Economic Anxiety and Donald Trump

How to understand the rise of populist politics? In a time of unprecedented social peace, how can large numbers of people turn away from the sensible, managerial mainstream and find the simple answers of crackpots and charlatans beguiling? How is it a third of French voters supported a fascist last Sunday? How did we get President Donald Trump? All kinds of explanations are in play, but the one that's done the running is anxiety, which is usually (and unhelpfully) separated out into economic and cultural anxiety. This has spawned an interminable zero-sum debate over what matters the most and, as per political debates, there are other stakes in play. If the economic argument is correct, then the Clintonian/Blairist and the still-shiny Macronite Third Way is wonky flimflam and the socialist critique, including emphasis on the importance of interests, is substantially correct. And if cultural anxiety is the explanation, then all the pundits and leading politicians are on the money, we have to carry on listening to them, and the horrible stuff about class and things can be boxed away.

There is nothing the social world throws up that can't be analysed, explained and, if needs be, critiqued. Indeed, we need to understand the world in order to change it, and that means taking it as we find it. That must be the starting point of any kind of progressive politics, or it's something else. That in mind, I'm interested in the latest intervention in the anxiety debate, covered here by Emma Green of The Atlantic. According to research by the Public Religion Research Institute (original findings here), the best predictor of support for Donald Trump after self-identified party affiliation is cultural anxiety. According to the research, some 68% of white working class Americans from the mid-western states believed the American way of life was under threat by foreign influences, and 79% of this group were set on voting Trump. 62% of the same group believed immigration represented a cultural threat and they are sceptical, by 54%, of the merits of a college education (rising to 61% among the men).

This refutes the claims of economic anxiety how? Well, quoting direct from the PRRI piece:

Despite the conventional wisdom that Trump attracted financially depressed voters, white working-class Americans who report being in good or excellent financial shape are significantly more likely to say that Trump understands their problems than those who report their financial condition as being fair or poor (48% vs. 39%, respectively). A majority (55%) of white working-class Americans in fair or poor shape say Trump does not understand the problems facing their communities well.

This is incredible and revealing. Incredible because the entire claim of the research that cultural anxiety matters more than economic anxiety hangs on this passage. Revealing because they reduce the question of economic anxiety solely to being poor. Despite themselves, they confirm the relevance of class, of the better off who disproportionately helped Donald Trump to victory, just like some of us have argued from the beginning. It is, for example, entirely possible to be poor and not feel insecure. Millions of people run very tight budgets but secure in the knowledge that their wages are due to be paid on x day of the month. Insecurity however will set in when their job is under threat, or whether the firm wants to introduce flexible/reduced hours, and so on. Meanwhile, a well paid manager whose remuneration is fixed to continual monitoring performance reviews, a successful small business person who frets over her competitors, the megabucks professional worried about the drying up of their consultancies, all these people are much better off than low paid working class people, but are likely to also suffer higher instances of economic anxiety. Their default setting is an existential craving for stability and certainty. And who can blame them, they are human after all. Yet that can, and has, taken them down some very dark paths. Generations of socialists have known that these demographics disproportionately fill out the support of reactionary parties and movements, confirmed again by the PRRI in the case of Trump. Economic anxiety therefore isn't just a matter of being poor, it's about the content of your relationship to the means of existence and how that frames your outlook. Or, if you prefer, your relationship to the means of production, and that the content of that being conditions consciousness.

In addition to the conceptual muddle, there is a strange issue with how the report is presented as well. For all the stressing of cultural anxiety, we have vignettes culled from interviews that capture the working class experience quite succinctly:

"It’s that kind of mentality with the businesses that we work for these days that they know they can get away with paying us nothing half the time because they know we have nowhere to go."

"The middle class can’t survive in today’s economy because there really isn’t a middle class anymore. You’ve got poverty level, and you’ve got your one, two percent. You don’t have a middle class anymore like you had in the ’70s and ’80s. My dad started at Cinco making a buck ten an hour. When he retired he was making $45 an hour. It took him 40 years, but he did it. You can’t find that today; there’s no job that exists like that today."

“I feel enslaved by the student debt that I have, and I don’t have a degree, and I feel that any job that I may get I will never pay it off in my lifetime.”

“My fianc矇’s worked for the same company for 21 years, and it’s a union [job], and they are hiring Mexicans. And I don’t want to be racial, but that’s all that they’re hiring. He makes like $31 an hour, and they’re coming in at making like $8 an hour.”

“I’m tired of the minimum wage being offered so low it makes it impossible to provide for your family no matter how hard you break your back."

Not the quotations I would have chosen if I wanted to prove cultural anxiety mattered and the economic was phooey.

Despite itself, the report establishes a link between economic status and interest. For instance, asked about whether the national minimum wage should be more than doubled from $7.25/hour to $15/hour, by 53% to 44% respondents agreed. Split by gender, however, we find that men oppose it by 50% to 45% while women support it 60% to 37%. It also notes support rises to 82% among black workers and 77% for hispanics. Cultural issues? Or the fact that the latter three groups are more likely to work minimum wage jobs than white working class men and would, therefore, directly materially benefit from a raise?

As we have seen, there are some findings here that are useful, but what absolutely isn't is their steadfast failure to place them in a social context. While the sampling is pretty robust, their conclusions are on dodgy ground because their variables are not connected with one another. Each is set up as an independent variable without any relationship to the others. So the view that the American way of life is under threat only tells us that people who believe that are more likely to vote for the candidate who shares the belief. How does that help? It does not explain how this works with other variables, of who believes this, nor offer hypotheses as to why they might believe it. It's a bit like stating people voted for Brexit because of immigration without trying to explain why that was a powerful motivator. And the quotes, why? These strike something of a Freudian note as the repressed breaks through to put question marks over their argument.

The biggest problem with the report is their failure to define what they mean by economic anxiety, which they simply identify with being poor. And because poor people tended not to vote for Trump, (which, as any Marxist would have said, like duh), they conclude economics has nothing to do with it. It's almost as if the data was written up with a determination to prove the culturalist argument. That it would be blandly passed off as fact rather than interrogated by journalists. As far as I'm concerned, this is an opportunity missed for a few petty Beltway points. The truth is with a bit more care and intellectual honesty, a complex, interesting, and accurate picture of how anxiety works, of how the experience of economic realities - which goes beyond wages and jobs and combines with culture - can be gleaned from the data. It's just that, instead, the PRRI have given us a hatchet job.

Boris Johnson, Pretend Foreign Secretary

While the words are getting tougher over Trump's bombardment of an air strip that, um, didn't actually take said strip out of action, the usual jockeying among senior government figures here is taking place in the background.

Take the news this morning that Boris Johnson, our most over-hyped but under-powered of politicians has cancelled long scheduled talks with his counterpart, Russian foreign secretary Sergey Lavrov. Apparently Johnson instead prefers to potter around the G7 to come up with a united response, though none of that is stopping Rex Tillerson of Trump Tower from flying to Moscow later this week. Unsurprisingly, Labour, the SNP and LibDems attacked him for his reticence on this Sunday morning's reduced schedule of political programming. On Sophy Ridge, John McDonnell slated him for passing up an opportunity of holding Putin's government to account. Tim Farron accused Johnson of having his diary managed by Washington, and Alex Salmond on Andrew Marr mocked him for not having the full confidence of his boss. No disagreements with those assessments here.

From day one of the Trump era, Theresa May has clung to the feet of the new administration, partly to mitigate the train wreck of Brexit. And so if the Americans want the limelight, May is happy to give it to them. Less an order cabled to Downing Street, and more a 'working towards the Fuhrer'-style approach. When that figure the Prime Minister is working towards is the man destined to be the worst president in American history, it's a concern.

