How To Tell When An Oligarchy Is Scared For Its Life

It's somewhat fashionable these days for a political writer to conjur up a dystopian vision of what things will be like by the end of Donald Trump's first term, so here goes: it's the day after Election Day in 2020, and the president has just been re-elected. If you can call it an election. The results of this contest, as they were with that of 2016, have been fraught with examples of voter suppression and statistically impossible exit poll discrepancies. And the means Trump used to gain support this time around have been similarly sketchy.

In the aftermath of the great economic unraveling of the first half of 2017, the president's approval ratings, along with the public support for the political and economic system he represented, looked like it would never recover from their staggering dip. But then, of course, the United States was attacked by terrorists in an epic breech of national security. Following the tragedy, Trump's poll numbers rose astronomically, along with his tendency towards engaging in corrupt and authoritarian behavior. He (by which I mainly mean the far smarter and scarier people who control him) went on a terrifying rampage, suspending virtually all constitutional liberties, eliminating the few remaining protections set in place to protect the bottom 99% of the population, and ultimately creating the now undeniable climate catastrophe we're experiencing today, all with the blessing of his unwilling-to-fight "opponents" in the Democratic Party establishment.

And when this inevitably started to bring Trump's poll numbers back down, he fulfilled the plan he'd once hinted at of starting a new War in Iraq to "take their oil." All of this, along with the massive efforts made by the Trump administration to take away the voting rights of nonwhites, caused Republicans to continue their eight-year streak of increased domination over electoral politics, with the GOP having retained the House and the Senate in 2018 and "won" the White House by a large margin in 2020. Meanwhile, the economy has become more unfairly ordered than ever, with the bottom 99% being mostly very poor while those at the very top enjoy as much wealth as ever due to the trillions of dollars they were awarded in bailout money after the 2017 economic crash.

As the recent behavior of Trump and Friends indicates, though, they expect a very different future. When one looks closely enough at how the benefactors of the political and economic status quo act these days, it becomes clear that they're trying to mask a deep, sometimes subconscious sense that the system they've created is in its death throes.

It can't be a coincidence that right after the existence of the neoliberal Democratic establishment came into peril with the rise of Bernie Sanders and his army of change-hungry activists, Democratic elites took wildly extreme measures to try to hold their crumbling base of support together, having started a clearly McCarthyite campaign and blamed everyone but themselves for their November defeat.

It's impossible not to at least speculate that Trump and his fellow oligarchs have grown very worried about their beloved neoliberal system being overthrown when, after a series of notably popular movements to take society back from corporate domination emerged in the form of Occupy, the Bernie Sanders campaign, and others, they filled their new government with former corporate executives, planned for the creation of an unprecedented police state, and threw out baseless claims about terrorist attacks to keep the public in a state of useful fear.

It's blatantly clear that those in power have largely become aware that their empire is close to crumbling when many members of the billionaire class have started seriously preparing in recent years for a coming crackup of civilization as we know it, often one which involves an uprising among the lower classes.

That last example is different from the first two, as it reveals certain members of the oligarchy have already surrendered themselves to the fact that their system is certain to fail, but for the most part, it seems, the world's elites are reacting to the growing signs that business as usual can't continue by doubling down on their faith in it. Through the launching of increasingly absurd propaganda campaigns, the prepared assembly of autocratic states, and the wholesale takeover of the government by big business, elites are attempting with redoubled vigor to take more control so that when the uprising inevitably comes, they'll be better suited to counter it.

And they have good reason to expect this challenge. In the 1930's, the last time economic inequality in America was as extreme as it is now, those left behind by an exploitation-based economic paradigm made every effort to break the power of corporations and the super-rich, and they very much succeeded. The 21st century's movement for economic justice (and by extension environmental, social, and geopolitical justice) are quickly moving in for the kill as the ever widening wealth gap forces public sentiment to become more and more favorable towards their agenda. And when this populist energy hits critical mass around the year 2020, a likely nonviolent but highly disruptive and polarizing battle between the masses and the oligarchy will be under way.

