Hi everyone,
By oceans of ink (well, pixels) have been spilt on the fallout of Donald Trump's win in the presidential election. I'm not going to be a smarta**e and claim I foresaw it. In hindsight, though, it should have been foreseen. Why? This -
However I slice it, Trump's presidential win has been cut from the same cloth as Brexit. Looking at my Facebook feed, I see acres of contempt from educated and intelligent people for the punters who voted another way:
After Brexit, there was no excuse for ignoring the views of the punters because they're "uneducated" or "hateful". Why? Because they don't feel any sense of obligation to the educated or the goodthinkful. At the risk of generalising, the punters already live financially precarious lives. They already know that their accents, their workclothes, their lack of connections will tend to exclude them from the world's high tables and from the counsels of the People Who Matter. And they're patronised by the great and the good? Maybe there really is some justification for schadenfreude at the long faces at Clinton HQ last night.
It's too late in the night, and I'm too tired, for me to think through whether Marx was perversely right or not. I suspect yes, but not in the way that he thought: the classes in western societies seem indeed to have declared war on each other, but the key factor is access to knowledge rather than to capital.
Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2016
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