The Banality of Ambition: Elite Overproduction and Democratic Fragility

Peter Turchin’s observation that competition within states exceeds competition among states captures something I witnessed firsthand in Weimar Germany. The real danger to republics comes not from external enemies or class warfare between rich and poor, but from intra-elite fragmentation—too many educated, capable individuals chasing limited positions of status and power. This is elite overproduction, and it creates the preconditions for totalitarianism’s emergence. When I analyzed the origins of totalitarian movements, I noted they required two elements: atomized masses and rootless elites. Elite overproduction manufactures the latter—ambitious individuals disconnected from traditional communities, their loyalty structures dissolved, willing to join any movement promising advancement. The Weimar pattern should haunt us: an educated middle class expecting professional success, economic crisis closing opportunities, resentment channeled into extremist promises of status restoration. What makes this dangerous is not villainy but ordinariness—careerism divorced from moral thinking, functionaries willing to implement any policy if it advances their position. This is the banality at the heart of elite competition, and it threatens the public realm democracy requires.

Elite Overproduction and the Crisis of the Public Realm

The public realm—the space where citizens engage in speech and action among equals—requires a certain stability. Participants need secure enough positions to engage in genuine deliberation rather than performative ideology. Elite overproduction destroys this foundation by creating a mass of educated malcontents: too sophisticated for working-class solidarity, too numerous for elite absorption, desperate for recognition their credentials promised but cannot deliver.

Consider the mathematics. A society produces thousands of law school graduates annually, but only hundreds of prestigious partnerships exist. It credentials tens of thousands with doctoral degrees, but professorships number in the mere thousands. Each wave of educated strivers confronts ascending qualifications that purchase diminishing returns, positional goods losing value as access democratizes. This is not Marx’s conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat but fragmentation within the credentialed class itself. Upper nobility versus lower nobility. Established gatekeepers versus ambitious newcomers.

Weimar Germany exemplified this pattern with tragic clarity. Lawyers, doctors, academics—all educated, all expecting the professional success their qualifications traditionally guaranteed—found economic crisis had eliminated opportunities. Their resentment made them susceptible not to communist promises of class revolution but to Nazi promises of status restoration and ethnic scapegoating. They became the bureaucratic functionaries of extremism, implementing policy with efficiency divorced from moral reflection. These were not the lumpenproletariat Marx feared but the educated middle class denied expected advancement.

When participation in the public realm becomes competitive strategy rather than collective judgment, speech shifts from truth-seeking to weapon in status competition. Citizens signal loyalty, perform ideological purity, demonstrate worth by attacking designated enemies. The plurality democracy requires—honest disagreement among diverse perspectives—gives way to factional warfare where opponents must be destroyed rather than persuaded.

The Banality of Elite Ambition

Turchin’s second principle states that elites demonstrate no loyalty to family, people, or state—only to power accumulation. This recalls my analysis of Eichmann, though the contexts differ radically. What I observed in that glass booth in Jerusalem was not demonic wickedness but something more disturbing: thoughtless careerism, bureaucratic ambition indifferent to the content of policy it implemented. Eichmann murdered millions not from hatred but from professional devotion to efficient administration, advancement through competent performance regardless of moral dimension.

Elite disloyalty operates similarly. Ambitious functionaries abandon principles, betray allies, destroy institutions to advance careers. These are not villains—no grand malevolence, no ideological conviction—merely careerists optimizing for personal advantage. This is banality in its truest form: absence of thought, replacement of moral judgment with procedural competence, willingness to serve any master promising advancement.

Athens after Pericles demonstrated this pattern with instructive clarity. Cleon and Alcibiades competed not through coherent strategic vision but via demagogic promises calibrated to assembly applause. Strategic coherence became sacrificed to rhetorical brilliance. Long-term planning gave way to contradictory policies lurching between defensive caution and aggressive adventurism based on which orator held temporary sway. Alcibiades personified elite disloyalty in its purest form—switching allegiances from Athens to Sparta to Persia and back to Athens based purely on personal advantage, untethered to principle or community. His brilliance made him indispensable; his disloyalty made him destructive.