Which of these two will prevail, though, and get to define the next phase of history? I'll take my best guess in another hypothetical scenario: It's the day after the election in 2020, and President Trump has just been defeated in a staggering landslide by a non-corporate funded opponent who may or may not be an 80-year-old but still fighting Bernie Sanders. This candidate's long path to victory has been tied in with the enormous gains that their supporters have made throughout these last four years.

Those gains started with the enormous movement ignited right after the 2016 election by Bernie Sanders and his supporters to remake the Democratic Party and the nation in their image. And they very much began to do so in 2017, having earned major victories in California and other states while generally making establishment Democrats uncomfortable. Their efforts picked up a lot of additional support from former Trump supporters and pro-establishment liberals when you-know-what happened to the economy in 2017.

And while things got frightening for those who professed their agenda in the aftermath of that year's terrorist attack, it proved to be a temporary setback. Many of them carried right on with their activism work away from the government's newly dissent-hostile gaze, giving them a wide series of victories in the local elections of November 2017. And as time went on, their fortunes for the most part improved, with Trump's approval ratings falling back to below 50% fairly quickly and many of those who'd thrown their support behind the administration amid the nationalistic fervor of the 2017 terrorist attacks' immediate aftermath moving back into the movement of the Berniecrats. This surprising resilience of anti-Trump and anti-neoliberal sentiments, which was no doubt due to the economic factors of the time, for the most part continued throughout the War in Iraq that the Trump administration launched to provoke renewed compliance from the public.

And the rest is an unsurprisingly uplifting story. Through relentless involvement in electoral politics, Sandersists took the majority in the Senate and the House in 2018 (they won the latter in spite of Republican gerrymandering thanks to Brand New Congress' brilliant strategy of running some candidates on the Republican ticket). Through intense public pressure, they provoked a widespread effort among local, state, and sometimes even national government officials to pursue creating a living wage for all, universal health care, and other necessary measures. And most fortunately, through a great deal of bottom-up climate action on their part, they were able to take advantage of a narrowing window of opportunity for averting climate meltdown.

As a result, the Trump administration became politically tied down in spite of its best (and most maniacal) efforts, poverty began to drop fairly rapidly, and things generally became less uncertain and more hopeful. This has been especially the case throughout the 2020 election cycle, wherein the overwhelming surge of progressively populist energy that elected Trump's successor has correlated with the emergence of a new and more resilient version of Occupy Wall Street. And while the president-elect faced some obstacles when overzealous pro-establishment Democratic primary election officials in several states perpetrated voter suppression and electoral fraud, the Democratic Party's state and local leadership has been taken over by Berniecrats so much throughout these last four years that the rigging of the 2020 Democratic primaries wasn't half as extensive as the rigging of the 2016 Democratic primaries. So like so many other recent efforts from the Sandersists, their presidential insurgency prevailed.

Which of these futures do you think is most likely? Yeah, that's what I thought.

The Standoff Between DemExit And DemEnter

As the neoliberal era enters into its final years, with the massive economic inequality that's appeared throughout the last four decades having spawned a new political era of radicalism on both the left and the right, American democracy is naturally becoming more factionalized than usual. The most glaring political divide, of course, is the one between those who support the agenda of president-elect Donald Trump and those who aim to fight him. But that hasn't meant that there isn't an equally significant split within the anti-Trump camp.

Namely, there's a dispute as to whether or not the chief anti-Trump organization should represent corporatism, militarism, and other facets of the neoliberal paradigm. Since the majority of Americans side with anti-neoliberal goals, the victory of the non-corporatist camp is naturally assured, but even within this group a dispute has appeared: whether or not the Democratic Party should fill the role of this progressive organization.

Following the Democratic leadership's sabotage this year of the Bernie Sanders campaign, a great deal of Sanders' supporters, already angered to a breaking point by the saga of betrayals that Democratic elites have perpetrated on their base, decided to finally throw up their hands and leave the party. And at first, this "DemExit" movement looked like it was going to succeed, with the poll numbers of the Green Party's Jill Stein having surged during the summer as a result of it.