You might also recall how, in an act of pettiness that is quintessentially Tory, how May appointed the "Three Brexiteers" - the hapless Johnson, David Davis, and disgraced former (now serving) minister Liam Fox - to the key Brexit portfolios. There was a great deal of comment about making them "own" the miserable situation they created while the man ultimately responsible enjoys retirement. Yet there were a paucity of views on whether any of them can do actually their jobs. That Johnson has been removed from the equation of a potentially serious crisis in relations with Russia. After all, it's not supposed to be the job of "Handbags" Fallon to issue sternly-worded rebukes to the Kremlin. His lot is to oversee the bean counting at the MoD and attend military parades. Foreign affairs, funnily enough, belong at the Foreign Office. Salmond is right to call Theresa May's faith in Johnson's competence into question.

It wasn't long ago that May was beholden to two deeply average but posh hoorays who treated government like cramming for an exam. She, like pretty much anyone else not dazzled by the buffoon celebrity knows Johnson is cut exactly from the same cloth. Lazy, opportunist, cynical, he is definitely not a man to turn to in a crisis. Yet what is worse is he is a perfect fit for a section of the foreign policy establishment who, for the last 25 years, have grown indolent thanks to not having to face up to a geopolitical challenge to the global supremacy of the United States. Egged on by blowhards nostalgic for the them and us certainties of a cold war, Johnson, like them, has absolutely no interest in understanding the Russian government's point of view. Indeed, while Johnson might not be guilty of this, there are plenty who write on foreign affairs always surprised to learn other states have interests too, and are quite prepared to pursue them as they see fit. Walking in your opponents' shoes, which should be an ABC of of domestic and international politics, is entirely absent not only from the Conservatives, but across the parties here and is the default setting for other western foreign policy establishments. It happens that Johnson offers a distillation of it.

And so May will carry on letting him play foreign secretary as long as no harm is done, which will mean removing him time and again from crisis and near-crisis situations. The question is how long can Johnson survive without the spotlight on him?

"Doing Something" about Syria

"Something has to be done!" goes up the cry every time an abominable war crime surges over the newswires, but the question has to be what and how. Throughout yesterday, following Donald Trump's bombardment of the Syrian government airfield apparently used for the chemical attack on Idlib province, we saw implacable foes of the White House freak show rush to back up the US administration. "Today was the day Trump became the president" went one egregiously arse licking headline, and all of a sudden the investigation of the dodgy links to Russia, and the awful domestic programme are compartmentalised and held in abeyance. Colour me surprised? Not in the slightest.

Let's get one thing out of the way with first. The attack on Khan Sheikhoun in which at least 80 people were killed did happen. It's not some fakery cooked up by the bureau for dirty tricks at the State Department (which, under Trump, barely has budget enough for staples let alone elaborate ruses). Just because it might be convenient as it directs the media spotlight away from Trump and his troubles doesn't mean it must be a US conspiracy. If you look at any Western government during the last seven years and the difficulties besetting them, the distraction of air and missile strikes has and always will appear to be convenient. Nor is it a hoax perpetuated on the ground by rebel factions, most of which are now little more than ragtag and bobtail outfits with Kalashnikovs. The mode of delivery and the multiple sources for the story point to its being true. So let's knock the conspiracy theorising on the head now.

The key question in time like these is how to enforce "accountability". We know that the White House and 10 Downing Street are compromised as enforcers of international law. That no one has been sacked, let alone charged for supplying weapons to Israel and Saudi Arabia as the former engages in chemical attacks of its own and the other presides over famine in Yemen is disgusting. How governments with great ugly question marks hanging over their repeat and unaccounted-for interventions in the Middle East are expected to apply the law always cruises under the radar of sundry Officially Concerned politicians and pundits. This matters because why it might not concern the people who matter here, hypocritical rhetoric and action certainly does matter to those who live there. Worried about winning hearts and minds? A dose of introspection would be most welcome.

Even if we put that out of our minds, we have to consider whether Trump's missile strikes are the means for enforcing the chemical weapons "red line". If he was genuinely moved by this outrage and wanted to help, then why not rescind his ridiculous attempts to enforce a travel ban? If this was about degrading the capacity of the Syrian air force, then why does the Shayrat airfield runway remain undamaged? And, while it might have been essential to notify Putin to get Russian personnel out of dodge (who after all wants a wider war?), it's naive to assume that the courtesy call's information wasn't passed on to the regime, which was then able to quickly shift some of its assets. The regime says nine people were killed, but these were civilians hit by missiles that fell short of the target or went awry - though these claims come with the necessary caveats. What then was the purpose of this escapade? A punishment that has done nothing to curb the military capacity of the Assad air force, but put on a show of liberal interventionism that has won Trump new friends. It's almost as if the response to Thursday's outrage was contrived this way. And it's reasonable to conclude that Assad and Putin are of like mind.

Meanwhile, the bloody grind and morass that Syria has become carries on. "Doing something", which is how this is being justified, should not be an excuse for doing anything.

The Tories and the Special Relationship

Stoke-on-Trent might be the centre of the political universe, but that isn't to say tumultuous events don't take place outwith the gilded city limits. And while by-election fever and an altogether unpleasant illness have gripped me, Donald Trump marked his first week in the Oval Office by unleashing a hurricane-level shit storm. His "temporary" travel ban on people born in seven Muslim countries where Trump happens to have no business interests drew near unanimous condemnation. And yet he found backing from Boris Johnson in the Commons this afternoon. The foreign secretary said this isn't as bad as his pledges on the campaign trail and that means his bark is worse than his bite, and so we should be thankful. Just how we should thank racists for firebombing one Mosque as opposed to two, or the EDL for beating up an Asian kid instead of tearing up a town centre. May is no better. Her craven performance as the first overseas courtier to meet the new president was, remarkably, regarded as something of a coup across the official commentariat and established media. How fast things change. Dismissing Trump's travel ban merely as a "matter for the Americans" speaks for the moral vacuity at the heart of her project.

The right's counter argument invokes that misused and knackered old beast, the "special relationship". The Churchill bust is back, Trump went out of his way to woo "his Maggie", he promised the UK would be at "the front of the queue" for a trade deal post-Brexit, and he even allowed the Prime Minister to take his dainty hand and guide him down a wee incline. We must therefore seize this moment and stay as close to this well-disposed president as possible. To utter the slightest criticism puts his Anglophilia at risk. None of this should come as any surprise, the Tories are well practiced at sucking up to worse people than Trump. The legacy of appeasement runs deep.

The Tory understanding of the special relationship comes from the overdue sunset on the British empire. As anyone conversant with any half-decent analysis of global geopolitics will tell you, Churchill (himself half-American) worked to get the United States involved in the war against Nazi Germany and then to step up to the plate as the guardian of the liberal capitalist order. Exhausted, as Britain withdrew from its colonies the US became the anti-communist bulwark old Winston always wanted it to be. Never mind that it subverted democracies, destroyed popular movements, and installed and supported dictators wherever it saw fit, little Britain was there by its side, sharing intelligence and providing fig leafs. Britain may have its own bomb and advanced military capabilities, but in a world inhabited first by the Soviet Union, and now a resurgent China it only "punches above its weight" by virtue of its being the herald for United States interests. They can never really admit it, but the Tories know well this is the case. Hence why they weren't fans of Obama nor Hillary Clinton who, for their part, viewed the special relationship with some distaste. Why not hang around with interesting folks like Angela Merkel's Germany instead of a ceremonial hangover as obscure and puzzling as parliamentary protocols are to most normal people. It's also why the Tories had no problem with Blair getting his thing on with Dubya. He understood Britain's proper place, and that was in America's lap. And why almost every single Conservative MP happily walked through the lobby in support of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

The character of the special relationship May has planned for Britain post-Brexit will see America and Britain become even closer. Already we have one of the most open economies in the world. Open for businesses from anywhere to swoop in and make a killing on the property market, take advantage of our anti-worker legislation to lock millions into poorly paid, insecure employment, and snap up strategic industries without even a shrug of the government's shoulders. A trade deal with Trump's America would exacerbate the situation. As we export more than what we import from the US, because their economy is over six times the size of our own, and as we'll be desperate for a deal if May follows through with her wrexit promise, Britain is going to be in a weak negotiating position. And that means two things, because this was what the Americans were pressing for under the aborted TTIP negotiations under Trump's liberal hero predecessor. A diminution of food standards so the Americans can freely sell all kinds of hormone injected meat and dairy without labelling, and opening more of the state up to private capital - including the NHS. A handshake greased with the slick of billions of tax monies heading for the coffers of American insurance companies. All presided over by secret corporate courts in which businesses can sue the government if they take action that threatens profitable returns on investments. Talk about sovereignty. Talking about taking back control.

