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On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy’s vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.

The term properly refers to a specific kind of American elite, mostly from the Northeast, mostly high-church Protestants, concentrated in a few cities (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, plus some Midwestern and Californian outposts), generally associated with the Republican Party (with occasional defectors like F.D.R.), who dominated a particular set of fields (academia, finance, foreign policy) and shared the code of service and piety and manners that defined the elder Bush’s career.

Their importance rested, to borrow from a WASP acquaintance’s email this week, on being “primus inter pares” — first among equals, with a particular kind of power in a particular set of institutions, and an ability to set a tone for the American upper class that was adopted by other groups when they ascended.

And ascend they often did, because the older American system was both hierarchical and permeable, with room for actual merit even without a meritocratic organizing theory.

Those advancing groups included non-Anglo-Saxons, and eventually non-Protestants and non-whites.

their example suggested that an aristocratic spirit was transferable to a more diverse elite, that there could be Catholic and African-American and Jewish aristocrats — like, say, the family that has long stewarded this newspaper — who could adopt the WASP establishment’s upper-class virtues without the ethnic and religious chauvinism.

The way of the “best and the brightest” at the dawn of the technocratic era and the “smartest guys in the room” decades later, the way of the arsonists of late-2000s Wall Street and the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley.

This was meritocracy, the system that we now take for granted. And for several reasons it didn’t work as planned

then the WASPs themselves decided to dissolve their own aristocracy, and transform their once-Protestant universities into a secular mass-opportunity system — a more democratic way of education, in which anyone with enough talent could climb the ladder, and personal achievement and technical expertise would be prized above all else.

instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.

Second, the meritocratic elite inevitably tends back toward aristocracy, because any definition of “merit” you choose will be easier for the children of these self-segregated meritocrats to achieve.

But even as it restratifies society, the meritocratic order also insists that everything its high-achievers have is justly earned. “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple,”

This spirit discourages inherited responsibility and cultural stewardship; it brushes away the disciplines of duty; it makes the past seem irrelevant, because everyone is supposed to come from the same nowhere and rule based on technique alone

As a consequence, meritocrats are often educated to be bad leaders, and bad people, in a very specific way — a way of arrogant intelligence unmoored from historical experience, ambition untempered by self-sacrifice.

First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders

Diversity, despite what many liberals want to think, does not provide a solution to this problem

nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy’s ruthless solipsism. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes or the slipping-from-grace Sheryl Sandberg

I don’t want to bring back the WASPs; if I had the magic wand to conjure a different elite, it would be a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile. (Hey, you asked.

But I do want to raise the possibility that an aristocracy that knows itself to be one might be more clearsighted and effective than an aristocracy that doesn’t, and that the WASPs had at least one clear advantage over their presently-floundering successors: They knew who and what they were

you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.

we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it

However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms. You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and

you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions.

you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity from high-achieving Asians — with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it’s discriminating

certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion

the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive

Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.

The goal would have been to keep piety and discipline embedded in the culture of a place like Harvard, rather than the mix of performative self-righteousness and raw ambition that replaced them.

for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended

“Those who are mourning the passing of the old Establishment should mourn its many failures, too,” he writes. Which is fair enough: The old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, it had failures aplenty

And as an American today, you don’t have to miss everything about the WASPs, or particularly like their remaining heirs, to feel nostalgic for their competence

long with the establishment failure in Vietnam, which hastened the collapse of the old elite’s authority, there was also a loss of religious faith and cultural confidence, and a belief among the last generation of true WASPs that the emerging secular meritocracy would be morally and intellectually superior to their own style of elite

the WASP ascendancy did not simply fall; it pre-emptively dissolved itself.

its virtues were to some extent transferable to a more diverse society: The establishment had always been somewhat permeable to arrivistes,

in our era their admirable influence is still felt in figures as different as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney

In such a world the establishment would have still admitted more blacks, Jews, Catholics and Hispanics (and more women) to its ranks … but it would have done so as a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy, rather than under the pseudo-democratic auspices of the SAT and the high school resume and the dubious ideal of “merit.”

At the same time it would have retained both its historic religious faith (instead of exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism) and its more self-denying culture (instead of letting all that wash away in the flood of boomer-era emotivism).

So as an American in the old dispensation, you didn’t have to like the establishment — and certainly its members were often eminently hateable — to prefer their leadership to many of the possible alternatives

it’s to look forward, and to suggest that our current elite might someday be reformed — or simply replaced — through the imitation of the old establishment's more pious and aristocratic spirit.

Right now, almost all the discussion of our meritocracy’s vices assumes the system’s basic post-WASP premises, and hopes that either more inclusion (the pro-diversity left’s fixation) or a greater emphasis on academic merit (the anti-affirmative right’s hobbyhorse) will cure our establishment’s all-too-apparent ills.

a more radical theory of the case, one proposed by Helen Andrews in a 2016 Hedgehog Review essay on meritocracy and its discontents:

The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy — so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label

By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not

they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

If we would learn from their lost successes in our own era of misrule, reconsidering this idea — that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly — might be a fruitful place to start.

Not only had Charles placed Sweden in a calamitous situation internationally but he had left behind him a legacy of domestic troubles. His usurpation of the throne had meant not only the expulsion of a Roman Catholic sovereign whose rule seemed to threaten Sweden’s Lutheranism but also the defeat of the aristocratic constitutionalism of the Council of State, and it had been followed by the execution of five leading members of the high aristocracy.

Charles IX had intervened in Russia to prevent the Poles from placing their own candidate on the Russian throne;

The king observed the spirit of the charter. The aristocracy found in Gustav a king favourable to their interests. He enlisted the nobility in the service of the state and thus provided them with numerous economic benefits.

The first decade of the reign, therefore, saw the creation of the Supreme Court (1614) and the establishment of the Treasury and the Chancery as permanent administrative boards (1618), and by the end of the reign an Admiralty and a War Office had been created—each presided over by one of the great officers of state.

And in the 1620s a thorough reform professionalized local government and placed it securely under the control of the crown. The Council of State became, for the first time, a permanent organ of government able to assume charge of affairs while the king was fighting overseas.

Thus, the fate of Europe was bound up with what happened in Livonia or Prussia. Protestant Europe was slow to appreciate the connection, but as the Protestant cause plunged to disaster in Germany, its leaders increasingly turned their eyes to Gustav as a possible saviour.

The disastrous defeat (1626) of Christian IV of Denmark, who had intervened in Germany without such an assurance, justified his caution, but it also made Swedish intervention inevitable.

Gustav landed in Germany without allies. Whatever the feelings of the Protestant populations, the Protestant princes resented Swedish interference, and the refusal of George William of Brandenburg to cooperate with the Swedes thwarted Gustav’s attempts to save Magdeburg from capture and sack at the hands of Tilly’s armies. In September John George of Saxony, provoked by violations of his neutrality, formally allied himself with Sweden.

the old security had become the new indemnity. Many Germans feared, and some Swedish diplomats now believed, that a final settlement must probably entail the deposition of the German emperor Ferdinand II and the election of Gustav as emperor in his place. It was a solution he must certainly have contemplated, but there is no firm evidence of his attitude; probably he considered it only as a last resort. Certainly it would have alienated those German allies who had no wish to exchange a Habsburg domination for a Swedish one.