But after Stein's disappointing Election Day performance of 1% of the vote, DemExit has evidently lost much of its initial steam. Apart from Cornel West and Chris Hedges, all the major progressive leaders are deciding to take the approach of "DemEnter" and try to change the Democratic Party rather than build a new one. For just two examples, Robert Reich, who used to be in the Demexit camp, is now advocating for the Democratic Party's reform, while Bernie Sanders, possibly the most powerful voice on the left right now, is doing the same, saying that the party needs a "fundamental transformation."

Indeed, it appears that because of this, DemEnter currently has more support and momentum than DemExit. But just because DemEnter is popular, it isn't necessarily the best solution; as we've seen this year, the Democratic Party, far from being an empty vessel for progressive reform, is something of a political labrynth, with many devices set in place to make it harder for non-corporatists to take control of it. As Cornel West has said regarding the idea of reforming the party, "I have a deep love and respect for brother Bernie Sanders. I always will. I don't always agree with him. I'm not convinced that the Democratic Party can be reformed. I think it still has a kind of allegiance to a neoliberal orientation."

So who's right? From an objective standpoint, the approaches of both DemExit and DemEnter have a lot of merit, as well as a lot of potential for failure, and should the currently dominant option of DemEnter fall short of its objectives going into the 2018 and 2020 elections, we'll end up with a fatally damaged Democratic Party and no viable alternative option to replace it.

And should much of the left suddenly start working towards building the Green Party between now and then, given the third party-hostile nature of America's electoral system there's a good chance that the Greens won't become a viable option by 2020, putting Trump's opposition in a similar position to the one mentioned in the previous paragraph. In either of these scenarios, the left will end up blowing the crucial 2020 election.

Those in the DemExit and DemEnter camps are competing for which group's approach will decide the next course that the left takes, and should this standoff last into the next election, the central cause of both groups will be lost.

But despite the risks that come with this competition, I believe its continuation is necessary for now. We don't know for sure which method will turn out to be the most practical and effective one, so when the time comes in 2020 to unite behind whichever approach proves to be the best, it would be wise to make it so that both are viable options by then.

In short, progressives will need to hedge their bets throughout the next three years as DemExit and DemEnter fight it out. But aside from the uncertainty of this situation, the shared goals of DemExit and DemEnter have an almost certain chance of ultimately triumphing; America's descent into its worst period of wealth inequality has created the factors for a class revolt, and when this uprising occurs sometime in the next several years, the objectives of the left will be realized regardless of which party it happens to be aligned with at that point.

So for now, I recommend that regardless of whether you're in the DemExit or DemEnter camp, you continue working towards your current approach, because when you look at the bigger picture, there's no way you'll fail.

Brace For Impact

In September, a poll was taken asking Americans which year they believe to be the greatest in their country's history. The prosperous post-World War II years were popular, as were (inexplicably, I feel) the most recent years. But by far the most commonly preferred era, according to all demographics, was the year 2000.

Perhaps this had something to do with how 2000 was the year of the turn of the millennium, or the fact that it was the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency (which makes it more likely to appeal to Democrats) and the year of George W. Bush's election (which makes it more likely to appeal to Republicans). But I strongly suspect that 2000's popularity comes from how it could be considered a pleasant lull before the storm that ensued afterwords.

The years between 1992 and and 2001, in spite of their problems, where a relatively high point in history, with the end of the Cold War having created a period where world events were largely stable, the risk of economic collapse having been greatly alleviated because of the U.S. turning its national debt into a surplus, and a breakthrough in human progress having occurred with the sudden popularity of the World Wide Web. But afterwords, as we know, the situation would take a sharp turn for the worse, and even during those years certain people were predicting such a deterioration of events.

