W hen Vilfredo Pareto wrote that history is “a graveyard of aristocracies”, he meant the observation to apply to all ruling elites. The Italian economist and political theorist’s description illuminates the world Donald Trump’s victory is transfiguring. The liberal establishment is losing control. Where they cling on – as in universities and sections of the legacy media – the institutions they lead are dying. A counter-elite is gaining power and influence, remaking politics and business even as its ascendancy is generating chaos.
Spending most of his life in the high bourgeois civilisation of 19th-century Europe, Pareto witnessed its disintegration after the First World War. When he died in 1923, aged 75, much of Europe was under threat from bohemian brigands such as Benito Mussolini. He has often been accused of having fascist leanings. It would be truer to classify Pareto as a classical liberal, who had come to believe that societies based on freedom and equality decay from within and are taken over by elites more attuned to the realities of the time.
Pareto never sought respectability. Despite holding a prestigious chair at the University of Lausanne, he chose a life of eccentric semi-seclusion. In 1889 he married Alessandrina Bakunina, a niece of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin; after she left him, he lived in Celigny, a quiet village in the Swiss canton of Geneva. He made his home there with a French woman, Jeanne Regis, in a little villa he built and called “Villa Angora”, which they shared with two dozen Angora cats who occupied the veranda. Proud of his independence, he received visitors of many political stripes who were at odds with their governments.
The human world interested Pareto chiefly as an object of study. Exploring the “non-logical” dimensions of behaviour which economists excluded from their discipline, he dissected the interplay between “residues”, the impulses and sentiments that drive human beings to act, and “derivations”, ideological rationalisations they contrive to justify what they do. He aimed to be rigorously empirical in his analysis. As he put it: “Even an absurd and idiotic argument is a fact.”
Absurdities abound after Trump’s triumph. Sinking liberal elites fear the imposition of a sinister right-wing world-view, but Trumpian ideology is an inchoate hybrid. The unfettered market is celebrated as an engine of innovation, but the process of creative destruction extolled by Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek must operate in an economy sheltered by tariffs from foreign competition. Libertarian individualism and techno-futurism cohabit with Christian fundamentalism. A neo-isolationist yearning for autarchy jostles with a willingness to intervene wherever US interests may be at stake, cold realism with a cult of American greatness that echoes neo-conservatism. Nothing is settled or fixed.
Trump’s cabinet choices mirror this mishmash of ideas. The nomination of Florida Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state entrenches a Washington orthodoxy combining a hawkish view of China and scepticism regarding the Ukraine war. Trump’s choice of former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence exemplifies a strongly anti-war strand, for which she has been attacked as being pro-Russian. The military veteran and Fox TV host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary may represent the view of some in the Trump camp (including his son Donald Trump Jr) that the bloated American defence industry needs a more transparent and competitive procurement system. But if he survives sexual assault allegations, Hegseth – lacking experience of the serpentine manoeuvrings of Washington lobbyists – will be swallowed by the swamp.
Nominated by Trump as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr has a history of fighting corporate interests; but he is notorious for his anti-vax stance and outlandish assertions such as the claim that Aids may not be caused by HIV. Each of Trump’s appointments will need Senate approval.
For all his clean sweep, Trump will be limited by narrow majorities and pork-barrel politicking by fellow Republicans in Congress. The uncertainties surrounding his cabinet may not be wholly unwelcome. A succession of ephemeral placeholders enables him to maintain his position as monarch in a court ruled by his whims.
Elon Musk’s position as co-director of a newly created Department of Government Efficiency is entirely at the president-elect’s discretion, but antagonism has already been reported between the Trump and Musk camps. A mercurial titan dedicated to interplanetary colonisation will not long be content cost-cutting for the new administration. (He may play a more lasting and consequential role in dealings with China.) The mooted trillion-dollar reduction in federal spending he is supposed to deliver will not happen. When Trump boasted during his 2016 campaign of being “the king of debt” – “I do love it. I love playing with it” – he delineated what looks like an inexorable trajectory: the US will continue its slide into deepening insolvency.