His death came at a moment when it had already begun to appear that the victory he believed to be essential to the stability of Germany and the security of Sweden might be more difficult to achieve than he had imagined. But he had lived long enough to deflect the course of German history. His intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, at a moment when the armies of the Habsburg emperor and the German princes of the Catholic League controlled almost the whole of Germany, ensured the survival of German Protestantism against the onslaughts of the Counter-Reformation.

By supporting the German princes against the emperor, Gustav Adolf defeated the attempts of the Habsburgs to make their imperial authority a reality and thus played a part in delaying the emergence of a united Germany until the 19th century.

Coleman and his team are completing a major revision of the SAT to be unveiled in January 2014 and launched in the spring of 2015. He wants the test to “propel” students toward deeper learning of real things

That means fewer abstruse vocabulary words (like “abstruse”) and essays that are based on documents so human graders can evaluate the correctness of their writers’ arguments, not just their style.

The U.S. rode to economic supremacy with the world’s highest share of young college grads, but now its percentage of graduates at the typical age of graduation is behind those of Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the U.K., the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says.

The message: Real life is messy. You’re not given five answers to choose from. And America shouldn’t depend on something resembling an IQ test to rake geniuses from the rubbish.

The SAT and its rival, the ACT, are part of the problem. Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a “wealth test.”

Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been two schools of thought about the merits of sorting students, as recounted in Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in a “natural aristocracy,” said that in Virginia all w

New Englander Henry Adams was less disdainful of the rubbish. He said Jefferson’s natural aristocracy was no better than regular old aristocracy: “I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited power.”

The SAT was launched in 1926 as a variant of an intelligence test used in World War I to place soldiers and sailors. Harvard adopted it in 1934.

The University of California long resisted using standardized tests but in 1968—swamped by more qualified applications than it could handle—began requiring applicants to submit SAT scores as a way to screen out lower achievers.

Admissions officers at about 850 four-year colleges now make standardized tests optional for some or all of their applicants

To be less cynical, the tests do stigmatize low scorers and distract people “from what they really need to do, which is mastering academic subjects in their high school,” says Wake Forest University sociologist Joseph Soares, whose school went SAT-optional in 2008.

the power of the first consul was so well established that there was no hope of intervening in France. Instead, the house of Orléans became reconciled with the elder branch of the Bourbon family. Even so, Louis-Philippe never took up arms to fight with émigré forces for the royalist cause against other Frenchmen

On November 25 he married Marie-Amélie, a daughter of King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria. About this time there was some suggestion that Louis-Philippe should join the English forces in the Peninsular War. Maria Carolina—who held the real power in Naples and whose sister Marie-Antoinette had been executed by the French Revolutionary government—had long backed the campaign against the Revolutionary armies and Napoleon. She certainly would have supported such a move by her son-in-law, but nothing came of it, probably because Louis XVIII again feared any activity that might further the Orleanist cause.

Louis-Philippe returned to France at the First Restoration (1814). Although Louis XVIII refused to grant Louis-Philippe the style of royal highness (later allowed to him by Charles X), the king did grant Louis-Philippe the dignities traditionally held by the head of his family. More important perhaps, Louis-Philippe regained possession of the family estates and forests that had not been sold after his own emigration and his father’s execution. During the Hundred Days (1815) he returned to England instead of following the court to Ghent.

Under the second Restoration the duc d’Orléans was a steady and more or less open adherent of the liberal opposition

when Louis-Philippe had become king and his eldest son, Ferdinand-Louis-Philippe, was heir to the royal domain, he could reserve the Orléans inheritance for his other sons instead of merging it with the crown lands.

In 1830 Charles X’s attempt to enforce repressive ordinances touched off a rebellion (July 27–30) that gave Louis-Philippe his long-awaited opportunity to gain power.

The revolution that brought Louis-Philippe to power constituted a victory for the upper bourgeoisie over the aristocracy. The new ruler was titled Louis-Philippe, king of the French, instead of Philip VII, king of France. He consolidated his power by steering a middle course between the right-wing extreme monarchists (the Legitimists) on the one side and the socialists and other republicans (including the Bonapartists) on the other. The July Monarchy, with its “Citizen King,” could never command the support of all the factions, however. Its opponents resorted to political intrigue, insurrection, and even assassination plots. In July 1835 an attempt on the king’s life by Giuseppe Fieschi resulted in the deaths of 18 people and the wounding of many more, but the royal family escaped injury. Throughout Louis-Philippe’s reign, it was said that “for shooting kings there is no close[d] season.”

before abdicating in favour of his 10-year-old grandson, Henri Dieudonné d’Artois, comte de Chambord. On August 7 the provisional government of deputies and peers present in Paris declared the throne vacant. Following the terminology of the Constitution of 1791, Louis-Philippe was on August 9 proclaimed “king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the people.” A modified version of the Charter of 1814 was issued, which the new king was obliged to accept.

The death of the popular duc d’Orléans in a carriage accident in July 1842 not only grieved Louis-Philippe very deeply but also seriously weakened the dynasty. The new heir to the throne, the duke’s son Philippe d’Orléans, comte de Paris, was an infant for whom a regency had to be prearranged.

The marriage (August 1832) of his daughter Marie-Louise to Queen Victoria’s uncle Leopold I, king of the Belgians, established an excellent relationship between Paris and London, almost foreshadowing the Entente Cordiale.

The British were finally alienated by Louis-Philippe’s policy on the “Spanish marriages.” In an attempt to revive the traditional family alliance between the French and Spanish Bourbons, he had at first wanted his sons Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, and Antoine, duc de Montpensier, to marry Spanish Queen Isabella II and her sister and heiress presumptive, the infanta Luisa Fernanda, respectively. The British objected to this obvious threat of French predominance in Spain, and in 1843 Louis-Philippe agreed that Isabella should marry neither Henri nor the British nominee, Prince Albert’s cousin Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, but rather some Spanish Bourbon instead.

French opposition to the regime had become much more embittered. The industrial and agricultural depression of 1846 aroused widespread popular discontent, and Louis-Philippe’s constant refusal of any electoral reform meant that many members of the lower middle class—from whom he might still have drawn support—remained without the vote. Finally, his narrow-minded conservatism and his unwillingness to seek any solution for pressing political and social problems drove many divergent interests into union against him.

The July Monarchy was but one casualty of the great revolutionary movement that swept through Europe in 1848. In any case, a change had come to seem unavoidable in France.

The July Monarchy was really an anachronism. To the French people—for whom, whether or not they favoured the institution, monarchy meant the splendours and absolutism of the ancien régime

In power Louis-Philippe strove to implement his desire to rule as well as to reign. The political difficulties with which he was faced revealed in him the weaknesses of an obstinate man; increasingly, his only response to crises was words and theories, and ultimately inaction lost him his crown.

