…only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That’s why they can be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they’d rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dredges of society.

This strikes me as anti-white bigotry designed to divide and conquer. It encourages the reader to think of impecunious whites as scum. It does not explain how it distinguishes between the useless peasants and the peasants who have the natural qualities necessary to rise once they find opportunity.

I don’t have a convenient copy of Ibn Khaldun to check, but from memory, I don’t think this is a good fit to what he was trying to get at with asabiya. When unsettled tribes kick the city regime’s ass, take over, and then likely get clobbered some generations later by some other unsettled tribe, it’s not just a ruling class solidarity issue. Indeed, it doesn’t look to me much like a ruling class solidarity issue at all, except perhaps indirectly. (Indirectly, e.g., because lack of ruling class solidarity contributes to the ruler being too insecure to allow competent respected men to have positions of power, especially in the military, for fear of their rivalry.)

Asabiya is important to a number of historically very effective fighting organizations, in several wildly different styles (e.g. classic phalanxes and Renaissance pikemen and to a lesser extent pre-Renaissance English infantry are mutually similar, but all very different from cavalry from various pastoralist groups). No matter how cohesive your ruling class, it’s hard to build such units if you’re too far out on the exploitative despotism scale. (And settling down with a bunch of serfs breeds exploitative despotism. Various direct effects contribute, and an indirect effect probably contributes even more: supporting the formation of proto-states and states with populations much greater than the Dunbar number.)

I’ve griped before about Turchin’s insistence on tying asabiya to income and/or wealth — it’s difficult to see a sensible reason for this interpretation, except in cynical support of the usual Progressive agenda of nominal equality propaganda (traditionally monetary equality, but recently equal outcomes for demographic groups too) with some animals more equal (or, recently, more diverse) than others. And, of course, see no nomenklatura, hear no nomenklatura, speak no nomenklatura. It takes a special kind of historical perspective to blow past stuff like David and Bathsheba, or Xenophon’s acid remarks about Athenians stealing from the public purse, or “who then was the gentleman” and still s.n.n.h.n.n.s.n.n. Of course, in many instances, notably the great classical empires and any number of modern kleptocracies, there is a very strong crosscoupling between monetary wealth and corrupt privilege, so there’s lots of ambiguity. But there are enough modern instances of market economies with lots of monetary inequality and relatively low privilege and corruption that Turchin’s interpretation is a surprising one that deserves a solid justification, not just smoothly assuming a useful Progressive talking point as though we’re all proper fellow travellers here.

Anyway, spandrell’s interpretation seems almost equally stretched, although less absurd than Turchin’s. (I admit I remember some related points in the Ibn Khaldun. E.g., from memory, asabiya falling when the ruler excludes his people from positions of power, instead suppressing rivals and favoring favorites.) I really think that limiting it to the ruling class is missing the point. (And I don’t think we can reliably identify the conquering tribe with the ruling class, not when we’re stretching the concept not just to premodern conquests but to the Soviets.) I also think it’s significant how often very old social arrangements, some significant fraction of which are likely left over from successful warrior arrangements, look less like props for ruling class solidarity than like protocols to help establish and maintain some justified trust between leaders and followers, in the spirit of “see, nothing up my sleeve” or “I cut and you choose”. Frex, any number of arrangements for warriors electing war leaders. Or trial by jury. Or public petition for redress of grievances. Or various norms for rulers to be at least formally subject to the law.

None of this is to say that ruling class solidarity is not historically important, or that spandrell is wrong about Leninism’s approach to building and maintaining it, or wrong about the contrast with various rival societies which have been weakened by e.g. ruling class infighting and tactics like far-against-near alliances. But I don’t think asabiya is a very suitable word for all that stuff, because Ibn Khaldun already used that word to name something else which is at least as important. Asabiya is more nearly about what let the ancient Greeks and the Swiss and some of their neighbors could field really effective heavy infantry units, and about why some kinds of stateless groups outfighting settled rivals was a historical cliche for so long. It’s pretty hard to explain those historical patterns in terms of elite solidarity, while it is pretty plausible that not-just-the-elite social trust and reliability and solidarity had a lot to do with those historical patterns.

He showed us that push-back is possible.

That’s plenty.

As to Borepatch’s ideas about Trump…? I’m not sure that Trump is anything but Trump. Classifying him and what he stands for is a job for historians a generation or two down the road, and I’d hesitate to say that he’s anything at all, except “different” than what’s gone before.

He may be a great president. He may be a disaster, but we’re not going to know until enough time has passed to truly evaluate him and his works.