Specifically, Johan Galtung, William Strauss, and Neil Howe foresaw the current geopolitical, economic, and political crisis. Galtung, a Norwegian sociologist, predicted in 2000 based on historical patterns of how past nations have risen and fallen that the United States' military and economic empire would come to an end within 25 years. His view of the future correlated with the one presented by William Strauss and Neil Howe, who also reasoned in a 1997 book that, based on past trends in American history, world events would reach a climax around 2025.

I'll talk more about their predictions later, though. What this piece focuses on is how such a scenario is likely to transpire. And I'll lay out this model of the near future by assessing the current directions that all the major factors shaping history right now are headed in, namely politics, military conflict, economics, and ecology.

Politics

For the past several decades, public faith in established political institutions has been deteriorating, and not just in the United States. A prime suspect for this is the enormous redistribution of wealth and power that's taken place since the 1970's with the normalization of unrestrained, predatory capitalism throughout much of the world. Whatever the cause of this crisis of confidence in government, though, it's lately evolved into a crisis for the stability of government itself.

The author Umair Haque has developed a series of events which so often occur in the lead-up to the collapse of republics: stagnation, demagoguery, and tyranny. In the first stage, faith in traditional politics and the ideological center erodes as the quality of life goes down for most people. In the second stage, divisive and dangerous figures arise as political leaders by tapping into the crudely populist sentiments that many have come to hold amid an era of widespread economic unfairness. And in the third stage, the demagogues destroy or at the very least thoroughly demoralize the nations that they've taken control of.

We've recently entered that last stage.

While there's still a possibility that a demagogue even worse than Donald Trump will emerge in 2020, for now it looks like his election was the culmination of all the toxic, neo-fascist political energies that have been quietly gaining strength for the last few decades. His brand of fascism, though not anywhere near as frightening as that of Adolf Hitler, has the potential to develop into something resembling it as he and his equally dangerous transition team become tempted to adopt more authoritarian tactics after assuming power.

And they'll be joining a growing number of similarly reactionary world leaders. A great deal of democracies have devolved into tyranny throughout recent years, starting with the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000. This trend has been especially prevalent in the 2010's, with victories for Trumpist leaders having taken place in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland within the past three years. France, Germany, and other European countries are likely to soon succumb to fascism as well as ethnic nationalism surges in the region.

"I believe New Fascism is the single most important political development in our lifetimes," wrote Haque last year regarding this phenomenon. "It is a critical moment for global society — a turning point. Like every turning point, it is a test. A test of the best of us: whether or not civilized societies can in fact stay civilized, in the most essential sense of the word — or whether we risk plunging once again into an era of world war and genocide." And so far, it seems society is failing this test.

Military conflict

Speaking of world war, the current geopolitical situation seems to have as much in common with that of the early 1930's as does the current political situation. As world powers have built up their economic and military strength to unprecedented levels since World War II, they've unconsciously created the factors for World War III, with the structure of the world stage alone making conditions very friendly for the possibility of major conflict. Modern civilization is a tinderbox for a global military clash, and it could very well soon be lit.

While the long-feared threat of war with Russia has been alleviated by Hillary Clinton's defeat, President Trump will of course introduce a whole new set of risks for world war. Specifically, a great concern that I have is how Trump and his foreign policy aides will respond to a major terrorist attack. If a 9/11-like event occurs during Trump's term, the Trump administration, in addition to using it as a tool to push their authoritarian agenda, would likely react by starting several major wars as was the case with the Bush administration.

This scenario, which seems likely given the normalization of terrorist attacks that's occurred around the world in recent years, holds a good chance of leading somewhere very frightening indeed, as Trump's reckless foreign policy ventures inevitably set off a larger series of conflicts within the already unstable world stage.

On November 8 this year, it appears that when Americans were choosing between Clinton and Trump, they were making a choice between two different but equally destructive versions of World War III.

Economics

The transformation of the world's economic system in the past forty years into a tool to funnel wealth to the top, in addition to creating the political crisis that I discussed, has greatly increased the potential for financial meltdown. Income inequality has lead to collapse in the past as the unacceptably top-heavy nature of such economies stifled growth and made it harder for debt to be repaid, and the factors for such a disaster amid the current era of inequality are falling neatly into place.