The first objective led Spain to build up a naval force in the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) that preyed on Dutch shipping in the North Sea and, on the diplomatic front, to cultivate the friendship of James I of England and even to contemplate the restoration of Frederick V to the Palatinate and the marriage of Philip IV’s devoutly Roman Catholic sister to the heretic prince of Wales (later Charles I).

From 1630, when Sweden and France actively intervened in the war, Spain rapidly lost the initiative. The war was fought on a global scale

In the autumn of 1640 Olivares scraped together the last available troops and sent them against the Catalan rebels. Claris countered by transferring Catalan allegiance to the king of France, “as in the time of Charlemagne” (January 1641). French troops now entered Catalonia, and only after French forces withdrew with the renewed outbreak of the French civil wars (the Fronde) were the Castilians able to reconquer Catalonia (1652)

The revolt of Catalonia gave the Portuguese their opportunity. The lower classes and the clergy had always hated the Castilians, and the Portuguese aristocracy and the commercial classes—previously content with the patronage and the economic opportunities that the union with Spain had provided—had become dissatisfied during the preceding 20 years.

Rather than allow themselves to be sent to fight the Catalan rebels, the Portuguese nobility seized power in Lisbon and proclaimed the duque de Bragança as King John IV of Portugal (December 1640).

In 1643 the French king’s cousin, Louis II de Bourbon (the Great Condé), broke the Spanish tercios and their reputation for invincibility at the Battle of Rocroi in northeastern France.

When the emperor conceded French claims to Alsace and the Rhine bridgeheads, the “Spanish Road” to the Netherlands was irrevocably cut, and the close alliance between the Spanish and the Austrian branches of the house of Habsburg came to an end. With Portugal in revolt and Brazil no longer an issue between the Dutch and the Spaniards, Philip IV drew the only possible conclusion from this situation and rapidly came to terms with the United Provinces, recognizing their full independence

But Philip IV had not changed his basic policy. He wanted to have his hands free for a final effort against France, even after Catalonia had surrendered. Once again the temporary weakness of France during the Fronde confirmed the Spanish court in its disastrous military policy.

More important than these relatively minor territorial losses was the realization throughout Europe that Spain’s pretensions to hegemony had definitely and irremediably failed. The Spaniards themselves were slow to admit it. Philip IV had made concessions to France in order, once again, to have his hands free against the last unforgiven enemy, Portugal. There was no longer any rational basis for his hopes of success. All schemes for financial and tax reforms were still being blocked by vested interests, and the government again had declared bankruptcies in 1647 and 1653.

First and foremost, the climate was changing. Sound familiar? Medieval Europe benefitted from several centuries of warmer weather, which boosted crop yields, but by the 14th century, the world was entering the so-called Little Ice Age

As the population grew, increasingly marginal land was turned over to agriculture, with diminishing returns, resulting in lower yields per capita and pushing the population dangerously close to subsistence levels. This left little slack in the economy to absorb a significant shock, and the 14th century would soon bring one shock after another.

From AD 1000, Europe's population doubled or even tripled, and the economy became increasingly commercialized, underwritten by an increasingly sophisticated financial system, as new cities and towns emerged, universities were founded across the continent, and the magnificent Gothic cathedrals surpassed the Great Pyramid at Giza as the tallest man-made structures in the world.

Cooler and wetter weather depressed agricultural yields, at a time when there was already very little slack in the food supply. This contributed to a broader economic slowdown, as yields declined and prices rose, but it also brought Europe to the edge of famine.

beginning in 1311, Europe began to experience a series of crop failures across the continent in what became known as the Great Famine. Reaching a peak in northern Europe in 1315-1317, the Great Famine may have killed 5 to 10% of Europe's population

At the same time, Europe entered a prolonged period of heightened geopolitical conflict, during which a dizzying array of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and city-states waged innumerable wars, both large and small.

These conflicts inhibited trade between northern and southern Europe and between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, further slowing the European economy and incurring a massive fiscal burden that would soon ruin the European financial system and provoke uprisings in both France and England

Northern Italy was the heart of the financial system at this time, and a small number of very large Italian banks, often referred to as "super-companies," were lending huge sums of money across Europe

All available money was loaned out or tied up in investments, leaving the banks severely under-capitalized and vulnerable to insolvency in the event of a sudden large withdraw or a major default on their loans.

war broke out between England and France in 1294, prompting King Edward I to withdraw huge sums of money from the Riccardi of Lucca, approximately equivalent to several billion dollars today. The Riccardi simply did not have the money, and Edward seized whatever assets he could. Then, over the following decades, three more super banks, the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, all of Florence, were each ruined by successive English kings who refused to pay their debts.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, the cultural and epistemological bedrock of Medieval Europe, was facing the most significant legitimacy crisis in centuries

he King's men attempted to arrest the elderly Pope, inadvertently killing him. Shortly thereafter, in 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was chosen to be the next pope, and the papacy was relocated to Avignon, France. This understandably cast a long shadow over the Holy See, and the Avignon Popes were widely disliked and distrusted. The crisis only deepened in 1378 when a second pope was elected in Rome and a third pope was briefly elected in 1409 before all three were deposed in 1417.

We might compare this crisis of faith with the current legitimacy crisis of science in the United States. Like the scientific method, the Church was a shared way of knowing — a pathway to common understanding, which was essential to the social order of Medieval Europe.

It was in the midst of this spiritual, economic and geopolitical crisis that the Black Death arrived, sweeping through Europe in 1347-1353 and upending the balance of power, almost overnight

the economic effects of the plague were nothing short of earthshattering. By killing perhaps 50% of the labor force, the Black Death drastically altered the supply of labor, land and coin. Wages skyrocketed, as labor was in short supply, and rents declined, as the plummeting population density created a surplus of land

Both of these developments substantially benefitted commoners, at the expense of the elite, particularly in England.

The archetypal serf was not paid for their work in the lord's fields — that was their obligation to the lord in exchange for the use of the lord's land. The modern equivalent would be if your landlord was also your boss, and in order to live in your apartment, you had to sign away your freedom and that of your children, in perpetuity.

Not only that, the medieval lord was also the primary unit of legal, civic and military power, often serving as the first stop for legal matters and the first defense against brigands and rival kingdoms.

With perhaps half the population gone, there were simply not enough peasants to work the land, and the average income of the English lord declined significantly. In response, the lord's wheat fields were increasingly turned over to livestock, or rented out to tenant farmers, who would pay the lord a fixed rent, keeping the agricultural produce for themselves.

The ambitious commoner could now acquire sizable tracts of land, and with the agricultural product of that land entirely at their disposal, commoners were incentivized to maximize the productivity of their land and sell the surplus at market for a profit. This transition is often referred to as the birth of Agrarian Capitalism.

