The Brave New World Of Trump And His Deplorables-- Headed Our Way?

Ms. Rote, Trumpist election rigger

America doesn't have enough problems on its hands? Now we have the newly activated-- courtesy of the orange narcissist-- what Trump referred to as "the poorly educated" and what Clinton called "the deplorables." (I've been referring to them as "life's losers" all during the cycle.) Point is, whatever you call them, they're stupid, paranoid, brainwashed by years of Fox and Hate Talk Radio, feeling set-upon and self righteous... and armed and dangerous. One of them is even the Sheriff of Milwaukee County! That said, meet Terri Rote of Des Moines, delusional Trumpist in need of some real help. (Olbermann famously suggested people like her all be sent back to second grade to start over again.)

A Des Moines woman has been charged with Election Misconduct, a Class D felony, after allegedly voting twice for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Terri Rote says she was afraid her first ballot for Trump would be changed to a vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

"I wasn't planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment," says Rote. "The polls are rigged."

But Polk County Attorney John Sarcone says voter fraud in Iowa is very rare, which is evidence that Iowa’s election system is secure.

"I think in the 25-plus years that I've been doing this job, this maybe the third [time] we've had some irregularity that's resulted in a criminal charge," says Sarcone. "People aren’t voting more than once. And if they do, or attempt to do it, they will get caught because there are safeguards in place....We want everybody to exercise their right to vote, but only once."

Rote was released from jail on Friday on a $5,000 bond. If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison.

So those responding to Trump's charges of vote rigging by saying that out of over a billion votes cast in recent years, there have only been 13 examples of this kind of voter fraud... now there are 14-- so far and thanks entirely to Trump and his enablers or, as serious conservatives call it,collaborators.



Oh... and speaking of Trump, no one seems to be talking much about his November 28 fraud and racketeering trial-- that's the first of the Trump University scam trials. And even fewer people are talking about Trump's December 16th trial for raping a 13 year old girl. The media can't allow that to get in the way of a fair election, right? As with everything Trump has ever been accused of, since he was first caught breaking into his sister Maryanne's piggy-bank in 1954, he has denied all wrong-doing. So has his pal, convicted serial rapist and child predator Jeffrey Epstein.

A federal judge in New York has ordered counsel for Donald Trump and the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein to appear in court along with the attorney for a woman referred to only as “Jane Doe” who alleges the Republican presidential nominee raped her when she was 13.

Judge Ronnie Abrams has slated an initial status conference in the civil lawsuit for 16 December in a New York district court.

The order raises the extraordinary prospect, were Trump to win the 8 November battle for the White House, of counsel for a US president-elect being called into federal court in proceedings relating to allegations of rape of an underage girl.

...The original federal lawsuit, filed in June, alleged that “Jane Doe” was sexually assaulted by Trump in 1994 at Epstein’s Manhattan home. Further claims were made that the real estate billionaire raped the then teenager at parties hosted by Epstein on the Upper East Side.

What a whole new world we'd be looking at if Comey's outrageous and unconscionable blunder winds up electing Trump president! And if not... what happens with these deplorables who have been unshackled from the bonds of societal norms and human decency. Will they go back to quietly seething? I doubt it. And destroying the Republican Party alone isn't going to satisfy them either.

Wherever People Have Lost Hope, They're Turning To Trump... "Rabidly"

Can you imagine a place where the support for Señor Trumpanzee isn't just solid or firm, but "rabid?" Yeah... I guess that's not much of a stretch among the deplorables. Although... in yesterday's NY Times Roger Cohen introduced his readers to people who don't really seem deplorable, but who are certainly rabid Trump supporters, normal Americans who are hurting big time economically and, maybe not brilliant or even smart enough to understand that Trumpy-the-Clown will never do anything for them, but smart enough to at least realize the establishment and the status quo aren't doing them any good. Cohen was writing from Paris... Kentucky. It's a very alienated town of less than 9,000 people in Bourbon County's horse country, not all that far from sophisticated Lexington. The town is basically all white and the median household income is $30,872. The county votes Republican, but not lopsidedly so.

Cindy Hedges, one of the Trumpanzee fans Cohen interviewed for his piece, is under economic stress and told him the U.S. needs "somebody spectacular to get us halfway straight," Trump, who she feels certain will "clean up the mess Obama has left us." (Interestingly, just as the piece got published a new Washington Post/ABC News polls came out showing Obama with a 58% approval rating, spectacularly high for a president at this point in his term and higher than at any point since 2009.)

