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This golden age for Western governing elites nevertheless bred potential problems for their class rule. First, the very transformation of asset wealth on which the new elite floated threatened to fracture the internal coherence of the ruling classes, for whom wealth, power and territory had traditionally gone hand in hand. The effects of economic globalization—bringing foreign-institutional ownership of national assets and the dilution of local capitalist classes, amid the swirl of international funds—has also broken the previous links of kinship and culture between state elites and asset-owners.

On the hori​zontal plane, meanwhile, the governing classes struggle to craft cohesion between different fractions of capital and help asset owners articulate interests across sectoral or geographic lines. This in turn renders strategic coherence difficult—something evident in the geo-economic tumult of the past year, from the tariff bonanza to the destruction of Gulf oil-and-gas infrastructure and terrorization of the low-wage migrant workforce. [...]

First, the reading proposed does not imply elite control over the social surplus has somehow diminished; there are good grounds to say it has increased. Yet the political unmooring of Western elites has widened the gaps between different fractions of capital and made long-term planning across them more difficult. Hence Krastev’s wonder over Trump’s ‘revolutionary sense of temporality’—an actor who has mercilessly seized on the apertures left by vanishing elite integrators, whose smash-and-grab politics at least promises direct gain. As the model hyperpolitician, Trump seems to offer easy rewards in the sordid struggle over rents. [...]