Where should we look for a new elite? Curtis Yarvin has a clear answer: “They are disgusted dissidents from the old elite whose need for secrecy has just ended.”
We do not necessarily have to imagine people secretly lurking inside the European Commission, longing to close the borders, abolish the Green Deal, and end the war with Russia. Rather, the point is that people who have been expelled from the ivory tower, or who have left it in disgust, form their own groups with different rules, different habits, and a different system for selecting leaders. From time to time, they bring in outsiders as well, including people from distinctly working-class backgrounds (just as the official elite does). But because these groups are newer, they adapt much more readily to those outsiders.
As long as the old elite is doing well, these groups scrape by somewhere on the margins, while each member individually dreams of being accepted back. But if the old elite collapses, or at least weakens substantially, they can take power. At a certain stage, this transfer of power may take the form of a revolutionary explosion, but quite often nothing of the sort is necessary.
This also explains why links between dissident groups and political activists—and, more generally, an interest in a political program—emerge only at a relatively advanced stage of their development.
And this is precisely where a historical perspective becomes useful. All of this is, in fact, historically normal. It is equally normal for the retreating elite to perceive the process as insane decline, the end of the world, and so forth, and to fill the public sphere with such complaints. But the story does not end there. Once their period of lamentation is over, they have little difficulty adapting to the new world. That is how some families of big capitalists became families of Communist functionaries, only to become big capitalists again after 1989.
From this perspective, there would actually be little reason to get worked up about any of this if it were not taking place alongside Islamization associated with population replacement and the threat of nuclear war. Otherwise, we would simply try to live our ordinary lives in such a way that the quarrels of our rulers affected us as little as possible. Stay out of it and, when the right moment comes, support whichever elite offers us the most advantageous form of rule.
The circulation of elites, then, is no disaster. The disaster is when an elite that should have been swept away long ago manages to cling to power.