So goes the old joke. The punchline soon follows: “Yeah, and they’re rioting in the streets, too.”

Bur we’re not really talking “peasants”, in a Marxist or Medieval sense of the word, as a vast agricultural class of serfs or tenant farmers. With the mechanization of agriculture, only a small population of technicians grow our food and fiber, aided by the occasional pulse of foreign labor that is briefly seasonally assigned to the labor-intensive manual tasks of farm labor that cannot be performed by machines.

The new peasant is an urban, or suburban creature. Sure, some live in the “country”, where they engage in the service and support activities that make modern agriculture possible. They fantasize about buying a ranch if they hit the Lotto. They sell tractors, they are linemen for the County, they work at Wal-Mart or the Toyota dealership, or they are cops or civil servants or dental hygienists or sports car mechanics or drive big rigs.. But these folks can just as easily do the same work in town, or even in a large city. They may wear cowboy boots and Stetsons, and have wagon-wheel chandeliers in their living rooms, they may own pickup trucks, listen to C&W and follow NASCAR, but no matter how much they identify with the rural lifestyle, they really are not part of it. And the new peasant may not be culturally connected with rural life at all. He may own a small business in Queens, and his grandparents may have come from Poland, or he may teach school in Miami.

What makes these “plain working folks” unique and distinctive, what binds them together as a cohort of people with common interests (a CLASS, there, I said it!) is that they are actually doing fairly well. They live in a detached house, or an apartment. They probably own an automobile, or two. Many have jobs in retail, or an air-conditioned office, and some even used to have good paying Union jobs in manufacturing. Their kids can go to college and then move up into the middle class. Someday they may own their own business or break into the professions or the executive or administrative ranks of government or business. To use a military metaphor, the new peasant is a a non-commissioned officer,a senior enlisted man and maybe even a warrant-officer–someday. And maybe some day his kid will graduate from West Point.

The industrialized world, and particular Western Europe and the USA have really done a very good job at moving large numbers of their peasantry into this world, a world that even thinks of itself as “middle class”. Even those that haven’t made it yet, or who are just getting started, have hope that they will make it, or that at least their kids will make it someday. They know they are better off than their parents, and they are convinced their kids will do better than them. And they remember their grandparents talking about how rough things were when they were peasants. I’m not being sarcastic. This was a remarkable achievement, one that Western World, and now, some parts of Asia, can be proud of. Capitalism worked. It not only provided prosperity, it also brought justice and freedom.

But that was then. This is now. For a variety of reasons, this century-long history of social progress is starting to falter. Its easy to name villains and fantasize about conspiracies, but in reality, shit just happens. There are no doubt villains and conspiracies, but they are taking advantage of this hesitancy, not necessarily the cause of it. But the peasants can feel it. Its in the air, its in the water, its behind them, looking over their shoulder. They can sense that the age of progress is starting to falter, many of them are starting to see they will never be as well off as their parents, and their children have no chance at all. The thoughtful ones among them strongly suspect how well off you are depends more on when you were born than on who your parents were, or how hard they worked.

Maybe its the economy, maybe the environment, maybe the population is too large or maybe the resources are running out. And yes, there are evil and greedy men and collectives who are busy making sure they will prosper even if it means many more must suffer. But whatever the reason, the peasants know hard times are coming, and they understand that they are going no further, in fact they are sliding backwards; slowly at first, but increasingly faster every day. They’ve lived a long time, and their families have long memories, and they are not stupid. They remember grandpap talking about “the good old days” and they know they really weren’t so good. And they know that they just might be coming back. Some counsel that if some of us settled for less, there still might be enough for everybody, but no one wants to hear that. They would rather believe that they have been cheated and betrayed, and they will follow those who know they want to hear that, and tell it to them every day. And they will elect a tyrant who will promise them redemption by offering them a scapegoat.

You can call it populism, but its happening all over, and it looks very similar whether its happening in the US or the EU or the UK or the RU. Its what always happens when the peasants revolt, although when the dust settles they usually find nothing really has changed. “Things still look the same, and history ain’t changed”. Poor and chaotic societies eventually become stable when they become feudal. But this is how prosperous but declining societies under stress tend to react. Its called fascism, the dictatorship of the middle class.