In the wake of the Black Death, plague doctors were among the first to believe they had surpassed the knowledge of the Greek and Roman world; ironically, they were wrong, but the lower mortality of later outbreaks led many doctors to proclaim they had cured the disease, which instilled a new faith in scientific progress

Sumptuary laws, which restricted what commoners could wear and eat, also became common during the 14th and 15th Centuries. However, these laws do not appear to have been effective, and tensions continued to mount between the aristocracy and the wider populace, who were increasingly impatient for change.

Urban laborers and craftsmen also benefitted from rising wages. The average lifespan increased, and standards of living improved across the board. The shortage of skilled tradesmen even created new opportunities for urban women

starting in the 14th century, infantry units comprised of commoners, like the Swiss pikemen and English longbowmen, began to win a series of decisive victories against mounted knights, revolutionizing military tactics and hastening the obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy.

a new intellectual spirit was taking root across western Europe. Influential thinkers like John Wycliffe and Marsilius of Padua began to question the worldly authority of both the Church and the state, arguing that power rested ultimately with the populace rather than the ruler, and the unworthy ruler could lose their right to govern

This, combined with the soaring fiscal burden of near-constant war, set off a series of uprisings, most notably the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The aristocracy responded with force wherever they could, but they could not turn back the clock.

seven-hundred years later, what, if anything, can we learn from this — what can the crises and consequences of the 14th century tell us about our own pandemic and the impending aftermath?

There will be no labor shortage in the wake of the coronavirus; quite the opposite, there will likely be a labor surplus, due to the ensuing economic contraction. As for rents, the housing market is essentially frozen as people shelter in place, and housing prices are likely to decline in a recession, but the real cost of housing relative to income is unlikely to see the kind of seismic shift experienced after the Black Death.

most presciently for our own time, Europe was headed for a climate catastrophe, and regardless of the Black Death, the continent would have almost certainly faced a series of demographic shocks, like the Great Plague, until considerable changes were made to the existing socio-economic system.

The lesson we should take from this today is not the differences between the coronavirus and the Black Death, but rather the broader similarities between the 14th century and the 21st century

war between China and the US still looms ever larger, socio-economic inequality is reaching record levels, trust in institutions and our established epistemology is waning, and as we enter the worst depression since the 1930s, climate change once again threatens to throw us back into the Middle Ages

if we continue business as usual, what happens next is likely to be much worse. The calamitous 21st century is just getting started, and a more apt parallel for the Black Death is probably yet to come

In a famous journal he kept from 1935 to 1944, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In his journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence they acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans—admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris—and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. “Is friendship possible,” he wondered in 1937, “with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?”

This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired

the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause célèbre. Just one court case—one disputed trial—plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another. But this shows that vastly different understandings of what is meant by “France” were already there, waiting to be discovered

More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad—just like Sebastian’s friends in the 1930s.

What has caused this transformation

My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What’s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.

Two decades ago, different understandings of “Poland” must already have been present too, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition

All of these debates, whether in 1890s France or 1990s Poland, have at their core a series of important questions: Who gets to define a nation? And who, therefore, gets to rule a nation? For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled—but why should they ever be?

the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization.

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets

in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.

Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal.

As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.” He mocked freedom of assembly as a “hollow phrase.” As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than “a machine for the suppression of the working class.”

These parties tolerate the existence of political opponents. But they use every means possible, legal and illegal, to reduce their opponents’ ability to function and to curtail competition in politics and economics. They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters. They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants. They discourage businesses from advertising in “opposition”—by which they mean illegitimate—media.

nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?

If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts, and warp the press to achieve your ambitions is strong. Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the “system” is unfair—these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right.

picking apart personal and political motives is extremely difficult. That’s what I learned from the story of Jacek Kurski, the director of Polish state television and the chief ideologist of the Polish illiberal state. He started out in the same place, at the same time, as his brother, Jarosław Kurski, who edits the largest and most influential liberal Polish newspaper. They are two sides of the same coin.

the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality.

yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-Size Lies. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it’s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.

In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, shared by the Russian government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no such migrants exist in Hungary.

In Poland, at least the lie is sui generis. It is the Smolensk conspiracy theory: the belief that a nefarious plot brought down the president’s plane in April 2010.

The truth, as it began to emerge, was not comforting to the Law and Justice Party or to its leader, the dead president’s twin brother. The plane had taken off late; the president was likely in a hurry to land, because he wanted to use the trip to launch his reelection campaign. There was thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a real airport, just a landing strip in the forest; the pilots considered diverting the plane, which would have meant a drive of several hours to the ceremony. After the president had a brief phone call with his brother, his advisers apparently pressed the pilots to land. Some of them, against protocol, walked in and out of the cockpit during the flight. Also against protocol, the chief of the air force came and sat beside the pilots. “Zmieścisz się śmiało”—“You’ll make it, be bold,” he said. Seconds later, the plane collided with the tops of some birch trees, rolled over, and hit the ground.

When, some weeks after the election, European institutions and human-rights groups began responding to the actions of the Law and Justice government, they focused on the undermining of the courts and public media. They didn’t focus on the institutionalization of the Smolensk conspiracy theory, which was, frankly, just too weird for outsiders to understand. And yet the decision to put a fantasy at the heart of government policy really was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.

Although the Macierewicz commission has never produced a credible alternate explanation for the crash, the Smolensk lie laid the moral groundwork for other lies. Those who could accept this elaborate theory, with no evidence whatsoever, could accept anything.

Whatever mistakes the party might make, whatever laws it might break, at least the “truth” about Smolensk would finally be told.

The Smolensk conspiracy theory, like the Hungarian migration conspiracy theory, served another purpose: For a younger generation that no longer remembered Communism, and a society where former Communists had largely disappeared from politics, it offered a new reason to distrust the politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals who had emerged from the struggles of the 1990s and now led the country.

More to the point, it offered a means of defining a new and better elite. There was no need for competition, or for exams, or for a résumé bristling with achievements. Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot—and, incidentally, might well qualify for a government job.

Hungary’s belated reckoning with its Communist past—putting up museums, holding memorial services, naming perpetrators—did not, as I thought it would, help cement respect for the rule of law, for restraints on the state, for pluralism

16 years after the Terror Háza’s opening, Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising. It has created a new business elite that is loyal to Orbán.

Schmidt embodies what the Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev recently described as the desire of many eastern and central Europeans to “shake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization,” to rid themselves of the humiliation of having been imitators, followers of the West rather than founders.

Listening to her, I became convinced that there was never a moment when Schmidt’s views “changed.” She never turned against liberal democracy, because she never believed in it, or at least she never thought it was all that important. For her, the antidote to Communism is not democracy but an anti-Dreyfusard vision of national sovereignty

It’s clear that the Medium-Size Lie is working for Orbán—just as it has for Donald Trump—if only because it focuses the world’s attention on his rhetoric rather than his actions.

I described my 1999 New Year’s Eve party to a Greek political scientist. Quietly, he laughed at me. Or rather, he laughed with me; he didn’t mean to be rude. But this thing I was calling polarization was nothing new. “The post-1989 liberal moment—this was the exception,” Stathis Kalyvas told me. Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome.

In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.

In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God

Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community.

