Revolution is in the Air

Last Saturday, the streets of Washington DC seemed to be the scene of a new revolution. The interviewees rejected the outcome of the presidential elections and claimed Trump had won. It was  difficult for Europeans to understand as there was no reason to believe in fraud, apart from the latest tweets of America’s funniest president ever.

The media presented the street demonstration as a big mistake, but they are insufficiently analysing the root cause of the people’s anger. The deep trouble of the lower social classes already became visible through the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which was essentially a political uproar. In this blog, we already highlighted the frustration of the middle class and even worse, the middle class’ complete lack of prospects for a better future. A lot of small entrepreneurs have lost their business to the benefit of large scale organisations, usually commercial chains. These large organisations are not run by charismatic leaders with a golden heart, but rather by entire platoons of MBA graduates, who don’t leave a single crumble on the table for external small supplier businesses.

In an article entitled “Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?”, The Economist pointed to an additional source of frustration or lack of prospect: the fact that even university graduates face an increasingly difficult time in maintaining their position or moving upward on the social ladder of the public and private administrative elites. The number of university graduates have risen considerably but the number of meaningful jobs for educated graduates have not grown accordingly. As a result, a growing number of graduates have no prospect of achieving what they were told to achieve. These ‘geese’ are wandering desperately through the social media in search of recognition, knowing that they will soon be slaughtered. As the Economist article mentions explicitly: “The feeling of resentment is particularly strong among people brought up to believe that they ought to be in the elite.”. It  will take another blog to discuss why we are so many.

The power is in the hands of a few large capital companies and their privileged lackeys. The question is if the three outsider groups described above will find each other for a common cause. Some kind of French Revolution is hanging in the air. It looks like we need to push the reset-button of our entire economy. This need has been described in Tomas Sedlacek’s book “Economics of Good and Evil”. In earlier times, such a system reset usually happened through war. The Corona crisis is not as heavy as a war, but it brings about some unexpected waves and it releases hidden frustrations. I also refer to my blogs Economic Justification in a Culture of Scarcity and Guy Fawkes Night.

Picture: Washington DC 1986 ©Wim Lahaye