That isn't to say the special relationship is a fiction, it is real. American culture is global culture, and because of the shared language Britain binges on their cultural produce like no other. But it is not a one-way street. British cultural exports and talent find ready audiences over there as well. The numbers of British actors, directors and producers, and video game developers that participate in the shaping of how America sees itself is surprising. And that's without acknowledging the roots burrowed under the ocean bed that link the two nations to the point where an understanding of the national character of each is impossible without reference to the other. And like all relationships, there's some give and some take. When Obama came to London and said no special favours for the UK post-Brexit, that didn't scare leave-minded voters - it motivated them to say up yours, a bloody sod you then. It firmed up the Brexit camp because, despite the special relationship, the then president was totally uninterested in the give. When May has gone through years of the weekly humiliation of soft soaping, white washing, and spinning for Trump, when her appeasement starts costing Britain friends and trade, and when finally she goes cap in hand to the White House for a trade deal, May will be doing the giving and Trump the taking. And all in full public view. The special relationship is tilting toward appeasement, how long before it becomes supplication?

Why Did We Call It Wrong?

Some didn't. No doubt they're feeling smug as others flail around in horror. But for the bulk of "us", the commentariat people spanning the academic pundits specialising in voting behaviour, the professional commentators paid for their opinion-forming opinions, and neither forgetting those weirdos who write about politics because they want to, Tuesday represented a unanimity of failure. That so few called it for Trump goes beyond bad analysis: it's a social phenomenon. How then did everyone get it wrong?

Well, for starters, we didn't. We were wrong, and yet we were right too. Not only did Hillary Clinton win the popular vote, she might surpass Trump's tally by some two million once all the ballots are counted. So yes, all the analyses were right that the GOP wouldn't out poll the Democrats - and the size of that margin could give Trump added extra legitimacy problems later on. Yet, despite knowing about the electoral college, too many of us treated the contest as if it was a simple popularity contest. The vagaries of this anti-democratic and archaic stitch-up system were rarely factored in.

The second point was polling. Most people writing about American politics, including Americans writing about politics, are removed from the action on the ground. You have to take what passes as evidence as your guide. And that, traditionally, has been opinion polling. While they were a bit all over the place, they favoured a Clinton outcome as per the final vote tally. Yet they also posted clear leads in the crucial battleground states, including Wisconsin where not a single poll put Trump on top. In Britain, the experience of the 2015 general election and Brexit should, by now, have taught us to treat polling with caution. On each occasion, they've been able to pick up movements in opinion but not the actual figures. Sucks to be them, sucks to be fooled by them.

And then there are the demographics. Asked about it in the lead up, like many others I couldn't see how Trump might win with such a coalition arrayed against him. Surely the bulk vote of America's ethnic and sexual minorities, allied to a sizeable chunk of white people would be enough to bury his chances? As we know, they weren't. The white middle class and well-to-do base of the GOP turned out in the states Trump needed them to turn out in, while the Democrat vote deflated. All the stars aligned for a Clinton win, and without anything else intervening we went with that.

Lastly, there's a strange sort of groupthink. In my bones, I felt we weren't going to win the general election, that Leave would put us on course for exiting the EU, and Trump was set to come out on top. But I ignored it, took Tony Blair's advice and had a heart transplant, substituting emotion for the cool analysis of hard numbers. This, however, was a conceit. The fear of the alternatives engendered a herd wisdom that appeared to have a close relationship to the simulated results of polling and extrapolations of demographics, but this was coincidental. In truth, commentators hostile to Trump right across the spectrum of opinion fooled themselves into think that he couldn't win because, well, he just couldn't. In the same way Britain just wouldn't leave the EU, how Labour wouldn't vote for Jeremy Corbyn (twice), how the Conservatives wouldn't be victorious in 2015. Being wedded to the established way of doing things, whether cheerleader or critic, meant projecting its assumptions onto a wider electorate. They couldn't possibly support ....

How to prevent this from happening again? Going in the opposite direction and forecasting doom and gloom is not an answer. Treating polling data more critically is the easy thing. Keeping a sociological imagination is necessary but not sufficient. One has to be alive to the play of tendencies and counter tendencies, their strength and weaknesses. But most importantly, and more difficult more difficult to accomplish is sustained self-criticism combined with the checking and rechecking of one's underlying assumptions, including acknowledging and allowing for your stakes in a issue and how that might colour your findings. It's not just fresh thinking that's needed now, but critical thinking and intellectual honesty. If that can be managed, then fewer in may be blindsided by so-called freak events in future.

Race, Class, and Donald Trump

How did the unthinkable happen? If only a short blog post hours after the biggest upset in world politics since the Soviet Bloc went under could provide the answers. Hot takes rarely do. Usually we have to wait months - years for perspective to form, and see an event in its singular aspect. Unfortunately, we do not have the time, the people who are going to be at the sharp end of a Trump presidency don't have the time. We need to understand what has happened not because it's a jolly fun thing to do, though there will be plenty who build careers off the back of providing comment and analysis of this kind; we need to get to grips with it to stop it from happening again. Here are some very sketchy thoughts.

The knee jerk nonsense of sundry liberals, which is already trying to carve a space for itself as the received wisdom on matters Trump, is most unhelpful. That the centre could not hold because the majority of white voters, some 62% of the population, voted because racism is the wrong conclusion. Yes, it was white people, but to mangle a phrase from a different context, not all white people. It was the well-off white folks, the middle class (not in the traditional American sense of the term) and the vast legion of small business people who are the constituencies who tipped it. In other words, the beginning of wisdom about Trump's victory begins with taking race and class together, of doing a touch of maligned intersectional analysis.

Just so we're clear, racism is as American as Mom and McDonald's. All through the American Revolution's heroic phase and down to today, the division of labour has always been heavily racialised. All whites, regardless of poverty and destitution, could draw deep from ideological resources that justified and maintained slavery to create an imagined superiority, and one that has blighted generations of white Americans. Of course, the Jim Crow laws in the South institutionalised racist supremacy and though they're long gone, the regular killing of black men by mainly white police forces show it hasn't gone away. Not completely separate from this is racial segregation. Despite being the great melting pot, it's probably fair to say that post-imperial Britain, with all its problems and issues, has proven much more successful in integrating ethnic minorities than the land born entirely from immigration. However, segregation and the racialisation of work, like all over the advanced West, had started to dissolve. More advanced in the socially progressive, metropolitan coastal states, it had a long way to go elsewhere, but nevertheless showed the interior its future. For the majority of white America, evidence of integration's insidious creep was felt through immigration. Year after year, more Hispanics appeared waiting tables in their restaurants, tending their gardens, working in their hotels, their service stations, their supermarkets and malls. They were a visual reminder that white America is a group in relative decline.

