As Gilman argues, during the post-World War II “social modernist era,” between 1945 and 1971, states around the world sought “to legitimate themselves by serving the interests of middle classes whose size they sought to expand.” Gilman doesn’t dwell on their relative successes — which were considerable in the industrialized West, at least — but concerns himself with what began happening as they fell short of their intended goals.

“Stagflation” in the West, central planning failure in the East and debt crisis in the global South were hallmarks of the different ways in which the model fell short. “By 1980, the reaction against the social modernist state had set in. Levels of economic inequality began to grow again, eventually reaching heights not seen since the 1920s,” Gilman writes. “It wasn’t just that the state ‘retreated’ from the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, to use Daniel Yergin’s terms, but also that the very ambition of the state receded. Many states stopped even pretending they wanted to create a more egalitarian society and instead sought to legitimate themselves by claiming they were maximizing individual opportunity.”

Politically, leadership came from figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Gilman cites Thatcher’s quote, “There’s no such thing as society” as “the cri de coeur of insurgent plutocrats everywhere.” The resulting retreat of the state left middle-class lives dramatically more precarious, especially vulnerable to threats on two fronts:

From above, middle classes find themselves threatened by a global financial elite, in league with ultra-wealthy compradors, both of whom seek to cut social services and the taxes that pay for them — taxes that these elites depict as a form of illegitimate expropriation. From below, the middle classes find themselves exposed to a new resurgence of criminality, which has discovered in their plight a business opportunity.

That is the twin insurgency in a nutshell: predatory plutocratic elites above, criminal insurgencies below and an increasingly insecure immiserated middle class caught in between. And it helps us to understand Donald Trump’s emergence with a clarity that’s otherwise hard to muster.

On one hand, the erosion of the social modernist state that allows the twin insurgency to flourish is the very foundation of Trump’s appeal. He is responding to legitimate, intensely felt grievances that have also fed ethno-nationalist movements elsewhere around the world, although it was Bernie Sanders, not Trump, who offered a concrete political program this year to restore at least some of what’s been lost. “Trump is certainly feeding off the middle-class anxiety that the twin insurgency has produced,” Gilman confirmed in an email to Salon.

On the other hand, Trump is the very embodiment of the twin insurgency, an insurgent plutocrat with suggestive links to criminality, who takes full advantage of areas free from the rule of law. He has long ruthlessly targeted other insurgents when it suited him — first as exploited business partners (even his bankers!) and now as designated villains in his grab for presidential power, which he understands in purely insurgent rather than constitutional terms.

Wayne Barrett, Trump’s first biographer, is especially helpful here. In one Democracy Now! interview, Barrett described how, around 1990, Trump “was engaged in completely defrauding the banks, and the banks knew it. OK? And they were giving him the loans anyway.” In part, Barrett said, this was because of Trump’s ties with prosecutors, most notably Rudy Giuliani, whose future trajectory is well known. “So his relationships with prosecutors and the fact that the bankers — they were embarrassed by what they had done; they didn’t want any investigation of this. So the combination of the two … gave him a pass.” Trump wasn’t simply taking advantage of a corrupt system, he was personally corrupting it. He partnered with mobsters as well (more from Barrett on this below), though now he enjoys painting immigrants as gang members and criminals.

Gilman cited this willingness to attack other insurgents as one of Trump’s greatest sources of strength:

I think the paradox with him, in terms of my framework, is that he’s the only candidate who has been willing to name and denounce both ends of the twin insurgency explicitly, whether that means railing against the “criminals from Mexico” and in the “inner cities,” on the one hand, and the bankers and “globalist parasites” exporting jobs, on the other. To be honest, it disturbs me that he is the only candidate willing to speak this truth, and I think part of his appeal is precisely that he does so. All of it is inflected through extremely ugly racist shit, of course, so it’s not that his diagnosis is right, but at least he’s naming the relevant elephants.

Trump has always been willing to cozy up to or attack other members of either insurgency by turns — the bankers who’ve saved his ass more than once, or the criminal enterprise-builders with whom he has partnered. There’s nothing new in this, except what he’s trying to get out of it.

Trump has sometimes acted like a pure plutocratic insurgent. The New York Times account of how he benefited from $885 million in tax breaks and subsidies offers a classic example of how plutocrats extract wealth from the postmodern state. But his dealings with mob figures since the 1970s, and his repeated backstabbing and double-crossing (a.k.a. “renegotiation”) are unusual, to say the least. He also has business dealings around the globe, including countless hidden partnerships with other members of the global plutocracy. Thus, Trump is not your typical plutocrat. He represents a fascinating intersection of the two insurgencies in a number of different ways, and has exploited bureaucratic weaknesses both have helped create.