Firstly, though I've made this point before, it can't be emphasized enough: our current banking system is not sustainable. Due to a series of irresponsible changes that have been made to America's financial sector in the past twenty years, namely the Wall Street deregulations of 2000 and the Wall Street bailouts of 2008, the economy now operates on a system of borrowing and accounting fraud which takes place for the short-term benefit of too-big-to-fail banks, and this order is expected to soon come crashing down. And when this crisis hits, it will likely be bigger than that of 2008, given the unprecedented global debt and stunted economic growth that's appeared since then.

But this will only be one of the earlier manifestations of the larger economic downturn that's certain to befall civilization in the years and decades to come. The mad scramble to exploit the earth's resources and churn out perpetually accelerating economic growth that's taken place in the last several centuries is finally coming to an end, and this next recession may be what officially ushers in the new economic age of stagnation, scarcity, and decline. And even that downturn will pale in comparison to the longer-term effects that the coming climate crisis will have on the economy and other aspects of civilization.

In the meantime, though, the downfall of the current economic, political, and geopolitical paradigm will be a spectacle to behold. And the most important date that this shift seems to be associated with is 2020.

The breaking point

Returning to the predictions made by Galtung, Strauss, and Howe, while their forecasts seemed far-fetched at first, given all the factors I've mentioned it's looking more and more like they were spot on.

According to Strauss and Howe's book, American history behaves in eighty-year cycles consisting of peaks and collapses, with the latest point of collapse having taken place in 1945 and the next one being expected to take place in 2025. And according to Galtung, empires tend to rise and fall in respect to a similar timetable of events, with the current global empire being set to have its day of reckoning at a similar time. But with certain recent developments, chief among them the election of Donald Trump, this process of collapse appears to have accelerated, with Galtung now naming 2020 as the end date.

The survival of the American republic in its current form before modern-day state successions, constitutional crises, and the deterioration of political discourse into tribal warfare tears it apart, estimates Galtung, will end by 2020. The same is the case, he also says, for the existence of the post-Cold War status quo of global military power as major world conflicts end the U.S.'s dominance in that area by 2020. And though he doesn't focus on when the current economic paradigm will meet a similar fate, those who have view 2020 as a pivotal year for this aspect of world events. According to said sociologists, the recession that I mentioned, along with a period of social upheaval as a result of massive wealth inequality, is also expected to emerge by 2020.

In short, crunch time is fast approaching.

"I am nervous," said Neil Howe in 2013 regarding the state of the world as it enters into the next climax of historical events. "I am nervous about the future right now. I think we have a lot more deep issues, deep crises, to save in the economy. I am also very nervous about what I see geopolitically. We cannot possibly afford the government we have promised ourselves. And, that will be a painful process of deleveraging, and it is not just deleveraging the explicit debt that we have already actually formally borrowed, it is all the implicit debt. And, I think we will deal with it, because we have no other choice. But, my point is this: No one simply solves a terrible problem on a sunny day when they can afford, at least for the time being, to look the other way. Problems like that are faced when people have no other choice, and it is a really grim day. And, it is white-knuckle time, and horrible things are happening with markets around the world, or horrible things are happening, at least historically; we have seen that geopolitically around the world. And, that is when people are forced to act."

It's the factor which Howe talks about in that last sentence, though, that provides us with hope. Because aside from the supporters of Trump and other demagogues, polls show that at least in the U.S, most people recognize the problems with how civilization has been conducting itself in relation to economics, geopolitics, social issues, and ecology. And if, as Howe recommends, they react to the coming crises by taking action to fix the system that created them, the post-2020 world could turn out to be a considerable improvement on past eras.

Regardless of the final result, though, we're certainly in for a wild ride throughout these next few years.

The End Is Near

The aversion that so many are feeling towards President-Elect Donald Trump is unquestionably justified; I don't think it's necessary to reiterate the countless reasons he is an extremely divisive leader and a generally dangerous individual. But amid the fear among women, racial minorities, and other groups that are being threatened by his presence, there's another demographic that feels (I suspect) uneasy these days: the members of the corporate elite.