This is only part of the story. The race anxiety vote theory doesn't stand up. None of this is new, it was the case in 2008 and 2012 when enough white people voted for Obama. If whites are essentially racist, why the variance over time, and why were plenty prepared to vote for the mixed race fella with the very non Anglo-Saxon name? Economics might have something to do with it too. Neoliberal economics and governance, the subordination of all to the demands of capital and the whims of the market ceaselessly undermine our senses of self-security. The lot of the majority, regardless of ethnicity and race, is to sell our bodies and our brains, and therefore our freedom for a set period every week in return for a wage or a salary. For too many of us, there's even uncertainty whether there will be work enough available to pay the bills. Doubling down on this way of being has been the great transition of the last four decades, where the memories of industrial capital echo around crumbling factories. Manufacturing jobs, Proper Jobs, have either disappeared, got themselves exported, or absorbed into manufacturing machinery. They are now replaced by office jobs, service jobs, caring jobs, of jobs that no longer make things and instead produce the intangible. Across the Western world, but particularly in America and Britain, governments have overseen and connived with the abandonment of millions by capital. These are the left behind, a strata of people with a skill set and a mind for another time, and they have been discarded. That is the unmissable, crucial context for Trump's victory in the rustbelt states.

Yet, as we have seen, while white workers of modest means did vote for Trump, fewer than half of them did. It was the better off. How then to explain this? It doesn't seem to make sense. In studies of voting behaviour concerned with economic voting, summed up by another Clinton in a happier time as "it's the economy, stupid", researchers typically distinguish between two sub-categories. There is 'pocket book voting' (behaviour conditioned by the prospective impacts on one's finances, and/or those of relatives and friends) and 'sociotropic voting', which is where a voter looks at the health of the wider economy over and above personal circumstances. All aspiring governments construct narratives that address the personal and the social, and they are emphasised and de-emphasised when expediency requires. In Trump's case, the pocket book was addressed by cutting taxes, and attacking higher health premiums for the better off to pay for Obamacare. The macro story was about restoring industry to the rustbelt by repatriating it from the Far East and Latin America, and curbing immigration to ensure the right (white) people got the jobs. As a pitch, on paper it seems something you might expect white working class voters to get on board with. And some of them did. But it was the white middle class who were proper beguiled. Why?

Generations of Marxists have talked about the petit bourgeois - small business people - as if caught between the fundamental forces of capitalism. On the one hand, big capital can out compete and always threatens to put the smallholder out of business, throwing them down into the wage-earning mass. On the other, ungrateful employees are always bellyaching about not having enough hours, wanting pay rises, having more time off, wanting more autonomy, and, through incompetence or, heaven forfend, strike action threaten the viability of the business. To occupy the position of the petit bourgeois is to surrender to the icy grip of permanent existential dread, of not having mastery over one's fate (despite the promise of being one's own boss), and feeling hemmed in and under siege in the market place and at work. Second, for privileged layers of white people, the managers and the professionals, they share a certain outlook with their small business counterparts. Their good fortune is a consequence of their talents and graft. The privileges accumulated, the good salaries, nice house, multiple cars, expensive holidays, and the million and one trappings of the good life are theirs By The Sweat Of Their Brows. And they too are anxious it could all get take away, either by economic crisis leading to redundancy and unemployment, or ever-encroaching taxes and health insurance premiums. For both these groups, their sources of status anxiety are bound up with the great intangibles of class dynamics and process, they are therefore very likely to respond sociotropically to economic policy. Trump's pledge to decent, secure, well-paid manly jobs, to get Motor City motoring again perversely had more of an impact on the non-working class segment of white America than the worker. By giving the impression of a return to stability for the worker, so too the more excitable petit bourgeois is swept up in enthusiasm.

There's no real excuse for us commentators and so-called professionals not to have seen a Trump victory coming. His platform is backward and deeply troubling, but his campaign team - and The Donald himself - understood that stability and security, served as it was in racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric might appeal to enough people. And so it proved. One of the reasons why Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't, despite just edging the popular vote, was because it stripped out emotion and values. Technocratic managerialism was the order of the day, just as it was for the failed Remain campaign, just as it was for Labour's failed 2015 election campaign. For the future, assuming a Trump presidency affords us the luxury of having one, there has to be a revolution in the Democrats. It needs a vision of the good life and not rely on how awful Trump's presidency is bound to be. It needs to challenge the nativism and racism, and win enough people back to a positive programme that understands insecurity and is sincere about tackling it. They need to construct their own American story around a credible, non-political establishment candidate. It has to fight shit values with good values, not pander to them. Unfortunately, though it's early days yet, shrieks of liberal despair across today's media aren't good. Some have not only learned nothing about Trump's shock victory, they don't want to learn anything. If the Democrats choose to listen to these people again, come 2020 there's going to be exactly the same outcome.

Vote Hillary, Vote Democrat

It's high time I invested in a nose peg factory. Here we are again, a presidential election showdown between the Democrat and Republican candidates, just as it has been for 150 years. And on this occasion, just like nearly every other, the logic of lesser evilism must come into play. However, in case you've been living under a rock the contest is between the Democrats and something qualitatively worse. Difference is not a matter of degree any more.

Yes, American politics is stuck. Thanks to the early award of the franchise, the American labour movement never took off unlike pretty much everywhere else. While the Liberals here in Britain tried and failed to co-opt working class votes and aspirations, democratisation preceded industrialisation in the US, meaning our movement fed into one of the two main bourgeois parties, and that's where it has more or less remained. Historically, it has conditioned the Democrats and pushed it in a direction similar to but not entirely comparable with Europe's social democratic and labour parties, and has also ensured its openness to successive progressive movements like civil rights and anti-racism, women's and LGBT liberation. Yet a bourgeois party it remains, another historical twist where early advance gave way to lasting backwardness. Yet here the processes transforming politics here are at work in America too. No exceptionalism this time.

Here is the problem with the Democrats. They are a party entirely in hock to big capital, and also have a progressive voter base. This can be galvanised into doing good works, but even then its active electioneering tends to dissipation as soon as the polls close, as per the genuine enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 and 2012 have shown. A small number might get involved in community organising and find other political outlets, but most remain passive until next time round. The Sanders insurgency however has cast a light on the ferment at the Democrats' base. Hillary Clinton's victory in the primaries was square, but certainly not fair. This has stirred minor controversy as Bernie-to-the-end types have not accepted it is the end, and are prepared to vote Republican in some feeble, farcical echo of the Stalinist third period. Nevertheless, from the long term standpoint of giving labour an independent political voice in the US, it is preferable that the Democrats are in office and that the election campaigns waged by its base, often around unsuitable and anti-working class candidates, win as opposed to defeated by the hard right GOP.

Yes, Hillary certainly does fit that unsuitable mold. A free market, Wall Street-loving, hawkish candidate is never going to do. Her win tomorrow would fracture the glass ceiling some more, but treating that as the singularly significant event to the point of excluding all else is the worst kind of myopia. Obama's extra-judicial kills-by-drone and all the misery that causes is set to continue. Threatening to impose a no fly zone over Syria is madness. And her tin ear to those communities left behind by decades of dog-eat-dog market fundamentalism shows not just shockingly poor political judgement, but scant awareness how such policies can easily turn Democrat voters away from the party. Why is Hillary the worst the Democrats could come up with? Because she's going down the very same political path that got us here.

Yet were I an American citizen, I would vote for her. And on most downticket races I'd vote Democrat too. Because, in case you hadn't noticed, this isn't an ordinary presidential election. As the year has worn on and we've got used to the buffoonish countenance of Donald Trump capering about the stage, the more obvious it is that his presidential campaign endangers democratic politics in the US and elsewhere. Like the Conservatives here, the Republicans are in long-term decline. Their explicit positioning as the white people's party put demographics against them, and they are divorced from the greater and greater dissemination of progressive social attitudes and values. Christian fundamentalism, the Tea Party, and now Trump's candidacy are the last gasps of an America struggling to disappear. And as we've seen with the Brexit vote here, when reaction wins a battle the aftermath is economically and socially damaging. Should Trump win, every racist, every fascist will be emboldened to carry through their imagined grievances against hispanics, blacks, Muslims, Jews, LGBT people, women. The so-called liberal elite, variously identified with journalists, academics, and lawyers are also threatened. And because the US remains the world's preeminent superpower, it will boost the politics of reaction everywhere. Should the worst come to the worst and a President Trump accompanies a GOP majority in both Houses of Congress, then the Republic itself is in peril.