As for Trump's obvious character flaws, she admits "he’s kind of a loose cannon, but he tells it the way it is and, if elected, people will be there to calm him down a bit, tweak a word or two in his speeches. And I just don’t trust Hillary Clinton." Sounds like Hate Talk Radio and Fox are her news sources. They blame Obama, the EPA (and Hillary) for the collapse of the coal industry in Eastern Kentucky.

The number of Kentucky coal jobs has plunged to fewer than 6,500 from about 18,000 when Obama took office; the number fell 6.9 percent between this April and June alone. Hillary Clinton’s words in Ohio-- “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”-- echo on Republican radio ads, plucked out of context from her pledge to replace those jobs with opportunities in clean, renewable energy. By contrast, Trump declared in West Virginia in May that miners should “get ready, because you are going to be working your asses off!”

“I don’t believe Obama has a white board on how he’s going to torture us, but he has,” [Bill Bissett, the president of the Kentucky Coal Association] told me at his office in Lexington. “I cannot tell you how rabid the support for Trump is.”

That support is proving resilient. The post-convention Trump free fall has run into the obstinacy of his appeal-- an appeal that seems to defy every gaffe, untruth and insult. The race is tightening once again because Trump’s perceived character-- a strong leader with a simple message, never flinching from a fight, cutting through political correctness with a bracing bluntness-- resonates in places like Appalachia where courage, country and cussedness are core values.

“Trump’s appeal is nationalistic, the authoritarian shepherd of the flock,” Al Cross, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky, told me. “That’s why evangelical Christians are willing to vote for this twice-divorced man who brags about the size of his penis. There’s a strong belief here still in America as special and exceptional, and Obama is seen as having played that down.”

But the Trump magnetism goes deeper than resentment at Obama’s regretful tone from Havana to Hiroshima. It seems to go beyond the predictable Republican domination in this part of the country. There’s a sense, crystallized in coal’s steady demise, that, as the political scientist Norman Ornstein put it to me, “Somebody is taking everything you are used to and you had”-- your steady middle-class existence, your values, your security. It’s not that the economy is bad in all of Kentucky; the arrival of the auto industry has been a boon, and the unemployment rate is just 4.9 percent. It’s that all the old certainties have vanished.

Far from the metropolitan hubs inhabited by the main beneficiaries of globalization’s churn, many people feel disenfranchised from both main political parties, angry at stagnant wages and growing inequality, and estranged from a prevailing liberal urban ethos. I heard a lot about how Obama has not been supportive enough of the police, of how white lives matter, too, and of how illegal-- as in illegal immigrant-- means illegal, just as robbing a bank is. For anyone used to New York chatter, or for that matter London or Paris chatter, Kentucky is a through-the-looking-glass experience. There are just as many certainties; they are simply the opposite ones, whether on immigration, police violence toward African-Americans, or guns. America is now tribal, with each tribe imbibing its own social-media-fed ranting.

The Clintons were feted here in the 1990s, but two decades on Hillary Clinton is viewed with cool suspicion. That’s because both the economy and values have moved on, too. Jobs went south to Mexico or east to Asia. Somewhere on the winding road from whites-only bathrooms to choose-your-gender bathrooms, many white, blue-collar Kentucky workers-- and the state is 85.1 percent white-- feel their country got lost. The F.D.R. Democrats who became Reagan Democrats and then Clinton Democrats could well be November’s Trump Democrats.

America is no longer white enough for that to be decisive, but it is significant. To these people, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is not the empty rhetoric of a media-savvy con artist from Queens but a last-ditch rallying cry for the soul of a changing land where minorities will be the majority by the middle of the century.

Hazard in Perry County is further east into Appalachia, and in much worse shape than Boubon County. Hazard has just over 5,000 people. Perry County is Republican landslide territory. Romney won Bourbon with 59%; he won Perry with an astronomical 79%. And it's even whiter than Bourbon-- 97.34% white. The median household income is $22,089. Over a quarter of the population is living below the poverty line and the average female life expectancy is 72.7 years, the shortest for any county in the United States, about 8 years shorter than the American average for women. The unemployment rate is over 10% and it's the center of a horrfiying drug epidemic. Cohen talked to a couple of regular guys in pretty bad shape.

On a bench opposite the county courthouse, on the Starbucks-free Main Street, I found Steve Smith and Paul Bush. Smith used to work underground at the Starfire mine. He earned as much as $1,500 a week, but was laid off a while ago. His unemployment has dried up and he has four children to feed. His family scrapes by on his wife’s income as a nurse. He’d been in court over a traffic offense; now an idle afternoon stretched away.