Trump's success was largely a result of the enormous class inequities that have appeared in recent decades. By redirecting people's economic concerns towards immigrants and Muslims, while also bringing up some legitimate issues such as the unfairness of the U.S.'s current trade policies, he ran with success against the establishments of both major parties. And while Trump doesn't pose any real threat to the benefactors of the neoliberal paradigm, his victory, I believe, has forced them to reckon with the instability of the political status quo that they've created; if someone like Trump can run for the highest office and win, what about when a genuine enemy of neoliberalism tries to do the same?

Indeed, when such an event materialized earlier in this election in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the response from the representatives of establishment economics was easy to guess; there's clear evidence that during the primary season, the corporate media, the Democratic leadership, and their allies on Wall Street regarded Sanders as a threat and worked to undermine him. Thomas Frank, in an essay about the anti-Sanders bias of the operators of publications like The Washington Post (and by extension economic elites in general), assessed that "For the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed."

And while Sanders has since been (illegitimately) vanquished, the subjectively horrifying thing that he represented has only gotten more powerful. What Frank and I are referring to, of course, is the possibility of the public becoming unable to tolerate the current economic system and successfully overturning it.

Well, in the following paragraphs, I'm going to provide some very good reasons for their fear being valid. This piece focuses on the past, present, and future of the neoliberal economic and political order, with the latter subject being what reflects my essay's title.

How we got here

At no point in America's history has the economic system been ideally fair. Even during the 1960's, when income inequality was by far at its lowest point in decades, Martin Luther King JR. felt a need to address economic injustice, calling for an economic bill of rights, a universal basic income, and a strong labor movement. But relatively speaking, the second third of the 20th century was a very good period for the middle and working classes.

After the Great Depression, which was a result of the enormous economic inequality that defined the early 20th century, America's leaders were forced to change how the wealth was distributed. In the 1930's, amid overwhelming public pressure, FDR changed his economic approach from the unrestrained version of capitalism that had previously dominated the political debate to Keynesianism, enacting reforms which reigned in corporate power and greatly reduced poverty. And for the next four decades, this economic paradigm persisted, with both parties for the most part upholding the policies of the New Deal.

It must have been no coincidence, then, that it took a full generation for society to start returning to the old order of corporate rule. Starting in the late 1970's, many academic and political leaders, too young to remember what happened when markets weren't sufficiently regulated and income inequality wasn't kept at a low level, advocated for policies which would return the economic system to its 1920's form. This newly mainstream breed of economic thought, which emerged mainly on the right but was also very much embraced by the Democratic Party, is essentially a perversion of capitalism in that rather than giving all people an equal opportunity to succeed economically, it allowed for corporations and the wealthy to re-write the rules of the game to their benefit.

This societal model, which I've discussed in detail in a past article, was not capitalism as it's often been characterized, but a newer and far more dangerous economic ideology called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has for the most part dominated the actions of government officials starting with the at-the-time unusually pro-business Carter Administration, and since then America (as well as many other countries, whose governments have also adopted neoliberalism in recent decades) has drifted ever closer to oligarchy.

For the past forty years, cuts to the social safety net, tax reductions for the wealthy, privatization, deregulation, so-called free trade deals, and at the root of it all an increased involvement of money in politics has resulted in the highest levels of economic inequality on record, with half the people in the country living in poverty and much of the rest not being too far ahead as they own very little wealth compared to those at the top. And while Americans very much want to end this feudalistic version of society, because their government is naturally controlled by these same corporate forces which control the economy, their opinions alone don't have much of an impact.

In recent years, though, that's begun to change.

The unraveling of neoliberalism

For quite some time during this period of modern-day robber barons, those who oppose neoliberalism, though very much in the majority, have largely been outside the mainstream of the debate. But an oppressed population can't be expected to remain helpless forever, especially when the oppression becomes increasingly prevalent, and the pot of public resentment towards the current economic order has started to reach a boiling point.


