In the tradition of The Lonely Crowd, an ambitious sociological, psychological, philosophical, and economic analysis of the rise since the 1960s of a new American elite whose narcissism and moral corruption threaten to destroy the fabric of the nation.

In the late 1970s, Sir John Bagot Glubb published a now mostly forgotten book called The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, which estimated that most empires do not last more than 250 years. As America approaches that auspicious benchmark, a new elite has risen to power that threatens to make the once-great country another footnote of history.

For more than 150 years, America built itself into a global beacon of power and hope atop a firmament of covenant—a sacred commitment, exemplified in the founding documents but maintained and updated through the decades, to a societal structure based on a shared sense of history and destiny. But beginning in the 1960s with the assassination of JFK and extending into the 1970s with the identity crisis brought on by the loss of the Vietnam War all the way up to today, this covenant began to fade, and a crippling sense of dysphoria began to emerge.

In America vs. the Overclass, scholar Stephen B. Young (Kissinger’s Betrayal) reveals the deep psychosocial roots and existential danger of this turn away from the covenant and the rise of a new type of American ruling-class mentality: a powerful “other-directed,” Gnostic way of thinking that has seized the levers of power from education to business to government to turn the global beacon of power and hope into a nation of narcissistic, confused, and depressed professional managers.

Drawing together threads from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Friedrich Hegel to Karl Marx to the great thinkers of the 20th century to today, America vs. the Overclass exposes the fateful, undercover battle going on for the soul of America—and how we can restore the covenant and save our country before it’s too late.

Stephen B. Young is the global executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism. He is the author of Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good and The Road to Moral Capitalism and has served as an assistant dean at Harvard Law School and dean and professor of law at Hamline University School of Law.

His other books include: Kissinger’s Betrayal: How America Lost the Vietnam War; The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam (with Nguyen Ngoc Huy); The Theory and Practice of Associative Power: CORDS in the Villages of Vietnam 1967–1972; and Qur’anic Guidance for Good Governance (coeditor with Abdullah Al-Ahsan).

His commentaries have been published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Asia Times, RealClear Politics, RealClear Defense, the American Thinker, American Greatness, and the Minnesota Star Tribune. He also has an author’s site on Substack.