This is not scaremongering. The danger a Trump presidency represents to the people of the United States and of the world is real. And what is awful is that even if Clinton wins, he's run her far too close. It's a pivotal moment from which very different histories flow. On the one side is a fatuous demagogue whose angry, but deeply insecure movement will take America into a very dark place. And on the other is a competent if uninspiring establishment politician whose victory would, nevertheless, drive a stake into a tottering party of racists, religious extremists, and the putrid politics they hold and, despite herself, allow the progressive reconstitution of politics to carry on unimpeded.

Those are the stakes. Vote Hillary, Vote Democrat.

Politicising Hillary Clinton's Health

Here's a guest post from @CatherineBuca talking about Hillary Clinton's health. Like Cat, I'm no Clinton supporter, though she's definitely the lesser evil to the disaster Donald Trump would visit on America and the world. Here, Cat punctures the bullshit-filled balloons bobbing about Clinton's well-publicised funny turn and pneumonia diagnosis by pointing out its utter banality.

You'd think nobody had ever had their blood pressure drop and faint before. It happens to otherwise perfectly healthy people when certain stress factors are introduced, and certainly can happen to people who are already under the weather for one reason or another.

Let's take him indoors. Several years ago he pushed himself very hard to finish his masters dissertation. He finished it. He felt fine, if a bit tired. He came to pick me up from work (which is a story in itself), and as he was stood there as I was getting ready to leave he keeled over. No indication it was going to happen in the lead up to it other than he started to feel 'wrong' and then just went.

A few years later we've both got the flu, but we can't rest because my aunt's just died and I'm next of kin and we've got to sort everything out. We make it through the funeral, and we're on the train two days later to go and bury the ashes and we're sat there, doing nothing, as the train's going along, and over he goes again, in his seat. Exhaustion and dehydration from the flu and from not being able to rest. (The people telling me "he's probably had a stroke, love" didn't help. He hadn't.)

Cue a couple of weeks ago, he's in perfectly good health, but gets woke up in the dead of night by the cat scratching him. It's not too bad a scratch, a bit of blood but he's not scared of blood. I get him into the bathroom to clean it up, and he's fine at first, but then he can feel it coming on. He has to sit down. He goes wobbly. Eventually over he goes, toppling off the toilet seat and ending up curled in a ball out cold on the floor. He comes round, has a drink of orange juice, feels much better, goes to bed, is fine, is back to swimming and doing all the other things he does within a day. It was the shock of being woken up so suddenly that made his blood pressure drop.

When I was 18 I went out to a bar with my cousin. I started feeling quite hot, not quite right, and I wanted to leave (I'd not been drinking). My cousin was an arsehole and didn't want to leave. So we stayed. I was getting really warm, and felt worse and worse. Eventually, over I went. As soon as everyone got me up, over I went again. They got me outside, and then I was fine. It's never happened since.

Here then we have someone whose schedule must be hellish, who looks like she's probably suffering from a cold (now we know is pneumonia, apparently), but who hasn't let up on their schedule, who had to stand still for an hour or more which, as soldiers who pass out during passing out will tell you isn't the most fun thing, who it seems was dehydrated and overheated which was either brought on by the pneumonia or exacerbated by it, and so felt faint. It's not an unusual thing.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like Clinton and her politics. But if I'm going to critique her it's going to be on the things that matter and not based on some dodgy conspiraloon shit.

Notes on North Korea

It's been a while, so it's time to talk again about our friends in the North. Who else am I speaking of other than the esteemed comrades of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Lurid stories have done the rounds about the Dear Respected Comrade's execution of two officials by anti-aircraft gun for the crime of snoozing in a meeting. Alas, this is but churnalism, but as ever, there is a deadlier side to Kim's clownish, murderous japes: the North's second nuclear test this year. This is a big deal. Since exploding its first bomb a decade ago, Kim's regime have tested devices of ever increasing magnitude. What makes this "special" isn't just the bomb's yield, but the claim they were testing a warhead. After showing one off (allegedly) back in March, the regime wants the world to know it won't be long before they can mount warheads on their long-range missiles.

A few of quick notes to remember when we're thinking about North Korea. First things first, despite the Bond villain methods Kim reportedly employs to dispose of those incurring his displeasure, the obsession with WMD and maintenance of a grotesquely over-large military, the grinding repression of the monstrous dictatorship, its synchronised mass parades and other trappings of royal pomp, and the inimitable blood curdling warnings against the "US imperialists" and the South Korean "fascist puppet regime", what Kim and his criminal cohort isn't is mad. Despite appearances, actions undertaken by individuals, organisations, and totalitarian dictatorships are simultaneously meaningful and, within their own terms, rational.

This is true of the Kim regime. Without excusing its awfulness, from the standpoint of the regime's preservation its long-standing military-first policy aids its longevity in two ways. Across the 38th Parallel sits a not insubstantial South Korean army backed by a major US military deployment replete with nuclear weapons. Effectively being on its own since the mid-70s without serious Soviet or Chinese backing, the North attended to its own Cold War frontier at the expense of a more rounded economic development. And so North Korean economics are locked in a death spiral. Perceived military necessity consumes the country's meagre resources, which holds back economic development, and therefore undermines the capacity to sustain the military. This is where the missile and nuclear programmes come in. They seem perverse, but it holds out the possibility of rescuing the regime from utter collapse. With nuclear weapons and the capacity to reach not just targets in the South and Japan, but also US bases further afield and the American west coast, not only does the North have a serious bargaining chip in its long-term aim of a non-aggression treaty with the US, much of the military capacity becomes redundant and resources can be expended on making the transition away from autarchy to a managed market system, as per China. As this transition is affected, new berths have to be found for bureaucrats who've crawled up the military's ladder - and the odd periodic purge works to get rid of those who might prove to be too awkward.

Second, for the majority of the South's residents, particularly those born after the Korean War, and for whom the US-backed post-war dictatorships are hazy memories, the North's threats, drills, and nuclear tests are more or less part of the mundane everyday. Like most advanced democracies, the right are adept at stoking fears - this time about the North and therefore the need to take a tough line with Pyongyang, And this fear of the other is most effective among older voters who, like everywhere else, are more likely to turn out for elections.

Third, instead of laughing about Kim's grotesqueries, shouldn't we also ask about the responsibility we, as the West, have for this situation? This isn't to suggest Kim is blameless and it should be piled up at Washington's door. But this is international relations, and relations tend to have reciprocal effects. The question never asked about Korea's Cold War frontier is the dialectical interplay between either side. The North, for instance, were not the first to deploy nuclear weapons in the peninsular. The Kims are playing catch up. It's not the North that carries out massive annual military exercises designed to intimidate and punish. And it's not the North obstructing a lasting peace settlement - being left alone to repress his people is something the Brilliant Comrade (and all Stalinoid despots) desire most of all.

Blair's Interventionism

Seven years in the making and the Chilcot Report confirms virtually everything said by the anti-war movement in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The conclusion was pre-determined, the intelligence was full of holes, the British military were ill-equipped for an adventure in the desert, it was known beforehand that chaos and terror would be the invasion's children, and last of all it was pointless and unnecessary.