The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state—the one-party state, the illiberal state—offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie.

there is also a sense of envy, that Islam retains a vitality, conviction, and self-assuredness that Western liberalism and Western Christianity lost long ago

Houellebecq, who once called Islam “the stupidest religion,” has since read the Quran and apparently developed an appreciation for Islam, contributing to his own epiphany of sorts. “When, in the light of what I know,” Houellebecq says, “I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer.”)

In fiction and nonfiction alike, liberalism—referring here not to the left of American politics, but to the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy—has come in for a beating, or at least a challenge.

This is a new global aristocracy, one defined by liberal ideas of “rational” education and sensibility.

insisting on yet more liberalism as a corrective has only made matters worse. “One of the liberal state’s main roles,” he writes, “becomes the active liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions.” Liberty, which he argues was once about freedom from “one’s own basest desires,” was redefined to encourage the ceaseless pursuit of those very same desires.

As a liberal who is critical of liberalism, I sympathize with these arguments but am, at the same time, unwilling to follow them to their logical conclusion.

Wherever I go and wherever I’ve lived, there are others, from all over the world, who I can easily connect with—“anywheres” of the center-left and center-right who share a similar disposition. They don’t really have a local community or “home” they feel particularly strongly about.

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame. Liberalism, in dismantling traditional structures, encouraging “privatism,” and empowering an ever-expanding state, has created an existential crisis, he argues

the diversity, paradoxically, reinforces a kind of cultural homogeneity. As Deneen puts it: “The identities and diversity thus secured are globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms.

Whether merit-based “aristocracies” are a good thing has long been debated. The historian Charles Wiltse, writing on Thomas Jefferson, pointed out the tension: “It is to the talented and the virtuous that the government is to be committed, a doctrine suggesting the Greek ideal of the wise man. The criticism of [John] Adams, that talents and virtue will, in the end, breed wealth and family, Jefferson seems to have ignored.”

Liberalism might be a better ideology (than whatever the alternatives might be) but it’s an ideology all the same. It’s a transformative project, as any belief system that views history as a progressive and bending arc must be.

All transformations, even largely good ones, come at a cost. Most Americans and Europeans, including those who benefit most from the liberal status quo, understand that something is not quite right. Take our unprecedented levels of inequality, which are only likely to grow.

But the incentives for meritocratic elites to do anything serious about it—Deneen suggests a rather unappealing “household economics” model while social democrats like Matt Bruenig propose “social wealth funds”—are limited. Liberals are the new conservatives.

Choice needs to be a means to something else, but to what? Legally based religious systems—which only Islam among the largest religions potentially offers—quite consciously seek to restrict choice in the name of virtue and salvation.

anti-sharia legislation has become an odd phenomenon—a sort of illiberal counter-illiberalism. This is not quite what Deneen, or for that matter Houellebecq, had in mind in thinking beyond, or after, liberalism.

In Europe, no populist party—and several, in Switzerland, Poland, and Hungary, have been in power—has managed to imagine something truly new.

What liberalism’s critics appear unable, or unwilling, to address is whether a lack of meaning is a worse problem to have than a lack of freedom.

the Two Sicilies were happier under Charles than they had been for many a long century

he reversed his predecessor’s policy of neutrality and involved Spain in two expensive wars against Britain, for which she was ill-prepared; and he committed the country’s pride and strength to a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to recover Gibraltar

Born in Madrid in 1716, the son of Spain’s first Bourbon King, Philip V, and of his second wife, Isabella Farnese, he enjoyed in some respects a happy and normal childhood

to bend the foreign policy of Spain solely for the purpose of providing kingdoms for her offspring

I would like to deserve to be called Charles the Wise

Philip V inherited the melancholy, the longing for seclusion that at times overcame all reason

the King had become so deranged that he had to abdicate in favour of Louis

Philip had to withdraw his abdication; but the bouts of insanity continued, and Isabella Farnese became de facto ruler of the country

the Austrians had to withdraw and Naples was ensured a separate existence under the Bourbons. Charles returned to his regime of hunting, building and reform.

Taking advantage of Austria’s preoccupations elsewhere in the war of the Polish Succession, Isabella decided to attack in Italy. The aim was to recover for Spain the provinces of the Two Sicilies which had been Spanish for two centuries until 1713 when they had been handed over to Austria under the Treaty of Utrecht. Spain declared war on Austria in December 1733, and Charles was made titular commander-in-chief of the 30,000 Spanish troops that landed at Leghorn

Austria withdrew without a fight and in 1734 Charles became King of the Two Sicilies, a territory now independent for the first time. But as part of the general settlement he had to give up his rights in the Duchies; and a commitment was made, which for him cast a shadow before, that the crowns of Spain and of the Two Sicilies would never be united

As in Spain later, Charles challenged and reduced the powers and privileges of the aristocracy and clergy. He reformed the archaic legal and economic systems. His aim was ‘to sweep away feudalism’,

Naples before him had been without industry or trade

Naples rose and flourished, a European capital of the arts

he astounded the aristocracy of Madrid by the purity of his life

identify government not only with order and tradition, but with reform, and thereby helped to avert revolution.

he nourished a grievance against Britain

he helped to defeat the Austrian troops at Velletri. He showed courage and leadership in the battle, having survived an attempt at capture

His mother was once again meddling in Italian affairs, trying this time to exploit Vienna’s preoccupation with the war of the Austrian Succession to recover the central Italian duchies for Philip, her second surviving son. Charles was forced to send troops north to support his brother’s Spaniards who had landed under the Duke of Montemar

This routine was shattered in 1759 by the death of his childless half-brother Ferdinand VI who had been King of Spain since 1746; a King who, true to family tradition, had gone mad

But Louis XV dismissed Choiseul and wrote to Charles in his own hand: ‘My minister would have war, but I will not

From the moment of his arrival in Madrid in December 1759, Charles showed that he was not prepared to follow in Ferdinand’s easy-going footsteps. Government was a serious business, and would be conducted by himself in the interests of the people

Italian influence came in with him like a tidal wave, sweeping over muph of Spanish life

But it was in administrative reform that the sharpest note of change was stock. The economy of the country was sagging, yet Charles badly needed more money—among other things to pay off his father’s debts, and to strengthen the almost non-existent defences of Spain and the Indies. A flow of decrees poured forth regulating commerce and providing for the collection of revenue.

cleaning as was done was carried out by private enterprise, by troops of sweepers

Charles set about a radical clean-up

Since reaching Madrid, Charles had been under pressure from both sides to join in the war between Britain and Prussia on the one hand, and France and Austria on the other, which had broken out in 1756

Ferdinand VI had managed to stay neutral and Maria Amalia had been a strong influence for peace, but after her death, Charles changed his policy

life-long grudge against the British for having taken Gibraltar from his father—a feeling compounded by Commodore Martin’s insult

if he joined the French alliance, might help him to recover Minorca and Gibraltar. So in August 1761 he agreed to the Family Compact with Louis XV which brought him into war against Britain

Spain was heavily defeated by the British fleet which captured Havana and Manila

British power had greatly increased, partly at the expense of Spain

The country was exhausted, and there was much resentment against the French. Charles personally would have liked to have shaken himself out of the family straight-jacket

For months the kingdom of Spain languished under this rule

Charles had no alternative but to capitulate to the British

the Madrid mutiny of 1766

The favour he had shown early on towards the bourgeoisie, his concern for the poor, and the reforming zeal of his Ministers had all helped to generate distrust amongst the nobility and clergy

the discontent did not stop with the rich

There was widespread public unrest caused by the effects of the war, prolonged drought and high prices. Far from assuaging this, Charles had aggravated it, particularly in Madrid

public indignation

Squillace was the main target of public wrath

Within a week the King capitulated and agreed to everything

the Jesuits the scapegoat for the mutiny. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain with ruthless efficiency

We have to distinguish between two separate things. The first is what I’m calling the tradition of the middle-class Constitution, and the idea here is that to have a republic, you have to have relative economic equality, and that’s within the political community.

