If disruptions in the economy— slow growth in productivity, lack of steady employment, and stagnant incomes for those in the lower 50 percent of the income distribution— seem bad the disruptions in the political system are much more worrisome. The political signs of disequilibrium in the advanced industrialized countries include votes for extreme parties, a rise of maverick candidates, an explosion in hate groups of various kinds, and so forth. Much of this can be grouped under the theme of a rise of populism, which opposes elites of various kinds (Brubaker 2017). One of the most telling signs of a democracy in trouble is volatility: repeated shifts in votes from left to right and back again (Easton 1983). Clearly, large proportions of the public, especially those raised in traditional contexts, believe that political elites ignore their interests in favor of others, whether these others are migrants or minorities or women or any combination of these (Lyman 2016). This means that the contemporary model of democracy, an eighteenth- century institutional innovation, needs to be revised to establish better channels of communication between elites and masses. Representative government, the current solution, is not enough. Many of the institutional mechanisms for mediating between “the people” and elites including political parties and the media are now distrusted (Brubaker 2018). The old idea of Kornhauser (1959) about intermediate interest groups no longer works! The most recent dramatic illustration of this distrust is the giles jaunes (yellow vests) movement in France, which started in November 2018 and continues as this book goes to press.

In the previous chapter, we focused on solving adaptive problems that increased opportunities for greater income equality, one kind of power for our three disadvantaged groups: industrial working men, minorities, and women. In this chapter, we start with another dimension of power related to these disadvantaged groups, namely, how to increase their political power inside our current democratic model. The long sweep of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw many signs of gradual dispersions of political power, as manifest in the expansion of voting rights and the creation of a welfare state to protect against the disruptions in the economy.