You own the conclusion you arrive at.
“Q managed to make us feel special, that we were being given very critical information that basically was going to save all that is good in the world and the United States. We felt we were coming from a place of moral superiority. We were part of a special club… At some point I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a reason this doesn’t fit. We are being manipulated. Someone is having fun at our expense.'” – Lenka Perron, a recovered QAnon junkie. The New York Times, Jan 29, 2021
Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily ‘elite overproduction’—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. ‘You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,’ Turchin said.
Steve Bannon is a ‘paradigmatic example’ of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. ‘He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge.’