As we know, our soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister acquired a gambling habit that will cost us all dear. But in a way, Dave's deliberate positioning as the heir to Blair, perhaps unbeknownst to him, led him to ape "The Master" when it came to brinkmanship. Blair's desire to "sort out" Iraq came off a roll of foreign policy "triumphs". In 1997 part of Labour's success in weaning swing voters off the Tories was the party's business-as-usual pitch. There were to be no nationalisations, no splurging of the public finances. Just careful, competent management of the economy, a commitment to "what works" (i.e. privatisation and marketisation of services), and investment in crumbling infrastructure. Furthermore, as per the celebrated deal Blair had struck with Gordon Brown, the chancellor looked after domestic issues, particularly where matters economic were concerned, while Blair had a free hand elsewhere. One of these was the determination of New Labour's "ethical" foreign policy.

The West's view of the world in the late 1990s basked in the afterglow of the collapse of the USSR and its client regimes. Dictatorships in the East and Global South were giving way to nascent liberal democracies and a new world order of globalised capitalism. The West had won and now was the moment to impose a new settlement. Liberal internationalism, or "humanitarian" imperialism - depending on where you stand - was the foreign policy doctrine of choice in Washington and London, and was informed by two suppositions. The first was the "lesson" that military competition with the West destroyed the Soviet bloc and ushered in market and democracy-friendly governments in Eastern Europe - so standing up to tyranny pays. The second was the trauma of the Rwandan genocide. The so-called international community stood aside as about a million people were butchered in a state-sponsored blood rage. Victory in the Cold War showed what good interventionist policies can bring. What happened in Rwanda stood-in for the consequences of doing nothing. Therefore it had ready ideological cover to range where it pleased and was always already predisposed to meddling and intervention.

Blair was fully signed up to an interventionist foreign policy to try and solve the world's problems and make it safe for freedom and, whisper it, business. To his credit New Labour were committed to the peace process in Northern Ireland, which began under John Major, and Blair and his team deserve full credit for delivering the Good Friday Agreement. One intractable problem, solved. Contemporaneously, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia boiled over into the Kosovo crisis. Previous "humanitarian" intervention had seen the bombing of Bosnian Serbs - the "baddies" in media constructions of the conflict - and had the assisted ethnic cleansing of Serbian Krajina by Croatia in 1995. When the oppression of the Albanians of the Serb provoked resistance, a low-level conflict simmered up until the late 90s, when Milosevic set in what remained of the Yugoslav army to stamp out the Kosovan Liberation Army. Under the attempt by the Western powers to bomb Belgrade to the negotiating table, Serb forces managed to expel about a million Kosovars. Blair was an enthusiastic participant in the bombing campaign, and it appeared to work. The Serbs were no match for NATO air power, they withdrew, Kosovo became a Mafia-riddled UN protectorate, key figures - including the loathsome Milosevic - ended up in The Hague, and everyone could pretend it was a triumph for muscular liberalism.

Then came Afghanistan. After September 11th "something" had to be done about the Taliban. Cashing in the capital earned from the appalling attacks, the US pulled together a NATO coalition and started bombing Afghanistan barely a month after the fall of the towers. Providing air and special forces support for the Northern Alliance, the US and Britain helped drive the Taliban from Kabul in November. In early 2002 an interim government was formed out of exiles and anti-Taliban militias, backed up by American military power. A new liberal democratic constitution was ratified in 2004 and the first nationwide election since 1973 was held in 2005 on the basis of universal adult suffrage. Again, as a full participant in this war the ease with which the country appeared to be taken must have reinforced Blair's preference for interventionism. Remember, in the build up to Iraq the running sore of Afghanistan was not then apparent.

The lesser known 2002 British intervention in Sierra Leone makes a more convincing argument for liberal militarism than the Kosovan conflict. After 11 years of civil war, British forces were sent in to rescue foreign nationals as a hard won peace accord collapsed. But with scarcely any debate or media coverage, the British abandoned its mandate and defeated the rebel Revolutionary United Front, a peasant-based nationalist outfit noted for its thuggish cruelty and penchant for amputating limbs. It ended the civil war, restored peace and started rebuilding the country's shattered infrastructure. Blair was then, and is still regarded fondly by large numbers of Sierra Leoneans for the "services" rendered, and helps explain why Britain did much of the leg work during the Ebola crisis.

And one shouldn't forget the first Gulf War between the West and Iraq, which set the tone for the hegemonic foreign policy to come. The invasion of Kuwait by the million-strong Iraqi army, then considered the fourth largest in the world, and the subsequent coalition building and assault under US leadership had absolutely nothing to do with humanitarian concerns, but was dressed up and sold that way. Saddam Hussein wasn't removed from power, but it was a victory for democracy as the ruling Al-Sabah family scuttled back to Kuwait under Western protection. It was also in the name of humanitarian intervention that sanctions were applied and destroyed Iraq's economy, plunged its people into misery, and were occasionally bombarded under some pretext or another. This, obviously, was not Blair's doing but he inherited a set of foreign policy priorities that list Iraq and its grotesque regime the number one bogey. His toadying to Bush was as much continuity John Major as the Good Friday Agreement.

Of the four, Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone have been the most enduring of Blair's accomplishments. Kosovo is still an impoverished proto-state going nowhere fast, but at least the spectre of ethnic cleansing - of Kosovan Albanians at least - has gone. And Afghanistan? Well. But for someone at the time sold on liberal interventionism, each in their way could have been read as mission accomplished. If you wanted to believe and were prepared to suspend your critical faculties, there was ample grounds for those beliefs.

I don't think Blair should go to The Hague. I've never been convinced about the legalistic and procedural arguments around the invasion of Iraq, especially when the grounds for opposing it were ample. But what Blair is guilty of is criminal negligence and recklessness, and there is a 2.6 million word judgement to back that up.

It's All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating ...

A guest post by Caroyln Morell

Despite the date having been written the wrong way round, the Stephen King televised serial, 11.22.63 was enjoyable bingeworthy TV (and is available on NOW TV for those, like me, who signed up for Game of Thrones and now has found fewer and fewer reasons for engaging in a real social life ever since). For the uninitiated, it follows the character of Jake Epping (played by James Franco) who travels back in time to 1960 in an attempt to (eventually) thwart the assassination of JFK on the famous day America lost its innocence.

Much has been written about the long shadow the assassination cast over American history; President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline were young, handsome and vibrant, they mixed with celebrities and enjoyed a 60% approval rating among the general public - even when the country was increasingly divided over race. In fact, it’s amazing what a sprinkling of youthful, distracting stardust will do for any institution. Haven’t Kate, William and Harry done that for a monarchy that looked to be limping towards an inevitable demise as the century dawned?

Equally, much has been written about what would have happened if the murder had not taken place. Would the wholesale, innocent slaughter of young Americans and Vietnamese alike still have occurred? Would Martin Luther King have been dispatched in much the same way as Kennedy himself?

Of course, these questions are impossible to answer. Kennedy was an ardent Cold War warrior who sent "advisors" to Vietnam but who showed considerable political grit in helping bring America back from the brink of disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In most areas, he was a moderate who understood the power of public support for his policies - it’s hard to imagine him sending nearly sixty thousand young American men to their deaths. With regard to MLK, who knows? Courageous political leaders have always been bullet magnets but JFK’s assassination turned a confident, forward thinking country in to a pessimistic one, negative and unsure of its place in the world. In such an environment, murder always becomes a more established method of removal than the democratic process.

The TV show and the book on which it was based gives us a brief glimpse into a world where the fatal bullet(s) had not made their connection and Kennedy had survived. Perhaps as we would expect from the foremost popular horror writer of the twentieth century, it does not look good. After Jake saves the president in a dramatic confrontation which also sees the death of Lee Harvey Oswald (and his fianc矇e), Jake returns to 2015 and finds a nuclear wasteland. Scant details are given about how the disaster occurred but we discover that Kennedy was re-elected in 1964, to be followed by the crazed segregationist and persistent presidential nominee, George Wallace, who famously announced he would rather stand in the school house door than allow the integration of Alabama’s schools. We discover little more but Jake realises (perhaps like a far more famous literary character, Jay Gatsby), that trying to change the past will always have more serious unforeseen consequences that we can imagine.

