Donald Trump’s 2015 speech announcing his candidacy for President of the United States is widely remembered for his comments about Mexican immigration. While immigration was central to Trump’s 2016 electoral triumph, the theme that closed his speech, however, gave his candidacy its central expression. “Sadly, the American dream is dead,” Trump declared. The brash billionaire exploited many Americans’ long-standing economic and cultural insecurities—the pervasive sense of American decline—and rode that wave to the White House. 

In Alienated America, Tim Carney theorized that the breakdown of civil society and the disintegration of social institutions, augmented and reinforced by the economic and demographic devastation wreaking havoc on the working class, was the breeding ground for the populism that produced Trump. And he argued that these conditions will likely create more men like Trump in the future.

It has been assumed that the next generation will be better off than its predecessors. But is that true? And what happens when the house of cards—otherwise known as the “global economy”—collapses? Finally, can the Right capitalize on this turmoil?

A Counterrevolution Delayed?

Already in March 1989, a headline from the Wall Street Journal ominously read: “Statistical evidence already suggest that the American dream is fading.”

In 2024, the dream of owning a home and being able to start a family is now far out of reach for many. The hope of living in a high-trust society has been shattered by fealty to the idol of multiculturalism and the myth of homo economicus, the libertarian claim that man at bottom is an economic unit built for consumption. Meanwhile, the post-national, post-industrial winners barely shield their disdain and contempt for Middle America. A Charles Murray chronicled in Coming Apart, the winners of the neoliberal game of roulette are increasingly separating themselves from hoi polloi they detest and the cultural wreckage they have created.

But what Murray described in 2013 and Trump made a political issue in 2016 have been present since the rise of the neoliberal order beginning in the eighties. The populist movements emerging in the West—and really the entire globe—are symptomatic of larger forces largely hidden deep within the body politic, hibernating over the course of several decades and now beginning to stir.

In 1990, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips argued in The Politics of Rich and Poor that the tax, trade, and regulatory policies of Reaganomics had produced a concentration of wealth in a new financialized ruling class, producing inequality, mountainous debt, and the gobbling up of American assets by foreigners.

Christopher Lasch described the growing divide starkly in Revolt of the Elites: 

Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.

The Right also took notice of the widening polarity between the ruling class and the serfs. Writing in 1996, Sam Francis articulated the divide and called for a Middle American Revolution predicated on creating a middle-class consciousness:

The significant polarization within American society is between the elites, increasingly unified as a ruling class that relies on the national state as its principal instrument of power, and Middle America itself, which lacks the technocratic and managerial skills that wield control of the machinery of power. Other polarities and conflicts within American society—between religious and secular, white and black, national and global, worker and management—are beginning to fit into this larger polarity of Middle American and Ruling Class. The Ruling Class uses and is used by secularist, globalist, antiwhite, and anti-Western forces for its and their advantage.

But the counterrevolution did not come. And America since has grown more polarized ideologically, culturally, racially, and economically. The process of stratification has even accelerated in recent years, with lockdown and race-infected politics, inspired by Covid-19 and the 2020 BLM riots, which have strengthened the hand of the ruling class, enriching oligarchs even as the middle class continues to shrink.

Oligarchy, American Style

Though the American economy continues to generate untold wealth—between early 2000 and the end of 2021, the estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions soared from $44 trillion to $150 trillion—that wealth is skewed toward the super wealthy. The richest 400 U.S. citizens now have more wealth than 185 million of their fellow Americans combined. The average net worth of American households stands at an eye-popping $1.06 million, though the median net worth is a more modest $192,900. Additionally, globalism has severed the connection between the gross domestic product (GDP) and advances in productivity, increases in jobs, and higher wages. According to Raj Chetty, a kid graduating from high school in 1958 had a 90 percent chance of earning more money than his parents, while children born in the eighties have just a 50 percent chance of outpacing the earnings of their parents.

