This year marks the 235th anniversary of the start of the French Revolution. With each passing year, the ancien régime creeps further into a distant past. Yet the lessons to be learned from it are stronger than ever. By 1789, the monarchy had already decayed into a financially and morally bankrupt vestige of ceremonial rule. Its public finances were in disarray with a colossal debt borne of state largesse and military expenditures. International rivals were poised to replace France as a world power. Domestic grievances were multiplying almost as fast as the inequalities between social classes. With the convening of the Estates General that fateful spring, France found itself in an impossible situation. Members of the highly unrepresentative body soon realized they were incapable of resolving the crises at hand and of reforming the country’s governance. It was already too late: a convergence of factors would spell the end of the ancien régime in France. By comparison, the past seems eerily analogous to the United States today. And if that past is any guide, Americans might want to brace themselves for more turbulent times well past Election Day.

Each of the three estates of the ancien régime finds a similar counterpart in American society today. For starters, the clergy in prerevolutionary France propped up the Catholic nobility while deriving certain privileges from it. A religious class in the United States operates a similar program today. Although far from having the same authority that the Catholic Church held during the ancien régime, the Christian right in the United States has a similarly outsized influence on national and state policy. With rare exception, it stokes sympathy in the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It pushes Federal and state legislation including religious liberty laws and exemptions under the guise of “sincerely held beliefs.” It has created a litmus test for the nation’s highest offices, and promotes the myth that the United States is an inherently Christian country. Politicians across the United States regularly invoke God in public forums with impunity, legitimizing the public sphere as an extension of the pulpit.

From restricting reproductive rights and sex education, banning books in libraries, or even refusing to conduct business with parties they perceive as a threat to their identity, America’s first estate actively seeks the government to do its bidding. Private companies can now exercise religious beliefs, such as by denying employer-sponsored health insurance if those policies allow for birth control. School vouchers can take public money and send it to private religious schools. Efforts are underway in multiple states to bring prayer, Bible study, and even displays of religious symbols like the Ten Commandments into public schools. Privatization of the criminal justice system has tied prison reform to evangelical programs. In addition to its assault on basic freedoms, the Christian right also benefits from a goldmine of tax exemptions. All manner of religious organizations—churches, schools, and charities—as well as their leaders can advance their beliefs with broad-based taxpayer support, whether or not Americans even agree with them. This Christian overreach betrays America’s religious diversity, especially that of its largest group, those who identify with no religion.

In addition to the first estate, the United States also has its own version of the second estate of the ancien régime. The upper echelons of government are far removed from the rest of the population to adequately represent their interests. It costs millions just to run for the nation’s highest offices, setting a steep price for admission to American political nobility. The noblesse de robe of today is rewarded for campaign contributions with presidential appointments to senior government positions, while relegating what remains of meritocracy in the civil service to lowly bureaucrats. And just as the French nobility doled out privileges to fellow elites, so do members of the Congress in the form of appropriations to pet projects in their home states.

America’s second estate controls not only the wealth and resources behind government but behind private industry as well. Its titans earn incomes that exponentially outpace those on the lower rungs of their corporate ladders. The heads of academia and major “nonprofit” organizations are close to the top as well. The gap between the top ten percent of the wealthiest American and that of the average American is now exponentially wide. By almost any measure, the real incomes of middle-class families have declined over the last five decades while those of low-income families have stagnated. Only the upper class has seen its real income grow during the same time, even after the Great Recession and the Covid pandemic. Which is not to overlook the fact that the wealth gap is exacerbated by gender and race. The cost of education, healthcare, housing, childcare, and even food is now so high that many Americans find that paying for these essentials cripples them with insurmountable debt.

In addition to the elite professional class are the many rentiers who live off inherited wealth and dispose of more money and leisure time than most Americans could imagine. An inner circle of attorneys and accountants abets the American second estate in avoiding the tax burden that non-elites must bear. Though their methods and names of taxes surely differed, the French nobility also practiced this intentional conceit of passing their fiscal duty on to the lower classes. For all its privilege, today’s American aristocracy would have felt right at home in Versailles before the Revolution.

What is the Third Estate, the Abbé Sieyès famously asked of his fellow Frenchmen? His answer was the vast majority of French whose economic inequality was matched by their political inequality. The answer today can be found in the vast majority of Americans. They have nothing in the political order because government offices are reserved for the elite. Parties choose which candidates to support from gerrymandered electoral districts. Both American political parties have interests that are elite interests. Though Democrats might claim to represent the welfare of the masses, especially those of the disadvantaged, its leadership is a bumbling dynasty that exploits minority interests to win elections without changing much. At the same time, Republicans have demonstrated mass appeal while brazenly overturning democratic norms in order to fulfill their party’s narrow objectives. Worse yet, presidential candidates today are determined by less than ten states, most of which are among the least populated in the country. Democrat and Republican form two sides of the same coin whose value now is measured less by real power than by ritualistic displays of authority.

So-called equal representation in the United States Senate disproportionately reflects the numbers of states rather than that of their citizens. Residents of the nation’s capital don’t even get a voting member of Congress. Recalling similarly disproportionate voting rights among the delegates at the Estates General in Versailles in 1789, it’s not hard to see just how unrepresentative the United States government is now.

Competing factions of representatives represent not the people writ large, but rather the interests of their parties and lobbyists. From the accounts of millionaires and billionaires, or corporations that manage their money, cash flows right into the political apparatus. Whether it buys political office, policies, or mere influence, political contributions stash money that could otherwise go to improvements in transportation, security, housing, education, environmental protection, or a host of other areas that would directly benefit the broader American public. The list of doléances is long but who can the American people reliably turn to if not their representatives? Certainly not the judges. That unelected crew almost predictably interprets the law to suit their own politics and are only accountable to their political allies.

Alexis de Tocqueville once described democracy as a society of peers, une société de semblables. It’s what he admired about the young American republic in the early nineteenth century. It was a model for modern democratic republics, the very opposite of the ancien régime. How the tables have turned. For the American elite, privilege and honor abound, or at least their veneer still does. Just like the French elite under the Bourbon kings, the United States has become deluded by grandeur with the thinking its nation is a beacon to the rest of the world.

Yet where the United States today most resembles prerevolutionary France is in its inability to reform itself. While some revolutionaries just wanted to reform the monarchy, others wanted to swap out the entire regime for another. What most could agree on was that the status quo could no longer last. The rest is history, so to speak. As for the United States today, will the nouvel ancien régime face a similar fate? Could it transition to authoritarianism, oligarchy, theocracy, anarchy, something else? One cannot be certain at this juncture, but if the United States should follow a path to revolution after November, the reasons behind it should come as no surprise.

Image credit: Auguste Couder, Ouverture des États généraux à Versailles, 5 mai 1789, Versailles, Musée de l'Histoire de France, 1839.