked: the wage
gap is less than it was. But other issues persist, including the low number of
East Germans in senior positions within the federal government. The sense of
being left out of national life, of being second-class citizens, remains
pervasive and dangerous.
That deep sense of dissatisfaction is caught in surveys
measuring people’s self-reported satisfaction with their lives. The split is
clear: those in the poor East are substantially more dissatisfied than those in
the richer West.
The mechanism of democratic breakdown
Societies go through recurring stages of integration and
disintegration, peace and conflict. A network of political scientists, calling
their field Cliodymanics
after the muse of history, have taken a statistical approach to the repeating
patterns of the past millennium, attempting to identify the common factors that
lead to social and political transformation. The two most significant elements,
they conclude, are “elite overproduction” and “popular immiseration”: too many
at the top taking too much and chasing too few positions of power; and the
great mass of the people sinking further and further into misery, alienation
and anger.
In his book End Times: Elites, Couter-Elites and the Path
to Political Disintegration, a complexity scientist, Professor Peter
Turchin, predicts that the new phase of disintegration and turmoil is already
upon us.
Popular immiseration is easily observed, and glaringly
visible in far too many western democracies. Elite overproduction is less
obvious. It is perhaps clearest in the statistics for unemployed university
graduates. Across the European Union, 13.3% of recent tertiary graduates were
out of work in 2011, but the pain was not evenly spread. In Italy, almost a
quarter were out of work; in France, almost one in five. This does not take
into account those working part-time or in jobs below their levels of qualification
and expectation.
It's a betrayal of the promise that education is the key to
a good, well-paid job and a satisfying life. Even more remarkable is that
general unemployment rates for this age group – 20 to 34 – are lower than those
for graduates.
In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported
that 5% of recent American graduates are unemployed and their situation is
deteriorating faster than for those without degrees.
“These disparities suggest that the traditional premium
associated with higher education—at least for quickly landing a job—may be
weakening,” the bureau reported. “Recent graduates are finding themselves in an
increasingly competitive environment where their educational credentials don’t
guarantee the same level of employment security they once did.”
Regardless of qualification, the rates of general youth
unemployment throughout the western democracies remains a corrosive issue. And
education is not the way up the social ladder that it once was.
For most of the past 250 years – at least since the start of
the industrial and agrarian revolutions – parents have had the reasonable
expectation that their children would have more prosperous and fulfilling
lives, and would live longer, than they did. That expectation was based on the
implicit promise that a rising economic tide would lift all boats, that
education was the key to advancement, and that personal effort paid dividends.
That promise has now been comprehensively broken. Economies
are still rising, but only the boats of the few are being lifted. So too is the
promise that education leads to success. Even life expectancy in high-income
countries has been going backwards
for the first time in living memory. Throughout many of the liberal
democracies, access to housing is at crisis levels, giving the far-right a
potent campaign issue with which to demonise immigrants and asylum seekers. And
on top of all that are the twin threats of climate change and artificial
intelligence, endangering the future of work and of life itself.
All of these issues affect the young most of all. They will
have to deal with the world that heedless commerce, globalisation and
financialisation are bequeathing to them; and in that lies both the danger and
the potential salvation of the democratic world. For as far ahead as they can
see, the future holds little assurance other than a precarious existence. They
are, in the idiom of sociology and political science, the “precariat”. We
didn’t have a name for that before: now we do.
Now, the choice
Young people, particularly the educated and idealistic
young, are commonly drivers of positive social and political change. “History,”
writes the historian and complexity scientist Peter Turchin, “tells us that
the precariat (the frustrated elite
aspirant class) is the most dangerous class for social stability.
Overproduction of youth with advanced degrees has been the most significant
factor in driving societal upheavals, from the revolutions of 1848 to the Arab
Spring of 2011.”
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| In Bangladesh, student protests ousted a dictator |
These young people do not fall for the smooth lies of
populists like Trump and Farage. But they also reject the politics-as-usual of
the entrenched traditional parties and power elites. In the young, as so often
before, lies our best hope for a better future.
Turchin and his network have identified elite overproduction
and popular immiseration as the fundamental drivers of social and political
disintegration. But a phase of disintegration can produce many possible
outcomes, from complete state breakdown and civil war, to widespread riots and
violence, to peaceful reform and reconciliation. That, now, is the choice we
all face.
Full state breakdown and civil war are unlikely in the
western democracies, but by no means impossible. Even in the United States, the
most precarious of the leading democracies, the institutions of state, though
more fragile than at any time in a century, remain in place. Nevertheless, a
recent YouGov
poll reported that 12% of respondents thought a new civil war was very
likely, and 28% somewhat likely.
But massive rioting, widespread lethal violence and social
breakdown in affected areas of a country – particularly the US – is far more
probable. That country, and many others, have been there before. This time, it
could be worse. To the list we can add Germany, France and Britain.
But history also shows that neither of these destructive
outcomes is inevitable. There are also examples of nations which navigate their
way through the crisis into a newer, fairer and enduring future.
The key is whether those in established positions of
economic and political power – the one per cent – have the wisdom to understand
that their own futures depend on giving up some of that power, so the rest can
share less unequally in the benefits of their civilisation. It will be better
for everyone, especially the rich, to reconcile and reconstruct.
It will require bargaining power to be returned to working
people, reversing the long decline of union membership and repealing four
decades of repressive industrial relations legislation. Wages are the indispensable
element in repairing the ravages of economic and social inequality.
But that path requires far-sighted wisdom and humility from
people who seldom display such qualities. The lesson of history is that those
in power who fail to understand the precariousness of their position can lose
everything, even their lives.