There may be a void at the centre, but there has been a decisive shift of power in America. The election was a contest between rival oligarchies, with Musk and various lesser-known billionaires making major donations to Trump’s campaign. The founder of the big-data company Palantir Technologies, Peter Thiel, did not support Trump financially but had a notable influence via JD Vance, a long-standing protégé. Against them were ranged George Soros and his son Alex, Bill Gates (who reportedly made a $50m donation to a nonprofit organisation which backed Kamala Harris’s presidential bid but did not explicitly endorse her) and other left-leaning billionaires backing Harris. After Joe Biden’s defenestration as a presidential candidate, corporate donations to the Democrats soared, a large part of the money being spent on advertising to no or negative effect. A portent of the future was supplied by Jeff Bezos. When the liberal Washington Post, owned by the former Amazon CEO, announced in an editorial on 25 October that it would not be endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years, an era ended. The hegemony of the American liberal elite was lost before the votes were counted.
The counter-elite that gambled on Trump have profited handsomely, with shares in firms owned by them rising dramatically. It is tempting to see the election as confirming the Marxian truism that politics is a shadow play in which victory goes to the dominant economic class. Certainly, a section of American capital demonstrated impressive political nous. During the neoliberal period, capital aligned itself with global free trade. At present, the most astute among the oligarchs are adapting to globalisation’s retreat. Backing AI, robotisation and the vertiginous rise of cryptocurrency, the counter-elite is aligning itself with the next stage of capitalist development. Anyone who talks of “late” capitalism has not understood its prodigious capacity for self-renewal.
It would nonetheless be mistaken to interpret the behaviour of these oligarchs as serving only their financial self-interest. To a considerable extent, they were reacting against a threat posed to an idea of America. Apparent collusion between the Biden administration and some big tech companies in attempting to stifle free speech in social media offended an image of themselves as enjoying a quintessentially American freedom. Above all, it was the extravagant sense of entitlement of the liberal classes, with their ill-concealed disdain for the values of much of the population, that enabled the right to mount its counter-revolution. Trump’s elites have their own ideologies, but they are more pliable than the rigid constructions of hyper-liberals, and their contradictions match those of American life.
More than the grand theorising of Marx or Hayek, Pareto’s penetrating empiricism captures the shift that is under way. Unwilling or unable to grasp that their ideological excesses opened the way to the insurgents that are overthrowing them, liberal elites have become possessed by the ideas they used to legitimate their leading position in society. They issue solemn warnings that Trump will “politicise” the machinery of American government – as if the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programme it promoted under Biden was not itself radically political. Presuming their exotic brand of liberalism to be the built-in end point of modern history, they cannot understand Trump’s takeover as anything other than a reversion to a deplorable past.
In fact, Trump is the face of things to come. Alongside the ultra-Hobbesian Nayib Bukele of El Salvador (who made Bitcoin legal tender in the country in 2021), the fiery Argentine anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, the illiberal democrat Viktor Orbán in Hungary and subtly adaptable post-fascist Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the US president-elect is a revelation of modernity as it is today and will be tomorrow in much of the West. Redoubts of progressive rule such as France, Germany and the UK are crumbling outliers.
In Britain, Keir Starmer’s regime is trapped by the absurd logic of its progressive formulae. What could be more rational than the UK “resetting its relationship” with a Europe that is at once economically stagnant and politically unstable? What could be more eminently reasonable than imposing a contractionary Budget in conditions of gathering recession, alienating pensioners, farmers and business, while clinging to an enormously costly green orthodoxy? Ensnared by its obsolete derivations – the rationalisations it invoked in its pursuit of power – Labour will be lucky to survive a full term. If it does, it will surely not be under its current leadership.
Progressive hegemony is ending in this country in any case. Are we fated to endure the disorders that are shaking so many other Western states? Or could this battered old kingdom – with its archaic parliamentary rituals a relic of bygone days, as all higher minds agree – avoid revolutionary upheaval and reinvent a more durable liberal way of life?
Contemplating the scene from the heavens, Vilfredo Pareto’s shade would smile as the circulation of elites moves into its next phase. He had seen it all before when liberal civilisation destroyed itself in Europe after the First World War. What will follow its self-immolation in America, a century later, would make an intriguing subject for reflection.
[See also: We need to talk about dying]
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