In the early 2000s I felt I could see the future. Not some psychic power, but something more logical. I could see the rise of GW Bush – that America would end up with his presidency and his blind intention to invade Iraq. It then proceeded.
Before Brexit that inner voice started to raise fears that Britain was about to make a terrible choice to abandon its responsibilities as a stable member of the EU. And then it did.
And then the American election. The same inner fears seemed to tell me that Hillary Clinton was not fighting the election in a way that would work. Bernie Sanders was a better candidate as he had definite policies that his followers believed in. She seemed to spend all her on-screen time talking about Trump. If she was to beat Trump, it meant taking the rust-belt states. The states that consider the middle-class as “elites”.
The effect of the 2008 crash seems to have worked its way out of the economy, at least out of the banking and asset trading economy. There is a sector of the economy that has not seen recovery, and that is the part that was wiped out, lost their houses, their jobs, their health and most importantly, any rationale that any political force was going to help them. Six years of Obama with the Republicans ruling both the House and Senate meant that their symbol of hope was unable to turn to help them out.
Like the dispossessed in Great Britain who blamed the “EU elites” for their trials, the American rust belt did not hear any answer from Hillary. Instead they opted to go with what they perceived as a source of power.
That explains, to me at least, why we managed to get into this hyper Right-Wing cycle. The “elites” are not the richest 1%. They are now the middle classes and despised by the non-working working class who look at the ruling class as their “saviour”. The elimination of the extremes of poverty in both cultures is more likely to erase the most poor from future history than it is to save them. They are now, like Native Americans, an endangered species.
Long term politics are a form of evolution. It means death to half of humanity.