Vastly unequal empires never end well.

In his 2017 book The Great Leveler, Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, demonstrates how extreme inequality has been “resolved” throughout history. Unfortunately, Scheidel found that so far the only thing that has undone such inequality—the only great leveler, so to speak—is violence. Plague, war, or violent revolutions. “It is almost universally true,” Scheidel writes, “that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time.”

America might be on the cusp of a revolutionary situation, and public disillusionment with Trump’s policies could lead to this dramatic outcome. But it’s not just Trump. While he always acts as an accelerant, this is a process decades in the making ever since neoliberal ideology took over both American political parties nearly half a century ago. 

Trump and the DOGE-bags have created a climate of fear, with masked ICE agents shoving critics of Israel into unmarked vans, the illegal forced deportations, the firings of thousands of government employees and the Republicans who say they’re afraid to speak up because they will be primaried by MAGA.

But clearly there is an enormous rage as well. The Trump administration is aiming to tamp down that fury by instilling more fear: his Department of Justice is pursuing the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, and officially treating Tesla vandals as domestic terrorists, but we may have reached a place where the genuine populist rage is simply too vast to be silenced. The Luigi avatars are common on social media, and this is a nation awash in guns and ammunition. As the Trump administration ignores due process and the Supreme Court, there is a growing attitude among dissidents that if they’re not going to follow the law, why should we?

Even during wartime, our presidents have generally required authorization from Congress to enact major policies, but Trump has totally ignored this Constitutional framework. Not one previous president had established such one-man rule on foreign, economic, and domestic policies, essentially governing through a series of emergency decrees, and doing so in extremely erratic fashion. This seems far more reminiscent of the “banana republics” the US fostered in Central America than our own Constitutional system.

The assassination of the United Health Care CEO appears to have shifted Americans attitudes with regard to the acceptability of political violence against elites and their property. And now an artist has made a deck of cards with America’s oligarchs info, including their addresses, on them, similar to the decks of cards with Saddam Hussain’s officials handed out by Americans during the invasion of Iraq. Justin Caffier classifies his “America’s Most Powerful” cards as an art project and is selling an Iraqi Most Wanted-style deck of cards with the home addresses of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, John Roberts, Marc Andreessen, and 48 others printed on them, through a website online.

The sources of this hatred are not difficult to discern. We are witnessing the most nakedly oligarchic ruling class since the first Gilded Age, when Diamond Jay Gould boasted that he could hire half of American workers to murder the other half. While working class Americans can barely afford rent, groceries, and access to basic services like healthcare, the world’s richest man is firing civil servants by the tens of thousands. As retirees and veterans watch their savings and 401k’s shrivel up, Trump, our billionaire president, is capitalizing on world-historic crypto grifts.

I very much hope that we have not reached a point where violence is the only option, but it would be a mistake to ignore the currents online, in pop culture, and in the streets.

Even the Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, author and New York Times columnist David Brooks, is calling for a “mass civic uprising” against Donald Trump: “We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place… [that] this is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.“

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the thought of our feral elite leading the revolution, spurred on by David Brooks. Brooks does acknowledge the “establishment sins” that led to this point. What he doesn’t admit to is that the way in which the Bobo’s were able to gain enormous wealth was by looting the republic with their parasitic financialization, particularly  stock buybacks, share-price linked executive pay, and the outsized role and pay levels in asset management, particularly private equity and hedge funds, that have been at least as destructive to middle and working-class standards of living as globalization. The sinful include Wall Street, the new billionaire oligarchs and Silicon Valley tech companies, who have prospered mightily from the golden era of free-flowing, seemingly limitless, money-creation; those who were enriched, precisely by the policies that brought us to this point.

There’s a political aspect of all of this: when people feel secure, when they have decent jobs, health care, and a future, they’re less likely to fall for fear-based politics, or engage in violence. A fair economy supports a healthy democracy, which is why the billionaires, who have made out like bandits, are not interested in a fair economy, and certainly don’t want people to feel secure.

 In the past there was a sense of noblesse oblige among American elite, as common sense efforts to reduce the likelihood of pitchfork-wielding mobs, trumbils and guillotines. Unfortunately that sentiment was so 20th Century. The result is a seething anger at America’s elite that has turned our nation into a ticking time bomb.

Bob Dylan was writing about the turmoil of the 1960’s but his lyric is appropriate to our milieu. “It don’t take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.”