Millennials and Zoomers face even darker prospects, as social mobility has ground to a halt. The “capitalist” economy of the United States has less social mobility than nearly all other Western nations, including “socialist” economies like Denmark. A broken educational system, insane immigration laws, mindless trade policy, the imposition of diversity and multiculturalism, and a bloated regulatory regime have together created a swollen and immovable aristocracy.

Though there has been significant growth and wealth creation, structural changes have produced an economy with a much wealthier upper class while incomes for roughly the bottom 60 percent of Americans are essentially unchanged since the sixties despite continuing increases in productivity. The link between compensation and productivity has also been broken. Since 1979, productivity has increased by 64.7 percent while hourly wages have increased 14.8 percent—a divergence of 4.4 times.

Combined with these factors is a decline in labor-force participation. Peaking in early 2000 at 67.3 percent, America’s overall work rate for Americans aged 20 and older has undergone a near continuous decline, dropping to 62.5 percent in May. Meanwhile, most of the employment growth since the pandemic has gone to immigrants. The Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey shows that while 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans

were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, the number of employed immigrants increased by 3.2 million. Moreover, as George Borjas has demonstrated, immigration plays a surprisingly small role in creating overall prosperity for real Americans, and dramatically redistributes wealth from workers to owners of capital and users of immigrant services.

A 2017 analysis of Federal Reserve data shows that “the median college-educated millennial with student debt is only earning slightly more than a baby boomer without a degree did in 1989.” More than 50 percent of college graduates have jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. One in four college graduates earn under $30,000 annually, and another recent study suggests that most underemployed graduates remain that way for the long term.

Meanwhile, inflation spirals ever upward. As far back as 2016, Charles Hugh Smith argued at The American Conservative that a standard of living common in the sixties was now largely out of reach for most Americans. Access to health care, having reliable vehicles, and holding significant equity in a home are a few of the dozen markers that were widely attainable among the middle class in that decade. Smith estimated that an income of $120,000 is necessary to meet that same threshold today—an amount that’s prior to the heightened inflation of recent years.  

Oren Cass of American Compass has proposed a “Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI),” which consists of the largest expenditures a middle-class family of four might face: rent for a three-bedroom house, a health insurance premium, a car, and a semester of public college tuition. Cass compared the cost of these goods to median weekly earnings for men working full-time, yielding the number of weeks required to cover these costs. In 1985, a typical American man needed 40 weeks of income to cover his family’s major costs, leaving 20 percent of his income for other things; in 2022, it was 62 weeks. A man working a comparable full year does not come close to covering that same set of essentials as in 1985.

Economic deprivation combined with the shattering of families and communities has led to a significant increase in what Anne Case and Angus Deaton have termed “deaths of despair” among working class whites. They argued that “a lack of steady, well-paying jobs for whites without college degrees has caused pain, distress and social dysfunction to build up over time. The mortality rate for that group, ages 45 to 54, increased by a half percent each year from 1999 to 2013.” Most of these deaths are the result of drugs, alcohol, and suicide. 

The data are clear: the American middle class is shriveling, and for many the “American Dream” is literally dying. In America as in Europe, the middle class was the creator and carrier of nationalism—its demise is a death knell of the nation it produced. 

What Does It Mean?

The anxieties of voters about the pace of demographic change and economic decline are legitimate but largely ignored by cosmopolitan elites. Populism is a reaction to a globalization that eviscerates the traditions, customs, and religions of nations and ethnic groups. As a result, the political chaos on display since at least 2016 is certain to continue. 

Right-wing parties may do well in European and American elections in the coming years. But will it matter? Conservatives have often been too leery of wielding power in the wake of electoral victories. But political victories will be limited or easily reversed if the cultural hegemony of the Left is not challenged and displaced. The rising Right must recognize the political power to be gained by harnessing culture, economics, and institutions of civil society.

Conservatism is not about a set of formulas or ideological abstractions. The purpose of economic and political life is the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its culture. The dominant social forces and the elites who benefit from them have no desire to do so. Therefore, conservatives who wish to live under the old way need power—they must not merely oppose the dominant forces but create new ones.