It’s often said that history repeats itself and its here that we can easily make comparisons between Wallace’s unsuccessful, real campaign for President in 1968 and the current, (yes, it isn’t just a horrible dream) campaign by Donald Trump. Like Trump, Wallace excited the political interest of the white working class in a way that politicians rarely do. Like Trump he put forward policies that could never realistically be implemented (Bring on the wall!) and his campaign fundraisers were often accompanied by violent scenes. Wallace tirelessly described himself as the champion of the working man and woman despite never having lived amongst them and all the time serving the needs of the elite business circles he mixed in.

What will happen if Donald Trump (unlike George Wallace) actually gets elected? Very sadly, the events in San Bernardino and Orlando have made that more likely, with a frightened electorate unsure about when the next ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attack will occur. Maybe next time, the victims won’t be the members of a subculture offensive to some Muslims and some Republicans alike but ‘normal’ NRA members, or families visiting Disneyworld? Maybe a politician who will ban Muslims from entering the country is the one to plump for? Of course the problem that he has not addressed is that the Orlando shooter was born in the US, whilst others were radicalised via the Internet long after their arrival in the States as children. Will Trump begin by attempting to limit internet access for Muslim people "until we can be sure what's going on?" How long will it be before President Trump, unable to stop every ISIS dedicated terrorist attack establishes Islamic internment camps for both first and second generation immigrants, just as occurred with the Japanese after Pearl Harbour?

It’s entirely possible that such a divisive, polarising President as Trump could be assassinated but this time the trial would likely feature the possibility of a third, fourth, or fifth shooter alongside the one in the book depository - especially when it becomes evident that he is fundamentally unsuitable to run the world’s most influential country (for good or ill). But if this happens, I doubt that anyone in the future would want to slip through a wormhole to prevent it from happening. Whatever the future holds for American politics, it has to be better without Donald J Trump than one with him in it.

Omar Mateen and American Culture

Some sketchy thoughts about the murder of 50 clubbers at Pulse in Orlando.

1. It does not matter how tragic or bloody the event, there will always be people sick enough to try and score points off it. On this occasion, fast out of the gate was Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who thought it appropriate to gloat over the bullet riddled bodies of the victims. Remember, this man is supposed to be a Christian. Joining him in callous indifference and cynicism comes ex-diplomat Michael Oren. On Israel's Channel 10 this afternoon he suggested Donald Trump would be wise to exploit the murder on account of the gunman being Muslim. Lastly, it's not above the utter bams to make their own play. Each case involves total dehumanisation. Social media simultaneously bridges and enforces social distance. An appalling crime is just another item on the feed/news cycle and is to be annexed for crass position taking. The human dimension, the suffering, the grief for those left to mourn are secondary images inessential to the political meanings constructed around the act of violence.

2. The gunman Omar Mateen was a Muslim. He was not on any watch list, nor was there any indication he was a radical Islamist or, for that matter, particularly devout. Before Mateen went on his murderous rampage he apparently called emergency services and pledged allegiance to IS. With these circumstances, it's understandable the authorities are responding to it as an act of terror. Yet as Alishba points out, homophobia is a problem in Muslim communities - a point that's often impolitic for outsiders and to mention. According to Mateen's Dad, it was witnessing two men kiss that sent Mateen into a murderous fury. This is worth bearing in mind as this act is unpicked and made sense of. When these sorts of crimes are committed by Islamists, previous experiences in the West fall into the pattern of indiscriminate slaughter (London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels) or specifically targeted military personnel, such as the murder of Lee Rigby, or the 2009 killing of 13 people by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. This attack is more suggestive of last year's massacre by husband and wife pair Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino which saw the killing of 14 of Farook's work colleagues, and the Syndey cafe siege: that is murders in which Islam is a flag of convenience for motives steeped in vengeance and narcissism. Or, in this case, plain old bigotry. We should find out in coming days.

3. Cue another round of American soul searching and hand-wringing about gun control. Obama will make his usual pleas, as he does every three to six months, and the GOP will blame the club goers for not taking their weapons with them. The right wingin', bitter clingin', proud clingers of their guns - as Sarah Palin likes to call this increasingly unhinged constituency - are happy to see the death of 50 gay clubbers here, a packed cinema there, and classrooms full of kids as so much collateral for their inalienable rights. The truth is that easy access to arms is only one part of the problem. There is something deeply sick with American society. No other advanced society suffers these sorts of shootings with anything approaching this level of regularity. It cannot be explained by the size of the population - per capita they're way above similarly developed countries. Nor do other states with large gun ownership, such as Canada where over a quarter of adults own one, have the same rates of violence. That leaves something exceptional about American culture. The constant reinforcement of individual gratification and sovereignty, even as the realities of free market fundamentalism trample all over it. The absence of mass, collectivist-inspired politics, the glorification of violence, the way American media and culture splits people into competing constituencies with little emphasis on integration. From afar it appears the nearest an advanced society is to a Randian nightmare, a dysfunctional dystopia where the war of all against all too often explodes into bloody outrages.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

After having it on the shelf for many years, I've finally got round to reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It's a socialist classic every bit as vital and necessary as the more celebrated The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. As such, I'm not going to give any spoilers away, as much as one can spoil a book that's knocked around for 110 years. But I will make the case for you to read it.

It follows the tribulations of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States. Lured then as now by the promise of work and high wages, his illusions are quickly dashed as he settles into Packingtown (Chicago's New City district). Bringing with him an extended family, it is a remorseless tale of woe in which tragedy is heaped on misfortune piled upon yet more tragedy. It is a story of how working for the city's meat packers is fraught with precarity, exploitation, alienation, and destitution. As the book works through, circumstances and skulduggery break the family, break self-respect, and break the human spirit. Jurgis's career has him as a meat packer, a hobo, a beggar, a footpad, a political fixer, a scab, and finally achieves a redemption of sorts via socialist politics.

What can readers take away from an old propagandist novel aimed at early 20th century audiences?  Firstly, there is the burning sense of grievance. It's not the blind operation of the market serving Jurgis and his family a diet of misery. At each moment, the invisible hand has its strings pulled by the plotting of the beef trusts, the rigging of the city's politics and legal system, the criminality of capital's lieutenants, the corruption of union activists, and the calculations made to maintain this state of affairs. Injustice radiates off the page - only the most stone-hearted could fail to be moved. And what stirs is that the tyranny, cruelty, and brutality of the packing houses doesn't belong in the history books. It's in the semi-criminal factories and warehouses stuffed with migrant labour, legal and otherwise, across the advanced countries. It's the lot of the millions crammed into China's "special economic zones", of the Bangladeshi garment worker, and Brazilian child labourer, all the members of our class who continue to bear the crushing load and grinding iniquity of capital in circumstances not at all removed from The Jungle's meat packers.

There's something here for accelerationism. Early on, Sinclair relates the elaborate organisation of the vermin-infested meat packing plant, from the conveyor belt of cattle and pigs through the process of killing, cutting, boiling, freezing, packing, and the disposal of leftovers. Even the scamming, the strategies of waylaying the food standards inspector, the cutting and selling of winter ice from the stagnant waste pond, all are the fruits of scientific management techniques. In the whir of industrialised slaughter, each man, woman, and child is a cog whose activity is absolutely determined by the momentum of machinery driven by the maximisation of all possible profit. It's a regimented ordeal captured with a sense of horrified wonder, of how an enterprise can be so ingenious, so stupendous, and yet so inhuman. The Jungle isn't as pithy as Marx's praise and condemnation of capital in The Manifesto, but Sinclair's praising of the packing industry as a means of burying it has a rhetorical force rare even among radical literature.