“Trump’s going to get us killed, probably!” he told me. “But I’ll vote for him anyway over Hillary. If you vote for Hillary you vote for Obama, and he’s made it impossible to ship coal. This place is about dried up. A job at Wendy’s is the only thing left. We may have to move.”

“Yeah, another year without change and they’ll be shutting Hazard down,” Bush suggested.

He was awaiting his son, in court on a drug charge for the painkiller Percocet. A retired operator of heavy equipment for the Road Department, Bush said his son did nothing, “just a few odd jobs.” He continued: “Obama’s probably never known hardship. He and Hillary don’t get it. At least Trump don’t hold nothing back: If he don’t like something, he tells you about it.”

His son’s girlfriend emerged from the courthouse. “They locked him up,” she said.

“Why?”

“He failed one of the drug tests.”

“Well, ain’t nothin’ we can do about it,” Bush said.

...That anger simmers. It’s directed at Obama, and by extension Clinton, and by further extension a Democratic Party that, as the former Democratic senator Jim Webb from Virginia told me, “has now built its constituency based on ethnic groups other than white working people.” The frustration of these people, whether they are in Kentucky, or Texas, or throughout the Midwest, is acute. They are looking for “someone who will articulate the truth of their disenfranchisement,” as Webb put it. Trump, for all his bullying petulance, has come closest to being that politician, which is why millions of Americans support him.

Bissett, the Coal Association president, made clear to me that he did not dismiss the emissions concerns about coal; what bothers him is what he sees as Obama’s and the E.P.A.’s refusal to seek a reasonable balance between the economy and the environment. The administration, he argues, has moved the goal posts to kill coal. It is this that feels punitive. For example, the E.P.A.’s Clean Power Plan, first presented in 2014 with no backing from Congress, requires every state to submit proposals for reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 2018. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, blocked the initiative early this year. But that was just before Justice Antonin Scalia died. “We need Trump for a reasonable Supreme Court and an E.P.A no longer skewed against fossil fuels,” Bissett argued. “A lot of jobs here still depend on coal and cheap electricity. That’s why Clinton is toxic right now.”

...Trump can’t reverse globalization. Nor is he likely to save coal in an era of cheap natural gas. His gratuitous insults, evident racism, hair-trigger temper and lack of preparation suggest he would be a reckless, even perilous, choice for the Oval Office. I don’t think he is a danger to the Republic because American institutions are stronger than Trump’s ego, but that the question even arises is troubling.

Still, in a climate where disruption is sought at any cost (whether political in Hazard or economic in Silicon Valley), it would be foolhardy to suggest that Trump cannot win. He can; and he can in part because of the liberal intellectual arrogance that dismisses the economic, social and cultural problems his rise has underscored. Whatever happens in November, these problems will persist, and it will take major public and private investment and an unlikely rebirth of bipartisanship in Washington to make any dent in them.

Back in Paris-- the Kentucky one-- I sit down in a coffee shop with Cindy Hedges and her husband, Mitch. He worked for more than 30 years as a welder and then a supervisor in a factory that refurbished mining equipment. It was dirty work-- coal is black, grease is black, hydraulic oil is black-- but it was a good living. He lost his job in February, before returning on a temporary contract a couple of weeks ago, and when I ask him why his full-time employment disappeared, the answer is by now familiar: the E.P.A. and Obama, for whom, like his wife, he voted in 2008. But when I turn to this political season, he springs a surprise.

“Look, there’s nobody to vote for,” he says. “Trump is an idiot, he pisses everyone off, he’s scary, he’ll pump his mouth off to some foreign country and we’ll be at war. He’s a billionaire on a power trip with as much reason to be president as I have. If Trump had shut up, he’d win the election. So do you vote for the one who’s going to lie, or the one who takes you to war? I’m leaning Hillary.”

“Oh, come on, Mitch!” says Cindy.

“What? With Bill Clinton the economy was rolling. I was working a 50-hour week and my 401 (k) outperformed my salary. He’s going to be advising Hillary, suggesting she needs to do this or this.”

“They don’t get along, Mitch.”

“Well, I’m scared of Trump.”

“I guess we’ll cancel each other out then,” says Cindy.

At the boot store, Carrie McCall, a FedEx driver, appears with a package.

“I love Trump,” she declares. “He shoots from the hip.”

But, I ask, isn’t that dangerous?

