Vox linked to this post about the USA. I would add that that same process occurs elsewhere: the establishment in the UK (and most of Europe is EU friendly, suspicious of isolation, and hates populists from Le Pen to Putin. Much of the lobbying and campaign funding is corporate and comes with strings attached. The new money is as politically astute as the old money: for both rely on regulation within the nation to give them and advantange, and free trade treaties to subvert any limits on their transnational activity.

Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top.

These gains have translated into political power to rig the system with bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, trade deals, and increasing market power – all of which have further pushed down wages and pulled up profits.

Those at the very top of the top have rigged the system even more thoroughly. Since 1995, the average income tax rate for the 400 top-earning Americans has plummeted from 30 percent to 18 percent.

Wealth, power, and crony capitalism fit together. So far in the 2016 election, the richest 400 Americans have accounted for over a third of all campaign contributions.

Americans know a takeover has occurred and they blame the establishment for it.

There’s no official definition of the “establishment” but it presumably includes all of the people and institutions that have wielded significant power over the American political economy, and are therefore deemed complicit.

At its core are the major corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; the billionaires who invest directly in politics; and the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers.

Arrayed around this core are the deniers and apologists – those who attribute what’s happened to “neutral market forces,” or say the system can’t be changed, or who urge that any reform be small and incremental.

Some Americans are rebelling against all this by supporting an authoritarian demagogue who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. Others are rebelling by joining a so-called “political revolution.”

The establishment is having conniptions. They call Trump whacky and Sanders irresponsible. They charge that Trump’s isolationism and Bernie’s ambitious government programs will stymie economic growth.

The establishment doesn’t get that most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

Most people are more concerned about economic security and a fair chance to make it.

The establishment doesn’t see what’s happening because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. It also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in bringing all this on.http://robertreich.org/post/139811651355

The peasants are revolting, for, As Alte notes some years ago, there is no room for the freeman in this system. You are either a ranked officer in the military or enlisted in a corporation. You are not allowed to be free: the free are outlaws, and held in contempt.

But this does not work. For the social justice convergence means that dysfunction rules. Even within the most healthy systems: Crossfit 16.1 had a very overweight athlete in the first demonstration (from a competition sponsor) to demonstrate inclusion. We must be average, even if that is dysfunctional.

To be functional is to be over the pale, and the people are rebelling.

We always end up with precisely the government we deserve, and if we’ve become incompetent to rule ourselves, then it is logical that we will be ruled by other people. Most families are now headless, so the state is doing their duty by stepping up and taking that place.

You may like to think of yourself as a freeman, and not a serf or even an aspiring lesser-noble, but that is actually a role allowed under neofeudalism. You are, you see, an outlaw. You are outside of the bounds of the system. You’ve gone rogue. You have a bounty on your head and it’s really only a matter of time before they trump up charges and drag you in to be hanged.

Unless….

Unless, that is, you manage to create a society outside of the bounds of their creation. A town, perhaps, or a large independent farm. A vibrant community offering some vital service that they are loathe to disturb, and that they choose to negotiate and trade with, rather than simply overrun and subject. It happened then, it can happen now.

But this has been coming for some time. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are beholden to the corporations: in the Commonwealth we have a political class: young men and women with a sense of entitlement and hubris, instead of being called prats and have sense bashed into them on the Rugby field (male) or hockey/netball court (female) do “Modern Greats” (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxbridge, or the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, Otago: (and McMaster and Victoria universities) then work for the party before gaining a safe seat. They have never missed a meal. They have never had to make payroll. And most of them are too busy and self-important to breed.

For the freeman sees not public servants and representative democracy, but Lords, injustice, and disempowerment. The anger is growing. The volatility in the electorates within the commonwealth is because we believe that throwing the bastards out every decade helps. But the USA is more sclerotic.

Both Occupy and Tea Party we’re the early warning signs that the establishment refused to consider. Republicans figured they could co-opt Tea Party and then go back to business as usual. Even the Tea Party primary challenges (some successful) were seen as something that could be weathered and not as a sign of a base increasingly hostile to the lordship of the establishment.

Likewise, how anyone on the left could look at Occupy and not realize that it’s natural home was with Sanders and not with Clinton is astonishing.

So now we have Trump and Sanders. The establishment still refuses to understand it, but more critically they refuse to understand or accept these are the moderate options. Should the establishment hold on and fail to respond to the base, or even worse, give themselves all the prizes and the conventions and inform everyone it’s totally in the rules that they can do this… then what comes next isn’t going to be ‘We hate the establishment but we’re still going to play the game within the confines of the existing political structures’, it’s going to be lampposts and guillotines.

Exactly, people pontificating about how Trump is like Hitler or Mussolini don’t seem to understand that if the system is not reformed a Hitler or Mussolini or Hugo Chavez is what we are going to get.

The people in charge seem to think they can operate with impunity, imposing the costs of open borders and globalization on the working and middle classes while they reap the rewards. Their motto? “F**k em”

Apparently the people who are in charge don’t understand that the social contract works both ways. If they have no regard for the rights and benefits of the people in fly over country and the working and middle classes, why should those people have any regard for rights and benefits of the people in charge.

The Estates-General convocation was on May 1789, the assault on the Bastille was in July, in August Feudalism was abolished, and Louis the XVI was executed in January 1793.

Do you think Louis XVI could have imagined that he would be executed thirty-two months after calling the Estates-General into session?

Feudalism was better than facebook. Because the king knew that if he did not ride with his Lords into battle, and show them loyalty, they would not be loyal. Fealty ran both ways. A king who cared not for the populace — John Lackland springs to mind — was held in scorn. If lucky (like John) he can negotiate a great charter. If less lucky (Charles Stuart) he faces a block and axe.

And this elite is corrupt. They demand our attention (the number of businesses that use facebook to communicate — or churches that do so — is alarming. Facebook mines all data. Far better to use MeWe or Ello). They manipulate our perception of what is going on. Like false prophets they proclaim peace and progress as the risk of war and penury mounts as a direct consequence of their policies.

It is time to disempower them. It is time to vote them out: move our social accounts elsewhere, not buy their magazines, ignore the books and music they promote, and build a more vibrant city, where they are beyond the pale. If they will not tolerate us, we should not tolerate them, or be like them.