Part of the reason that things in the US feel so turbulent right now is that we're in the midst of a good, old-fashioned, full-blown elite crisis.
This is most obvious in politics but also within the economy and society more generally. American elites largely define themselves as a meritocracy; a meritocratic elite is supposed to be fundamentally competent, so when they do incompetent things, it's hard to square.
The last two decades are full of examples of elite failure: never-ending wars in the Middle East and beyond, a global financial crisis, drastically rising inequality, growing political instability, an entire downwardly mobile generation.
So when your meritocratic elite has proven itself to be not really meritocratic, as anybody who's spent time in elite institutions can tell you, and the outcomes are increasingly poor, things are going to get a bit dicey.
To be clear, this is a biparitsan elite failure - that's not a matter of dumbly "both-sides"-ing things - and it extends beyond high politics, deep down into core institutions.
Elite failures are nothing new, historically speaking. The end of the Roman Republic was a long and drawn-out collapse of an established elite; it was a component of the fall of the Roman Empire; and the Hundred Years War saw elite failure among both the French and the English.
In cases of elite failure, there are a few different paths that aren't mutually exclusive. One is to simply continue the process of implosion and clear the way for a whole new elite. Another is to broaden the elite to bring in new blood. The last is to harden elite distinctions.
In late medieval Venice, for example, the existing political/economic elite just legally defined themselves as a hereditary body and pulled the ladder up after them. That's just one of many examples of a theoretically open elite closing itself off.
That's the most worrisome scenario in the US right now, and it's what lies at the heart of the current turbulence: Are elites subject to the same laws and rules as everybody else? Are we all, in fact, equal before the law or are some by definition better?
That's the fundamental question that the US is going to have to answer. It's entirely possible that a broad elite group - roughly 10 percent of the population - could mostly steer politics and the economy. They already kind of do.
There's absolutely no reason, historically speaking, why you can't end up with a de facto or de jure elite, either broadly or narrowly defined, with either unwritten privileges or their status enshrined in law. That's a worrisome scenario.
This is a really deep, structural issue, tied into everything from national politics to corporate structure to social networks. Elites are important; if they weren't, they wouldn't be elites. Framing this in terms of elite crisis at least helps us understand what's happening.
