When a new system is on the rise, it needs more people to join. Maybe it doesn’t need everyone, there may be an “out” group which is either the enemy or the scapegrace or both, but basically they want people inside their new system. Capitalists want wage workers; communists want everything collectivized and so on.
But when you’ve won, when your system, your ideology, is the only one available to most people, well then, you want people out because if you push them out the benefits for those who remain are greater and because being pushed out is such a huge punishment. If there is more than one system easily accessible to people, a person kicked out of one can usually go to another.
Even an alternative system which is not easily available, but does exist mitigates against abuse. It’s not an accident that the late era weakening of the Soviet Union and then the end of the Cold War saw much more abuse of populations in the capitalist world.
We, if it’s not obvious, are in a period with a dominant hegemonic ideology: capitalism of the neoliberal variety. (The previous dominant capitalist ideology was “New Deal” or “Post War” capitalism and was quite a bit different, while still being capitalist.)
This “pushing out” operates at all levels. At the bottom it means you get pushed out onto the street. In the middle it means descent to the working class or precariat. In the upper class, which is not the ruling class), it means dropping to the middle. And at the top, in the ruling class, it means being pushed into the upper class: people who are very comfortable and have more money than they need, but have no real power. You can have tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars and be in the upper rather than ruling class: it’s about power more than money. Some politicians and corporate executives are in the ruling class despite being worth only a couple tens of millions and even some billionaires, with just a few billion, aren’t really ruling class if they only have the money and don’t have control of any important company or some lever of power.
The pushing out is one of the symptoms of ideological decay. Peter Turchin has become famous for talking about “elite overproduction” but it has been understood for a long time that people who had expectations of being in the ruling or upper class and are kicked out are dangerous to the status quo. Indeed everyone who had expectations and didn’t get them is dangerous, but people who know how the system actually works and who were groomed for some form of leadership are particularly so.
At first the pushing out doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter much in the 80s or 90s or even 2000s, but eventually it reaches critical mass: an elite faction in opposition to the main system, massive popular discontent and, for a variety of reasons, an enforcer class unwilling to do their jobs.
This doesn’t have to be from the left; there are definitely right wing revolutions.
I leave it to readers to think this thru and apply it to our current situation.
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