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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Before The Peasants Storm The Castle

Billionaire Nick Hanauer has a word of advice for his fellow plutocrats: Change, or prepare to run for your lives, if you can. Why? Inequality. Excerpt: If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising […]

Billionaire Nick Hanauer has a word of advice for his fellow plutocrats: Change, or prepare to run for your lives, if you can. Why? Inequality. Excerpt:

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.

Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens.

Whole thing, here.

As longtime readers know, historian Barbara Tuchman’s book The March Of Folly is one of my favorites. Among the characteristics of folly — the kind of idiocy that leads to cataclysmic historical failures for power-holders, e.g., six corrupt Popes provoking the Reformation, the British losing America, and the American involvement in Vietnam — Tuchman observes are:

1. obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents
2. primacy of self-aggrandizement
3. illusion of invulnerable status

It’s easy enough to see how our plutocrats may be guilty of this. But it is very hard to detect any pre-revolutionary consciousness in this country. To be sure, I don’t believe that there will be an actual revolution, but I’m talking about the kind of populist uprising that Hanauer fears. It may well come — he obviously believe it will one day — but I don’t see it on the near horizon. If the country can go through the depression of the past few years without any serious political and social change, the status quo is pretty resilient.

However, let’s assume Hanauer is correct about the long term. What trends do you see now that, if not arrested, are likely to make Hanauer’s dire prediction come true in, say, the next 30 years? Don’t say simply “inequality”; please be as specific as you can.

My best guess is that the skyrocketing Medicare cost of paying for care of the aging Baby Boomers, plus a decreasing number of middle-class taxpayers, as well as the ease with which the ultrarich can exempt themselves from taxes, particularly in a globalized economy, will all stress the system perhaps to the breaking point. What do you think?

[H/T: Surly]

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