“I don’t care. After all we’ve been through, I just don’t care.”

"I don't care"-- the cri de cœur of life's losers. Are there enough of them to elect Trump? In places, like Kentucky that seem like time left behind, there may be. 454,573 Democrats voted in the Kentucky primary on May 16. It was a basically a tie, although a couple of corrupted big city machines swung the vote to Hillary 46.8% to 46.3%. No machine was going to help her in Perry County. Bernie beat her there 59.6% to 30%. The GOP had a caucus and 229,667 people participated. Trump won, narrowly with 35.9% of the vote, with Cruz at 31.6%, Rubio at 16.4% and Kasich at 14.4%. Perry County was Trump territory-- 49.2%. He did badly in the middle class suburbs but did real well wherever the hardship and suffering is most acute. He basically swept coal country-- as did Bernie.

Does America Need A More Authoritarian President?

Early yesterday-- just after midnight-- Señor Trumpanzee had one of his notorious Twitter freakouts, this one about Tony Schwartz, the guy who virtually lived with him "day and night for 18 months" and then wrote Art of the Deal and allowed El Trumpanzee to take co-author's credit despite the fact that he was the subject of the book, not the author of even one word of it. Trump's tantrum (below) was a reaction to Schwartz's appearance on Anderson Cooper's CNN show (above). Trump, it should be remembered, has been threatening to sue Schwartz.

Schwartz responded to Cooper's question about Trumpanzee affinity for brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, by explaining that Trumpy-the-clown "is at heart a deeply, deeply insecure man and he is a sucker for flattery... He reveres authoritarians because he dreams of being one... Here is one of his favorite phrases: 'I love that guy; he's a killer'... Anybody who does know him well knows who Donald Trump is and no one who knows him well would doubt that to be a dictator and to be able to control everything would be his dream come true."

It scares me that over a third of Americans seem incapable of discerning Schwartz's simple diagnosis-- or that they just don't care. Is life that bad-- that hopeless and that devoid of meaning-- that they'd just as soon throw it all away? That's what a vote for Trump is: throwing it all away. Remember, Hitler kind of won an election too... supported by the same kind of ignorant, hate-filled losers who support Señor Trumpanzee today. Life's losers... they vote too, I guess.

Life's Losers Finally Have Their Own Candidate For President

There are plenty of reasons-- both real and concotted out of the thin air between the ears of your typical GOP hate monger-- to be repulsed at the idea of voting for Hillary Clinton. (Personally, I'd never do it.) But there are no legitimate reasons for anyone to cast a ballot to elect someone of Señor Trumpanzee's caliber and character to the presidency of the United States.

Trump fans may not know what "diverse" means but they know they want less of it... and that's what they interpret making America great again to mean. And if that wasn't just fine with Señor Trumpanzee, he wouldn't have brought alt-right sociopath Steven Bannon on to run his campaign. Sure the vast majority of Trump fans-- even the occasional ones you see who climbed into a suit and tie for his rallies-- are two-digit IQ losers who hate the world and their miserable existences and want to see it all end. But then there really are the alt-right leaders portrayed this weekend by Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast.

In a windowless room in a swanky hotel half a block from the White House on Friday afternoon, three of the most visible leaders of the Alt-Right movement held a two-hour press conference to discuss their affection for Donald Trump and their hopes for a white homeland. The white supremacist Alt-Right movement has grown over the last eight years or so, incubated in racist forums like StormFront and meme-loving corners of the internet like 4chan and 8chan. Its members generally share a disdain for political correctness, feminism, zionism, Jews in general, immigration (especially Hispanic and Muslim immigration), and anyone who criticizes them for holding these views.

And the Alt-Right won substantial mainstream media attention when Hillary Clinton gave a speech last month excoriating Donald Trump for some of his staffers’ ties to it. Clinton’s team zeroed in on the campaign’s new CEO, Steve Bannon, who formerly helmed a website that he himself once described as “the platform for the Alt-Right.” And prominent Alt-Right figures, including two of the men who helmed Friday’s press conference, told The Daily Beast last month that they were delighted Trump hired him.

The three Alt-Right leaders who gathered in D.C. this afternoon made two things very clear: They think white people are genetically predisposed to be more moral and intelligent than black people, and they do not want to share their envisioned utopian ethno-state with folks of the Jewish persuasion. There’s some disagreement in the Alt-Right on what they refer to as “the Jewish question.” But the big take-away was that Jews are suspicious.