What we have is a constitutional system that doesn’t build class in at all, and the reason why is that America was shockingly equal at the time in ways that seem really surprising to us today.

The idea is that the Constitution relies on a relatively equal society for it to work. In societies that are deeply unequal, the way you prevent strife between rich and poor is you build class right into the structure of government—the House of Lords, House of Commons idea. Everyone has a share in government, but they also have a check on each other.

In a country that doesn’t have a lot of inequality by wealth, you don’t need that kind of check. There’s no extreme wealth, there’s no extreme poverty, so you don’t expect there to be strife, to be instability based on wealth. And so there’s no need to put in some sort of check like that into the Constitution.

That’s how our Constitution works. The reason why it works this way is that when the founders looked around, they thought America was uniquely equal in the history of the world.

extreme wealth, there’s extreme poverty, neither of which really exists in America. As a result they don’t need to design a House of Lords and a House of Commons, they don’t need a tribune of the plebs in order to make their constitution work.

And in an unequal society, the only possible government you could have would be some sort of aristocracy or monarchy.

there’s another question which is, who is in the political community? And that’s a question that’s been fiercely debated over our history, fiercely contested over our history.

There’s a second tradition that we call the tradition of inclusion, which over time has fought to expand the community to include minorities, to include women. The challenge for anyone who’s interested in continuing both of these traditions is, how do they work together?

I think the key thing is, when you expand the political community, you have to make sure that every member of the political community then has the opportunity to join the middle class, or else you can't maintain the structure of the republic and the preconditions for having a republic.

In the 17th century in England, James Harrington writes a book called The Commonwealth of Oceana, and it’s a pivotal book, extremely important in the history of political thought. What Harrington argues is that the balance of power in politics in any society will inevitably mirror the balance of property in society, and he talks a lot about property. We can think about that as wealth

What Harrington does is he explains this by saying that power has to follow property.

there’s actually a radical change in our Constitution that we don’t build economic class directly into these institutions. The purpose of the Senate, with its longer terms, is to allow representatives to deliberate in the longer-term interest of the republic, and that’s the goal of the Senate.

their intellectual fountain, is Harrington, who suggests that, if you have an equal society, it is possible to have what he called a commonwealth, or a republic.

his views were well known in the time period. In fact, more so than being known, they were just believed by everyone. Everyone embraced them, in some cases without even necessarily knowing their source, although throughout the founders’ writings they list Harrington as one of the great political thinkers who can comment on what it means to create a republic.

by the late 19th century, industrialization has reached full force.

These are all huge changes in the economy, and they put serious pressure on the economic foundations of the Constitution.

The response that starts really in full force in the populist era of the late 19th century and moves into the Progressive Era is to try to combat both economic power and to prevent economic power from turning into political power.

antitrust laws

People in this time period do a lot of extraordinary things.

an income tax

the first campaign-finance regulations

a constitutional amendment to require the direct election of U.S. senators

These factors, these actions, both economic and political, were designed to create what Teddy Roosevelt called an economic democracy that was necessary as a precondition for political democracy.

we regulated the financial industry through the Securities and Exchange Commission, Glass-Steagall during the Great Depression.

it happens for three reasons. The first is that we experience a huge economic boom. This is a period that economists call the Great Compression. GDP goes up, median wages go up, we build America’s middle class during this period.

a lot of things that contributed

After World War II, something changes. In this period, post-World War II, the idea that economic equality is necessary for our constitutional system falls out of the consciousness of most people.

We also invested a lot in the kinds of things that would build a strong middle class. We sent a generation to college through the GI bill. We invested in infrastructure, which created jobs. We invested in research and development

We also encouraged homeownership, and in addition to all of that, we also undertook policies that would help the people who were worst-off in society: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start. Together, these things meant that we created a society that was more equal economically than we had seen in generations.

constitutional debates over the economy waned, because the New Dealers won the fight over the Constitution. Debates about economic policy now just moved into regulatory terms. There was no question that the Constitution empowered the federal government to be able to regulate and operate within the economy.

The third big factor is the Cold War.

After World War II, the contrast is now between capitalism and communism, not between republics and aristocracies. As a result, the egalitarian tradition in America wanes because of the fear of communism.

The fear in that period switches from a fear over aristocrats, oligarchs, and plutocrats to a fear of becoming too much like the Soviet Union and too much like the communists.

first had a period of about 30 years where things went really well. We had a growing middle class, an expanding middle class; in fact, it was in this period that we first made serious efforts to make our country more inclusive.

then, just at that moment, we started turning in a different direction and undermining many of the policies that had actually built the middle class. So over the last generation, we’ve significantly reduced taxes on the wealthy, we’ve abandoned a serious antitrust policy, we’ve started investing less in the things that create a broad middle class—education, infrastructure, research. And the result of all of this was the stagnating middle class

One of the important things about having a large middle class for society is that there’s a sense of everyone being part of the shared project. No one’s so different from each other when there’s a large middle class.

People don’t have different economic interests, and as a result, they often don't have very different social interests. People send their kids to the same public schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they shop in the same places, they play on the same sports teams.

When the middle class starts to crumble, people increasingly see themselves as different from others. They sort themselves by wealth, by education level, and the result is that there’s an increasing fracturing of society, a loss of the solidarity that comes with having a large middle class

throughout our history, you see big divergences between the tradition of inclusion and the tradition of the middle class. In some cases, they overlap.

These two things don’t necessarily have to go together.

I think the most interesting moments in our history, though, are when there were people who understood that these two things had to go together, and in fact tried to build movements around them. The Civil Rights Era is a good example

One of the most exciting things about writing this book is discovering how often throughout our history people talked about the Constitution in economic terms. Throughout our history there was a deep sense that to have a republic, to have our Constitution work, we had to have economic equality, and that the Constitution in fact relied on this and in some cases even required action from political leaders to fulfill this economic equality.

