Nemesis by C.A. Bond is a political theory book that argues for and expands on Bertrand de Jouvenel's political model. Jouvenel offers accurate insight into the functions of power, how it grows, its tendency to centralize into a single entity, etc. It departs from jouvenel's classically liberal viewpoints, seeing them as his remaining allegiance to the power conflict that he discovered. I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in political theory.
It shows that most political processes are top down, an elite group appealing to a lower class for power over the middle class. The high classes enlist the low classes to subvert the middle class, because the middle class is the only one with enough power to threaten the elite class. The lower classes accept this alliance because they are in a position of low status and naively see this as an opportunity to change that. This political process only works because the parties involved see it as beneficial to the whole of society. This "High-Low vs Middle"(HLvM) model accurately showcases how and why the middle class is shrinking and losing social influence as well as wealth.
In a democracy like the U.S. this HLvM strategy is executed by appealing to victimary categorizations like "you are oppressed because you are black, you have the right to not be oppressed" which the elites themselves developed and funded the academic research for in order to use for such an appeal. They use the previously established egalitarian mindset (set in place by the ideology of democracy) as a foundation, building up victimary categories and presenting them as violations of that egalitarian ideal. These victimary ideas are used to undermine minor power centers which threaten the greater power center. Think civil rights movement, LGBT activism, etc. This bias towards victimary politics ensures that the traditional middle class mindset of "earn your own living and dont blame others for your circumstance" loses ground to a growing voting demographic that is taught to see the elite class as their savior, the one who will rescue them from their position of victimhood. In a democracy this strategy manipulates the voting populations to the point where there is negligible resistance to the victimary mindset, once the majority of society is in a victimary mindset they become dependent on the elite and will consistently vote in the elite's favor. The democracy has then been subverted and does not act according to any "will of the people", instead it manufactures its own will. This analysis indicates that the primary factor driving the west's trajectory to modernity was chronic institutional conflict, not any scientific, cultural or moral progress.
Often the political system appears conspiratorial from the perspective of the average man, since its decisions seem secretly coordinated and organized to a specific end. Often it may actually be conspiratorial, but this book shows that those decisions are more often made with the context of institutional conflict in mind, which is why most decisions made by elites aim towards the same end. It may appear that many unrelated rich people are suspiciously doing the same thing, but in reality they are all functioning within the same system and therefore make the same decisions.
The book develops an idea of "Imperium in Imperio" or "State within a state". This concept describes how constitutional democracies still manage to centralize power in ways the constitution would prohibit. In essence, NGOs, financial elites, activist groups, media, etc are driven by the HLvM to influence society in ways which the government is prohibited from doing. Each entity fulfills a role in the HLvM struggle that the others can't, they are spontaneously coordinating. Moldbug called this spontaneous alliance of NGOs, the government, the media, academia, etc "The Cathedral" and it is the entity which is receiving all of the newly centralized power.
Complimenting the HLvM this book's next most important concept is the patron theory of politics. A theory which analyzes the nature of political activism and concludes that only institutionally backed political movements ever have any success. Movements require patronage to succeed. Bond demonstrates this by showing how the occupy wall street movement came to a sudden stop immediately when the black lives matter movement came into relevance. He shows that this was done by academics, who suddenly received funding to study race issues. As a result you can see the occurance of the word "racism" rise sharply in published academic papers, while words related to occupy wall street correspondingly drop in usage. Resulting in the modern world we see in 2021, where megacorporations and their logos are in prominent display in gay pride parades and BLM organizations.
This HLvM process and the patron theory of politics prove that to build a realistic model for optimizing politics it is necessary to account for power dynamics and requires an understanding of the top-down nature of political processes. Rather than naively attempting to combat political centralization like the classical liberals and others, a realistic political model would utilize centralization to build a system that functions effectively using the incentives of power without attempting to deny them.