The entire world is undergoing a major historical transition. The technological changes we are experiencing are occasioning an upheaval on a scale of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; but the first took millennia and the second, centuries:  The current IT Revolution and the incipient BioTech Revolution will unfold within the span of individual lifetimes. In all revolutions, there are winners and losers. And vast numbers of Americans – as with people worldwide – perceive themselves to be the wrongful losers in the current changes. They want to reverse that. Now, they will. And Trump, as Trump himself says, is their “vengeance.”

That’s the year after Dwight Eisenhower took office, the year Earl Warren became Chief Justice, and, coincidentally, Donald Trump turned eight – the age since which, Trump himself has asserted, he hasn’t changed a bit. Now, that’s the date at which America will have stopped changing, too.

It was a time before Sputnik. A time when – as the TV character Archie Bunker would reminisce two decades later, in a theme song fit for the current day – “girls were girls and men were men,” when racial and religious minorities, like children, were, if seen at all, not heard. The Supreme Court hadn’t yet ruled segregation, mandatory school prayer, or restrictions on female contraception unconstitutional. There was no birth control pill; no civil rights or voting rights act; and people lived in fear of being branded un-American and having their lives ruined for voicing any form of dissent or disagreement with their government. Authorities of all types could act secretly and corruptly, and yet people still trusted them. Everyone knew their place. 

It was, in short, a time remembered fondly by certain Americans (most of whom, unlike Trump, were not alive then), and this nostalgia for a lost Golden Age – not unusual in times of great flux – is the driving force behind Trumpism.

Technological developments within the last several decades ... have radically changed the nature of economic production, so that manual labor – especially that requiring substantial brawn – has become much less important than intellectual output, changing the division of labor and flipping the value proposition as dramatically as the advent of agriculture 12,000 years ago. The effects of these changes have been synergistic and cascading.

Take, for instance, the dismal performance of males at the college level today. Women now far outperform their percentage in the population in admission to elite colleges. More young women are simply doing much better academically, and in the other leadership traits selective colleges value, than are young men. As a result, as the economy has deindustrialized and come to rely more on information processing skills than physical labor, there are both fewer jobs (and certainly fewer well-paying jobs) for non-college-educated men – and fewer college-educated men. As a further result, intelligent and successful women no longer feel the need to “marry beneath them” that older generations often did; they, like the colleges they attend, have become more selective, which means that a narrowing pool of men have access not only to the most desirable jobs and most desirable colleges but also to the most desirable women. ... In the face of all this, young men are either simply folding – or lashing out.   

Aggrieved, entitled, performatively faux-macho ... Donald Trump is both the personification of and catalyst for the counter-revolution. But it isn’t about Trump.

Historically, the Third Estate was the peasantry and petit bourgeoisie – in today’s terms, the working and middle class. These Americans, seventy-some million strong and carrying, on average, several firearms apiece, are regularly portrayed as dupes and followers of Trump. I don’t think so. It is Trump who follows them – he’s simply adept at sensing very accurately what this segment of the population wants to hear – and it is the aspiring ruling class around him that constitutes the dupes: The Third Estate is fully in charge of this revolution. And they are angry.

Like any such movement, the revolution will turn first on the upper middle classes – ... it is not the distant aristocrats who become the sustaining fuel of every revolution’s rage, but rather the more accessible level just above the proletariat, the folks the angry new masters perceive as having looked down upon, suppressed, and robbed from them all their lives. In the Chinese Revolution, it was the shopkeepers and intellectuals; in Russia, the kulaks – peasants fortunate enough to be able to own land themselves and hire other peasants. In the Trumpian Revolution, it is professionals and the highly-educated, the lawyers, doctors, financiers, “Hollywood types,” journalists, professors and even school teachers whom Trump’s core supporters have suspected for years were secretly sniggering at them and trying to make them feel small. ...

Most liberals and intellectuals believe that it is state-sponsored oppression that awaits under the Trump Administration. I don’t…. That’s because the real power in this Revolution will be the Third Estate, and they know it. They’re just waiting for Trump to authorize their attacks on the shopkeepers, the kulaks, the professionals – their vengeance, their revenge – which is essentially what all those Trump rallies, with Trump’s not-so-veiled granting of permission for violence, were all about. It won’t be state-sponsored violence and oppression – it will be, rather, state-permissioned violence and oppression not uncommon under repressive regimes (think, the Basij in Iran). ...

The fear on the left, and hope on the extreme right, of an authoritarian future mistakes the social, political and technological architecture of our current age as centralizing when it is in fact the opposite: Social and political structures are breaking apart across the globe in a reflection of a world based on digital technologies that in fact atomize, not aggregate. If – as I and many others have thought for some time – we are now entering the middle stages of a period of sustained intra-societal violence, it will be widely-distributed and bottom-up (as events keep demonstrating), not monopolized from the top down.