If there are downsides to The Jungle, I think the party scene of the first chapter is out of place. And the final section of the book, where Jurgis is introduced to socialist politics, could come across a touch preachy (indeed, Sinclair himself later disowned it). But for comrades new to socialism, especially the more enthusiastic Jeremy supporters, this is vital reading. Like the experience of the newly radicalised, the scales tumble from Jurgis's eyes as the story of his life finally makes sense. He's seized by the zealotry of the convert and attempts his damnedest to recruit family members and acquaintances. Yet he's mystified that others cannot see what he sees, despite going through the same backbreaking, soul-shattering traumas. This teaches him patience and gives the book chance to explore the psyches of those resisting the socialist proposition. This is an ideal primer for the frustrations of radicalism, and is one I could have done with when I was an annoying 18 year old.

Publication was met with a ferocious scandal around food hygiene and adulteration, and new standards legislation was imposed on the beef trust. As Sinclair put it at the time, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." While this was a happy, if unintended consequence, The Jungle's radical edge is yet to be realised.

Politics and the Panama Papers

After expending a long day compiling and pouring over spreadsheets, I wasn't expecting two terabytes worth of them would bring a smile to my face. Yet that happened last night when the massive leak from Mossack Fonseca of Panama City flashed across the world's media. In a society like ours where everyday folk can't move for video cameras and tracking devices, it's welcome when those at the top feel the heat of, for want of a better phrase, surveillance from below. As the data hasn't been dumped online for all and sundry to skim through, there will be more than a few scandals buried in the numbers and tedious legalese. Already, we've seen a few. Iceland's Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson has refused to resign after he and his wife were spotted dodgy-dealing. Papa Putin's inner circle are caught up, though he claims it's a conspiracy to destabilise Russia in the run up to parliamentary elections. If you say so, Vladdio. It must be those same dark forces who have it in for the likes of Jackie Chan and Lionel Messi, as well as David Cameron's late Dad. Not that Dave's going to talk about that. Inheriting millions that have given tax inspectors the body swerve is a "private matter", we're told.

Mossack Fonseca have opted for the "within the rules" defence beloved of many MPs caught troughing on expenses seven (seven!) years ago. But, oh dear, what have we got here, clients under sanction and several front companies for pretty unsavoury regimes, including our beloved friends and comrades in the Workers Party of Korea. All above reproach, which is why several tax authorities in the wealthiest countries have announced investigations.

The leak is a significant political event, apart from seeing ruling circles the world over gripped by panic. The first, linking Dave to pots of money with questions of legitimacy hanging over them is yet another headache this useless government could be doing without as they flounder over the budget debacle, their lack of willingness to do anything to assist the beleaguered steel industry, and indeed their connivance in its decline. The problem for the Tories is they run the risk of not just of re-acquiring the nasty party tag, but being perceived for what they rightly are: a narrow (and narrowing) clique who are increasingly dysfunctional from the standpoint of British business. Their strength lies in appealing to enough people and convincing them their way is the best way, that they too will gain from the pain (which is always felt by other people anyway). Whether the Labour Party will benefit from the Conservatives' desire to skinny dip in toxic sludge remains to be seen, but their rudderless flailing and questions over the Panama papers, which are bound to embarrass other Tories and businesses with Tory links, is storing up huge political problems for them down the road.

As the tangled web of dodgoir transactions are followed and the global circuits of illicit cash mapped, this feeds into political problems everywhere. Even broken antennae have picked up the fact that mainstream politics is in trouble. Anti-politics and naive cynicism is the de facto attitude at large, there is distrust of (representative) political institutions, and a soft polarisation of electorates under way in many countries. I say 'soft' because the organised expression of that polarisation, Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP here, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump over there, is diffuse and largely atomised. Hundreds of thousands are inspired by the new (old) leftism of Jez and Bernie, but a great deal of that support is passive and gestural. Pay three quid, register as a Democrat. Politics remains a spectator sport deserving the barest amount of participation. And what's true of the left is true of those newly-drawn into politics by the populist right. The so-called people's army depends on disgruntled voters fed up with the way of the world and has pulled only but a hardy few into activity. Likewise Trump. His rallies might be scary and bizarre viewed from afar, especially when violence flairs, but what do most of The Donald's supporters do after he's breezed through town? They go back to their everyday lives letting their inchoate anger fester and wait for a messiah to fix it for them.

What repeated scandals involving elites do is crank up the frustration and the cynicism, and make the answers provided by the new lefts and new rights appear straightforward, no-nonsense, and appealing. With clear rallying points, what is amorphous today could well become organised tomorrow, and when that happens soft threatens to pass over into hard polarisation, and all the consequences that may flow from that.

Donald Trump's "Liberal" Support

There is little Donald Trump can say to shock any more. Last night's implication that his underwear packs something beastly is a case in point. I must admit, it raised a chuckle here. As the Republican party takes a dark turn that won't end well for millions of Americans, not least those supporting Trump, sometimes laughter is the only response you can muster as all the rules about US politics is dumped in a skip, and for something more coarse, more dangerous to rise in its place.

I would hope that Hillary Clinton, as the likely Democrat nominee would be able to crush Trump in the presidential election, though I still am of the opinion that Bernie Sanders would be an even safer bet. Yet neither are dead certs as Trump is drawing deep from a well poisoned by decades of prejudice, resentment, alienation, entitlement and, yes, that old warhorse anxiety. As many commentators have already observed, Mitt Romney's "unprecedented" intervention was only going to shore up Trump's support, as per His Blairness and his courtiers vis a vis Jeremy Corbyn.

In this respect, The Graun has provided a service inviting us to peer into the minds of "secret" Donald Trump supporters. Some of it is typical hard right bullshit, but lest we forget that bullshit is taken deadly seriously by millions of Americans. But most intriguing (or depressing) are the self-styled liberals, progressives, and in one case an apparent anti-capitalist who are lining up to support his ticket.

One describes himself as a "patriotic socialist" who likes Trump's idea of stopping all Muslim immigration. Another would support Sanders in a heartbeat, but believes Trump is the lesser evil to Hillary's oligarchy-as-usual policies. Another thinks a Trump presidency would shake the American people out of their torpor, seeing as Hitler did the same. A "left-liberal college professor" is supporting Trump because he wants to piss off his lefty students. Another is an unemployed licensed attorney who thinks Trump will shake things up, even if he's "as bad as Hitler". And perhaps the most ridiculous and short-sighted comes from a young gay Muslim who thinks he'd be okay under a Trump presidency because The Donald just wants to get the "bad" Saudi-backed Wahhabi Muslims.

Each of these people are either deeply stupid, short-sighted to the point of blindness, or both. But millions supporting Trump for similar, albeit less articulate reasons, isn't something you can put down to individual stupidity. It is a social phenomenon, and need to be grasped, analysed, and responded to as such. What's common in all these "left" rationalisations is a sense of fatalism and powerless. Each of them have effectively given up on collective action to change things, not that each and every one of them have been active in the activist sense. They don't think to look to themselves and others in a similar position to work together around a set of political and social objectives. As American politics has redoubled its oligarchical character, so their individual situations are rendered external and irrelevant to Beltway concerns, or at least so it appears to them. Hence feeling isolated and unwilling/unable to engage in politics to solve their own problems, they latch onto a billionaire saviour who threatens the whole system with a hard reset - and all without having to do much more than fill out a piece of paper.

The problem is their fatalism is also premised on it's-not-going-to-happen-to-me-ism. Trump wants to demolish establishment politics, but that wrecking ball will crash through the heartlands of those now flocking to support him, just as it has done under previous conservative presidencies.