In Reconstruction, in the Jacksonian Era, the populists, the progressives, the New Dealers. Throughout our history, there is a strong tradition of people who believe this.

there’s lots of places we could think about this in our Constitution today

To take a simple example, a case like Citizens United uses the First Amendment in order to stop efforts, it seems, to make our political and economic system more equal by enabling corporations and wealthy people to have outsized power over the political process. We could think about a wide variety of constitutional provisions differently if we took this seriously—the Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, the 13th Amendment, which was seen by the Reconstruction Republicans as not just ending slavery but also empowering Congress to create economic opportunity for people who were struggling economically.

Even going back to the ancients there was a fear that economic power would turn into political power and undermine the republic. That’s an oligarchy.

First, the wealthy start believing that they’re better than everybody else, that they’re more virtuous, that they deserve to govern

The second thing that happens is that the wealthy now have different interests than everybody else. The things that are good for them aren’t actually in the common good, so when they do govern, they start pursuing policies that improve their well-being and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

the “doom loop of oligarchy”: once you start down this path, it’s very hard to get out of it.

The problem with the vicious cycle that leads to oligarchy is that people are smart, and they see it happening, and they know, and they feel that the system is rigged against them. And in that context, people revolt against the system. This doesn’t happen through some sort of mass uprising. What the people do is they look for a leader, they look for someone who will help them overthrow the oligarchy.

The threat for unequal republics is on the one hand oligarchy and then on the other hand tyranny. That is a pretty unfortunate fate in either direction.

The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control.

He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.

Plato also argued that democracies inevitably degenerate into anarchy, as the poor plunder the rich and profligacy produces bankruptcy.

Anarchy leads to the rule of tyrants: a bully can appeal to the mob’s worst instincts precisely because he is ruled by his own worst instincts

this changed with the French and American revolutions, which were based on contrasting approaches to mob rule.

Aristotle, Plato’s great pupil, distinguished between three legitimate forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that they each have their dark shadows: tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule

He then outlined the ways in which these virtuous forms of government evolve into their opposites: democracy becomes mob rule when the rich hog the society’s wealth

A more practical thinker than Plato, Aristotle argued that there were two ways of preventing democracy from degenerating into mobocracy: mix in elements of kingship and aristocracy to restrain the will of the people; and create a large middle class with a stake in stability.

Machiavelli speculated that clever princes might be able to profit from chaos if they could forge the mob into a battering-ram against a decaying regime

Mostly elites were content with demonisation

He is, as it were, the mob in the form of a single person

The French Revolution also produced a robust conservative critique of mob rule—first in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France

Samuel Huntington warned that “democratic overload”, with too many interest groups demanding too much from the state, would lead to democratic disillusionment as the state failed to live up to its ever-escalating promises.

Burke recognised that the mob has a collective psychology that makes it uniquely dangerous. It is a “monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”. It relishes wild abandon—“horrid yells”, “shrilling screams” and the “unutterable abominations of the furies of hell”. It gets so carried away with its own righteous bloodlust that even normally decent people can be transformed into monsters.

He predicted that the revolution would end in the massacre of thousands (including the king, queen and priests) and the rise of a dictator who could restore law and order.

The cycle of mass protest followed by violence followed by dictatorship set a pattern for subsequent revolutions in Russia (1917), Cuba (1958) and elsewhere.

The American revolution succeeded where the French revolution and its progeny failed because it was based on a considered fear of “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude”.

“Federalist No. 55”, written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, is particularly sharp on the way that ill-designed institutions can turn even sensible citizens into a baying crowd: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.

The Founding Fathers argued that democracy could avoid becoming mobocracy only if it was hedged with a series of restraints to control the power of the people.

Alexis de Tocqueville added his own worries about mob rule in “Democracy in America”. For him the constitution alone is not strong enough to save democracy from the mob. A vigorous civic culture rooted in self-governing communities (he was particularly keen on New England’s townships) and a self-reliant and educated population are also necessary

So too is a responsible elite that recognises that its first duty is to “educate democracy”

The 19th century saw the world’s ruling elites reconciling themselves to the fact that democracy was the wave of the future. How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.

Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.

This sort of pessimism has been out of fashion for a long time. The second world war and the defeat of Nazism led to an era of democratic self-confidence, and the fall of the Berlin Wall to one of democratic euphoria.

But a few pessimists continued to warn that democracies might well degenerate into mob rule if they neglected the health of their political institutions and civic culture. Seymour Martin Lipset, an American sociologist, echoed Aristotle’s view that a healthy democracy requires broad-based prosperity.

Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher, reiterated Tocqueville’s worry that civic decay might corrupt democracy

many changed their minds when they discovered that, far from unleashing man’s natural goodness, the revolution had set free his inner demons. Those who stuck with the revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror did so on two grounds: that the old regime was responsible for the violence because it created so much pent-up hatred; and that you cannot improve the world without bloodshed.

In recent years the pessimists have grown in number

The election of Mr Trump, a reality-TV star, raised profound questions about the health of America’s political regime. Can democracy survive if television channels make billions of dollars by peddling misinformation and partisanship?

Or if wealthy people can invest vast sums of money in the political process?

Or if society is polarised into a superclass and a demoralised proletariat? Recent events suggest that the answer is “no”.

The age of democratic naivety died on January 6th. It is time for an age of democratic sophistication

Democracies may well be the best safeguard against mob rule, as liberal democrats have been preaching for centuries. But they can be successful only if countries put the necessary effort into nurturing democratic institutions: guarding against too much inequality, ensuring that voters have access to objective information, taming money in politics and reinforcing checks and balances.

Otherwise the rule of the people will indeed become the rule of the mob, and the stable democratic order that flourished from the second world war onwards will look like a brief historical curiosity.

"If three years ago [at the end of the American Revolution] any person had told me that at this day, I should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of our own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite - a fit subject for a mad house," Washington wrote to Knox on Feb. 3, 1787, adding that if the government "shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws … anarchy & confusion must prevail."

Washington's alarm about Shays' Rebellion was a key factor in his decision to take part in - and preside over - the Constitutional Convention, which was supposed to offer revisions to the Articles of Confederation but instead threw out the old structure entirely and replaced it with the U.S. Constitution, which shifted national sovereignty from the 13 states to "We the People" and dramatically enhanced the power of the central government.

A central point of the Constitution was to create a peaceful means for the United States to implement policies favored by the people but within a structure of checks and balances to prevent radical changes deemed too disruptive to the established society. For instance, the two-year terms of the House of Representatives were meant to reflect the popular will but the six-year terms of the Senate were designed to temper the passions of the moment.

Within this framework of a democratic Republic, the Framers criminalized taking up arms against the government. Article IV, Section 4 committed the federal government to protect each state from not only invasion but "domestic Violence," and treason is one of the few crimes defined in the Constitution as "levying war against" the United States as well as giving "Aid and Comfort" to the enemy (Article III, Section 3).

To win over other skeptics, Madison agreed to support a Bill of Rights, which would be proposed as the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

The Second Amendment dealt with concerns about "security" and the need for trained militias to ensure what the Constitution called "domestic Tranquility." There was also hesitancy among many Framers about the costs and risks from a large standing army, thus making militias composed of citizens an attractive alternative.