Jared Taylor, who founded the white supremacist American Renaissance site, explained the Alt-Right as predicated entirely on the belief that some races are inherently superior to others—the movement, he said, is “in unanimity” in rejecting “the idea that the races are basically equivalent and interchangeable.” There are genetic differences in race that make some races more ethical and intelligent than others, he said. That’s what the Alt Right is all about.

...One more Alt-Right platform plank: that white people, as a group, have discrete interests that are different from other races’, and that they should push for those interests. In practice, this means the Alt-Right thinks school integration was bad and Apartheid was good. Later in the press conference, Taylor said he thinks white people are more moral and more intelligent than black people.

...[T]hey just want white people to have their own homeland.

With no Jews.

Spencer in particular fixates on the homeland idea.

The Alt-Right needs to aspire to something, even if that dream won’t come true in his lifetime-- and that means they should aim to build an ethno-state for just whites. And Spencer made it clear that white-only means Jews aren’t invited. They have their own identity, and it isn’t white-slash-European, and that’s that.

“Jews are Jews,” he said.

He added that his whites-only utopia would still have a good relationship with Israel.

These people (I hope) sound sad and racist and antisemitic and deeply confused to you. But they don’t sound that way to Breitbart, the right-wing news site to which Trump has given countless exclusives and from which he pulled his new campaign boss. The site has seen its traffic skyrocket over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, rapidly gaining clout in the conservative movement and among Trump-loving voters. The site says it had 31 million visitors in July. And in March, it ran a piece describing Taylor, Spencer, and their ilk as “fearsomely intelligent,” and praising them for speaking truth to power or whatever.

So the Alt-Right-- helmed by the trio who gathered at The Willard on Friday—is the most extreme example of a shift on the American right: away from a nostalgic conservative focus on restoring the values of the Founders, and towards a forward-focused nationalism that prioritizes drastic limits on immigration and open hostility to globalism. Trump isn’t a white nationalist. But he speaks their language. And they dig it.

A YouGov poll last January discovered that 20% of Trump supporters were willing to admit they didn't approve of Lincoln freeing the slaves

Hillary was wrong when she said that half of the Trump supporters were from a basket of deplorables. Sad as it sounds, it's probably a much higher percentage. Writing in June for New York, Ed Kilgore reported that "there's an ongoing debate in the chattering classes about the deepest motives of those who support Donald Trump for president. One theory is that it’s cultural change — epitomized by immigration and the spread of non-Christian religious views — that makes these folks tick. Another is that it’s a product of economic inequality and insecurity.  Those who hold the latter view tend to think Trump has some natural appeal to Bernie Sanders voters, to the point of sometimes seeming to suggest that Trumpenproletariats just need to bone up on their Piketty in order to find their true gospel in democratic socialism."

But now comes the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and Brookings with a new survey that adds powerful ammunition to the "It’s the Culture, Stupid!" faction. It covers many issues related to the changing demographics of America and the perceived impact on the culture for good and for ill. And it does not always break out Donald Trump supporters from broader categories like Republicans and white, working-class members. But where it does, it paints a pretty clear picture of a group of people who absolutely hate the changes taking place in this country since the 1950s, and will support almost any measures to turn back the clock.

You can get a full sense of the comparative views of Trump supporters by reading the entire report, but just listing some of their perceptions in a row will give a good sense of how strongly these folks resent cultural change:

•  77 percent say it bothers them to come into contact with people who speak little or no English.
•  81 percent say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.
•  77 percent say discrimination against Christians in the U.S. is a major problem.
•  83 percent say the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influences.
•  83 percent say the values of Islam are at odds with America’s values and way of life.
•  80 percent say immigrants constitute a burden on American society.
•  68 percent say the country has changed mostly for the worse since the 1950s.

  And here’s the scariest one:

•  72 percent say we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right. 

There wasn’t a follow-up question about the willingness to break some heads, but I think we all know the answer to that one.

Self Harm-- A New Political Goal To Contend With... From Brexit To Trumpism

Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn genuinely thought he could bring all factions of the Labour Party together or perhaps he felt he just didn't have the power to cast the Blairites out, but after he was elected party leader, he formed a shadow cabinet filled with his political enemies. Now they're using Brexit and a likely snap election as excuses to oust him. The slimeball behind the effort is shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn-- since fired-- who claims to have persuaded a majority of the shadow cabinet to resign if Corbyn doesn't step down. But if you think Brexit has roiled Labour, keep in mind the Trump-like Boris Johnson is likely to take over as Conservative Leader whose prime minister announced he's stepping down after a reaction against his austerity policies overturned the established order. And the Liberal Democrats... well they're basically launching an election campaign based on ignoring democracy itself.

Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron says they'll run on a clear platform of setting aside the Brexit results and keeping the U.K. in the E.U., calling the vote a "howl of anger at politicians and institutions who they felt they were out of touch and had let them down. The British people deserve the chance not to be stuck with the appalling consequences of a Leave campaign that stoked that anger with the lies of Farage, Johnson and Gove. The Liberal Democrats will fight the next election on a clear and unequivocal promise to restore British prosperity and role in the world, with the United Kingdom in the European Union, not out."

Now let's look at that in the light of what we've been calling at DWT "life's losers," the people with no stake in society and who hate everything, even their own families and themselves, i.e.-- an average Trump supporter. Don't say it can't happen here-- it can, especially with a candidate as disliked and mistrusted as Hillary Clinton as the alternative-- and playing the establishment card to the hilt. British sociologist Will Davies addressed this in an essay about why so many Labour voters went for Leave.

One of the most insightful things I saw in the run-up to the referendum was this video produced by openDemocracy’s Adam Ramsey and Anthony Barnett discussing their visit to Doncaster, another Labour heartland. They chose Doncaster because it looked set to be a strong pro-Leave location, and wanted to understand what was at work in this. Crucially, they observed that-- in strong contrast to the Scottish ‘Yes’ movement-- Brexit was not fuelled by hope for a different future. On the contrary, many Leavers believed that withdrawing from the EU wouldn’t really change things one way or the other, but they still wanted to do it. I’ve long suspected that, on some unconscious level, things could be even stranger than this: the self-harm inflicted by Brexit could potentially be part of its appeal. It is now being reported that many Leave voters are aghast at what they’ve done, as if they never really intended for their actions to yield results.

This taps into a much broader cultural and political malaise, that also appears to be driving the rise of Donald Trump in the US. Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences. The discovery of the ‘Case Deaton effect’ in the US (unexpected rising mortality rates amongst white working classes) is linked to rising alcohol and opiate abuse and to rising suicide rates. It has also been shown to correlate closely to geographic areas with the greatest support for Trump. I don’t know of any direct equivalent to this in the UK, but it seems clear that-- beyond the rhetoric of ‘Great Britain’ and ‘democracy’-- Brexit was never really articulated as a viable policy, and only ever as a destructive urge, which some no doubt now feel guilty for giving way to.

Thatcher and Reagan rode to power by promising a brighter future, which never quite materialised other than for a minority with access to elite education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or American ‘great again’ is not made in the same way. It is not a pledge or a policy platform; it’s not to be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris Johnson, it’s not even clear if it’s meant seriously or not. It’s more an offer of a collective real-time halucination, that can be indulged in like a video game.

The Remain campaign continued to rely on forecasts, warnings and predictions, in the hope that eventually people would be dissuaded from ‘risking it’. But to those that have given up on the future already, this is all just more political rhetoric. In any case, the entire practice of modelling the future in terms of ‘risk’ has lost credibility, as evidenced by the now terminal decline of opinion polling as a tool for political control.

One of the complaints made most frequently by liberal commentators, economists and media pundits was that the referendum campaign was being conducted without regard to ‘truth’. This isn’t quite right. It was conducted without adequate regard to facts. To the great frustration of the Remain campaign, their ‘facts’ never cut through, whereas Leave’s ‘facts’ (most famously the £350m/week price tag of EU membership) were widely accepted.

...In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish. If risk modelling (using notions of statistical normality) was the defining research technique of the 19th and 20th centuries, sentiment analysis is the defining one of the emerging digital era. We no longer have stable, ‘factual’ representations of the world, but unprecedented new capacities to sense and monitor what is bubbling up where, who’s feeling what, what’s the general vibe.

As rightist David Stockman wrote over the weekend, Bravo Brexit-- "the tyranny of the global financial elite has been slammed good and hard... The central bankers and their compatriots at the EU, IMF, White House/Treasury, OECD, G-7 and the rest of the Bubble Finance apparatus have well and truly over-played their hand. They have created a tissue of financial lies; an affront to the very laws of markets, sound money and capitalist prosperity... On the immediate matter of Brexit, the British people have rejected the arrogant rule of the EU superstate and the tyranny of its unelected courts, commissions and bureaucratic overlords. As Donald Trump was quick to point out, they have taken back their country. He urges that Americans do the same, and he might just persuade them."