This prevents formation of durable institutions. When every leader prioritizes personal advancement over collective projects, long-term planning becomes impossible. Caesar’s assassins claimed to defend republican virtue, but their motivation was resentment of Caesar’s dominance—elite competition masquerading as principle. Their act created the power vacuum that enabled Octavian’s consolidation, a worse concentration of power than they feared. The republic died not from Caesar’s ambition but from elite competition that destroyed the institutional framework meant to contain it.

Democracy’s Vulnerability to Demagogic Competition

Sophocles understood something vital. In Antigone, when Creon dismisses public support for Antigone by asking “Should I the king listen to the mob?”, he reveals tyranny’s essence: rulers ignoring popular will, treating legitimate criticism as disorder requiring suppression. Yet I observe a complementary danger—democracy becomes vulnerable when elites compete via mass manipulation rather than genuine persuasion.

The ancient Greek “demagogue” meant leader of the people, but implied pandering to passions rather than appealing to judgment. Elite overproduction intensifies this—many capable speakers, limited positions, powerful incentive to promise unrealistic solutions and demonize opponents. The public realm requires natality—new beginnings through speech and action—and plurality—diverse perspectives honestly debated. Elite competition can support these when discourse remains generative. But when competition becomes existential, discourse transforms into warfare.

Athens lost the Peloponnesian War partly due to elite competition producing policy incoherence. Naval power had created Athenian democracy—rowing warships required hundreds of poor citizens working in coordination, giving common people military importance and thus political leverage. But this same democratic openness made Athens vulnerable to demagogic manipulation. Without Pericles’ unifying authority, multiple capable politicians competed by proposing maximalist policies: aggressive offensives, the disastrous Sicilian expedition, punitive actions against allies. The assembly, swayed by rhetorical brilliance rather than strategic wisdom, oscillated between incompatible approaches.

Greek playwrights functioned as prophets because they taught citizens to think rather than react, to exercise judgment rather than follow passion. Theater was civic education, forcing Athenians to confront hard questions about justice, power, and responsibility. When this educative function collapses, democracy loses the thoughtful citizens it requires. Opponents cease being fellow citizens with different views and become enemies requiring elimination.

Preventing Totalitarian Consolidation

Elite overproduction creates preconditions for authoritarianism: educated masses denied expected status, elites competing destructively, public realm corroded by instrumental discourse. Rome’s transition from republic to empire followed this pattern—Caesar’s assassination triggered power struggles among multiple capable leaders, the post-assassination power map fragmenting across Gaul, the Eastern provinces, North Africa, and Italy. Philippi resolved nothing except which faction would dominate; it could not restore the republican institutions that elite competition had already destroyed.

But this pattern is not deterministic. What prevents the slide? Strong institutions limiting winner-take-all stakes. Multiple power centers—federalism, separation of powers, decentralized authority—forcing cooperation rather than consolidation. Civic culture valuing public realm over private ambition. Expansion of meaningful work absorbing ambitious individuals without zero-sum competition.

Most critically, maintaining the public realm where plurality and natality can flourish. This requires citizens capable of thought, of judgment, of distinguishing genuine deliberation from performative competition. It requires institutions—perhaps modern equivalents of Greek theater—that educate citizens in exercising judgment rather than merely recognizing faction. It requires recognizing that elite overproduction threatens not when societies produce capable individuals but when they fail to create legitimate roles for their exercise of capability.

The banality of ambition is more dangerous than dramatic villainy precisely because it operates through ordinary careerism, through thoughtless optimization for personal advancement. Preventing totalitarianism requires not suppressing ambition—impossible and undesirable—but channeling it through institutions robust enough to contain competition, diverse enough to provide multiple paths to meaningful work, and grounded enough in civic culture to maintain the public realm as a space for genuine action rather than mere performance. Elite overproduction becomes catastrophic only when combined with institutional failure and the collapse of thoughtful citizenship. These are conditions we can address, if we recognize the danger before it becomes irreversible.