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Contrary to some current right-wing fantasies about the Framers wanting to encourage popular uprisings over grievances, the language of the amendment is clearly aimed at maintaining order within the country.

That point was driven home by the actions of the Second Congress amid another uprising which erupted in 1791 in western Pennsylvania. This anti-tax revolt, known as the Whiskey Rebellion, prompted Congress in 1792 to expand on the idea of "a well-regulated militia" by passing the Militia Acts which required all military-age white males to obtain their own muskets and equipment for service in militias.

there is also the simple logic that the Framers represented the young nation's aristocracy. Many, like Washington, owned vast tracts of land. They recognized that a strong central government and domestic tranquility were in their economic interests.

it would be counterintuitive - as well as anti-historical - to believe that Madison and Washington wanted to arm the population so the discontented could resist the constitutionally elected government. In reality, the Framers wanted to arm the people - at least the white males - so uprisings, whether economic clashes like Shays' Rebellion, anti-tax protests like the Whiskey Rebellion, attacks by Native Americans or slave revolts, could be repulsed.

race — what Dew calls “the absolute belief in white supremacy — unquestioned white superiority/unquestioned black inferiority” — only deepens the question. What does that mean? Where does that belief come from? What sustains it?

It survives, I think, largely because after all these years we cannot imagine ourselves without it, because we are emotionally invested in the intellectually lazy notion that eye shape, hair texture or melanin content can somehow be correlated to individual destiny, honesty, athleticism, musicality, intelligence and worth.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.

“I don’t know where my head or heart was,” he said. “I don’t know where my parents’ heads and hearts were, or my teachers’. . . . We were blind to the reality of racism and afraid, I guess, of change.”

“I think the differences are still greater than the similarities,” he says. “Hitler was not only more intelligent, but craftier. He was not just a powerful orator, but a talented actor who succeeded in winning over various social milieus. So not just the economically threatened lower middle classes which Trump targeted, but also the upper middle classes. Hitler had many supporters in the German aristocracy.”

Trump was also democratically elected, while Hitler never had a majority vote. “He was appointed by the president of the German Reich.” Then there’s the fact that Trump does not lead a party “which is unconditionally committed to him”.

“A further obvious difference is that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, as Hitler did with the SA, which he used in his first months after coming to power to settle scores with his opponents, like the Communists and Social Democrats. You can’t possibly imagine something similar with Trump – that he’ll be locking Democrats up into concentration camps

“Finally, the American constitution is based on a system of checks and balances. It remains to be seen how far Congress will really limit Trump or if, as is feared, he can override it. It was different with Hitler, who, as we know, managed to eliminate all resistance in the shortest space of time and effectively establish himself as an all-powerful dictator. Within a few months, there was effectively no longer any opposition.”

“Hitler profited from the fact that his opponents always underestimated him,” Ullrich explains. “His conservative allies in government assumed they could tame or ‘civilise’ him – that once he became chancellor he’d become vernünftig (meaning sensible, reasonable). Very quickly it became clear that was an illusion.”

“There were many situations where he could have been stopped. For example in 1923 after the failed Munich putsch – if he’d served his full prison sentence of several years, he wouldn’t have made a political comeback. Instead, he only spent a few months behind bars, [having been released after political pressure] and could rebuild his movement.”

The western powers made the same mistake with their appeasement politics, indecision and indulgence. “In the 1930s Hitler strengthened, rather than weakened, his aggressive intentions,” Ullrich says. “So you could learn from this that you have to react faster and much more vigorously than was the case at the time.”

llrich also contends that if Hindenburg, the president of the Reich, had allowed Chancellor Brüning, of the Centre party, to remain chancellor to the end of 1934, rather than responding to pressure from conservatives to dismiss him in 1932, “then the peak of the economic crisis would have passed and it would have been very questionable whether Hitler could still have come to power”.

At the same time, Hitler’s ascent was no mere fluke. “There were powerful forces in the big industries, but also in the landowning class and the armed forces, which approved of a fascist solution to the crisis.”

If fascism “now just means aggressive nationalism, racism, patriarchy and authoritarianism, then maybe it is back on the agenda,” Bosworth continues. But today’s context is fundamentally different

Schama is clear: Trump is obviously not Hitler. “But, you know, if you like, he’s an entertainment fascist, which may be less sinister but is actually in the end more dangerous. If you’re not looking for jackboots and swastikas – although swastikas are indeed appearing – there’s a kind of laundry list of things which are truly sinister and authoritarian and not business as usual.”

Today’s “alt-right” agitators “live in a neoliberal global order where the slogan, ‘all for the market, nothing outside the market, no one against the market’ is far more unquestionably accepted than the old fascist slogan of ‘all for the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state’”.

Schama also points to deeply worrying messaging, such as “the parallel universe of lies which are habitual, massive, cumulative”; the criminalization of political opponents; the threat to change the libel laws against the press and the demonization of different racial and ethnic groups, going as far as proposing a Muslim registry.

“What is that if it’s not racially authoritarian?” asks Schama. “If you want to call it fascist, fine. I don’t really care if it’s called that or not. It’s authoritarian, you know, ferociously authoritarian.”

Don’t ignore what people vote fo

f you’re of German heritage, it’s hard to understand how so many people could have bought Mein Kampf and gone on to vote for Hitler. Maybe no one really read it, or got beyond the first few pages of bluster, or took antisemitism seriously, you tell yourself. “Or they liked what he said,

“I think one of the mistakes this time around would be not to think that the people who voted for Trump were serious. They may have been serious for different reasons, but it would be a big mistake not to try and figure out what their reasons were.

Hitler presented himself as a “messiah” offering the public “salvation”, Ullrich points out. With austerity and hostility to the EU and to immigrants riding high, there is fertile ground for European populists next year to seduce with equally simplistic, sweeping “solutions”.

The problem, in Mazower’s view, is that establishment politicians currently have no response

“The Gestapo was piddling compared with the size and reach of surveillance equipment and operations today,

“Very belatedly, everyone is waking up to the fact that there was a general assumption that no government in the west would fall into the wrong hands, that it was safe to acquiesce in this huge expansion of surveillance capabilities, and the debate wasn’t as vigorous as it could have been.”

“Now, there is a lot of discussion about allowing this kind of surveillance apparatus in the wrong hands,” he adds. “And we’ve woken up to this a bit late in the day.”

Ullrich calls crises, “the elixir of rightwing populists”, and urges that politicians “do everything they can to correct the inequalities and social injustice which have arisen in the course of extreme financial capitalism in western countries”

Jane Caplan, a history professor at Oxford University who has written about Trump and fascism, highlights the want of “dissenting voices against marketisation and neoliberalism

The failure to resist the incursion of the market as the only criterion for political utility, or economic utility, has been pretty comprehensive.

Paranoia, bullying and intimidation are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. They are also alive and well in our culture today, where online trolls, violent thugs at rallies, threats of expensive libel action and of course terrorist acts are equally effective in getting individuals and the press to self-censor.