The first major sign that a revolt against neoliberalism is on its way may have come in 1999, with the outbreak of protests in Seattle over the U.S.'s entering into the World Trade Organization. Since then, shows of resistance towards the economic order have appeared whose levels of success would have been impossible in earlier stages of the neoliberal era; most notable among them the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2016 and the Democracy Spring demonstrations that took place this spring.

So it's no surprise that in this election cycle, the economic policies of government officials have started to match up with the wishes of the people.

Firstly, 2016 has been an unusually good year for advocates of a minimum wage increase. In March, California's governor decided to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022, and four states voted on Election day to raise it to $12 an hour by 2020. Similar actions have been taken in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Washington DC.

And even the election of Donald Trump was in some ways a victory for the lower classes; there's a slim but present possibility that he'll bring back Glass-Steegal, and his protectionist stance on trade has made it so that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is now dead along with America's involvement in past trade deals like it. Indeed, Bernie Sanders has expressed optimism in some areas in response to Trump's victory, saying "To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him."

Cornel West agrees that a new era has befallen the nation this year as a result of the policies of the past forty years, saying in an op-ed this month that neoliberalism was "brought to its knees" on Election Day. But as even Trump's supporters will come to realize in the next few years, there is much more that needs to happen before economic change can come.

2020 vision

Despite the parts of Trump's agenda that I mentioned, the fact remains that on January 20, 2017, the 40th anniversary of the neoliberal era will involve the inauguration of a president who may do more damage to the economic interests of the bottom 99% than any of his predecessors.

I believe he has the potential to do unprecedented harm in this area not because of his intention to repeal Obamacare, or his trickle-down tax plan, or his vision of a drastically reduced social safety net. The worst thing that I expect to happen to the lower classes under Trump is a financial crisis comparable to the Great Depression.

Unsurprisingly, amid 1920's-level income inequality, there is 1920's-level risk for economic collapse. The economies of the U.S. and many other countries have become highly financialized, making global markets ripe for a dramatic downturn. And perhaps even more importantly, worldwide debt outside the financial sector is at an unprecedented $152 trillion, obviously adding to the possibility of economic catastrophe.

"Nothing is priced correctly, especially money," writes James Kunstler on the current economy's lack of sustainability. "It’s all kept running on an ether of accounting fraud. We can’t come to grips with the resource realities behind the fraud, especially the end of cheap oil. And the bottom line is the already-manifest slowdown of global business. The poobahs of banking pretend to be confounded by all this because everything — their reputations, their jobs, their fortunes — depends on the Potemkin narrative that ever-greater economic expansion lies just around the corner. Not so. What waits around the corner is a global scramble for the table scraps of the late techno-industrial banquet."

When this crash hits sometime in the next few years, it will be disastrous. But it will also present a great opportunity for finally defeating the neoliberal forces which helped create it. The magnitude of the wealth that will be lost in this event, along with the unprecedentedly unfair state of the economy that it will take place in, will without a doubt provoke an effort on the part of the populous to overthrow the corporate state which has a very good chance of succeeding.

This revolt will be part of what the anthropologist Peter Turchin views to be the next major wave of social upheaval, which he's found occurs in cycles throughout history. And according to Turchin, American society's next bout with revolution is set to occur in or around the year 2020-which is shortly after the next recession is likely to happen and the date of what's expected to be the most consequential election in our lifetimes.

In short, 2016 has been just a foreshadowing of the seismic political and social changes that indications say will befall society in the years to come, with the culmination expected to arrive in 2020. The neoliberal order, in spite of all the wealth and power it's consolidated, is ultimately as subject to insurrection from the masses as all the other tyrannical regimes throughout history.

And in the process of its death, many possibilities will appear for improving society that go beyond redistributing the wealth; goals like withdrawing from America's perpetual wars, enacting laws to protect the environment, and even ending the two-party system will become very much doable when the population is mobilized for change on the level I expect it to be in the coming years. And when this happens, hopefully those objectives will also include the proposals of Dr. King.