I went to bed last night knowing, as I have for months, that the next POTUS will be appalling. Now we know which brand of appalling. Now we look set to see the Racist Demagogue in the Oval Office rather than the Warmonger for Wall Street.
The bad news is for millions of Americans whose skin colour puts them under threat as not seen since the fifties.
The good news is for those across the world who, on balance, would prefer sanity to war-for-profit-and-empire in the middle east – and especially would prefer not to see WW3 over Syria.
Most of my friends are, like me, middle class and relatively sheltered from the neoliberal forces that wreak havoc on millions of working class and underclass lives. We are angry – but not angry enough – at the venal corruption and sense of entitlement that begets the Bills and Hillarys of this world, only superficially distinguishable from the Dubyas and Cheneys, and the 2008 style crashes that follow their neoliberalism as night follows day. (Paid for of course by those least culpable, and least able to pay.) Now we, good people all, ask: is this the end of the world?
Well on one far from insubstantial count – thermonuclear showdown over Syria – the world may, just, have drawn back from that. But it’ll be a nasty, brutal and massively disruptive drawing back. One that comes with already visible price tags and, assuredly, others as yet unquantifiable.
And of course, Trump cannot possibly deliver on the expectations that look to have propelled him to victory. That’s a hard truth equally applicable to other products of those expectations. I mean Brexit. I mean Corbyn.
But the end of the world? I think not.
Its going to be a tumultuous decade as those who have been ignored – have so comprehensively rejected neo-liberalism. The only choice for them was Trump as our only choice is Corbyn. The big difference is that for the United Kingdom – we have a plan based on Socialism. In the United States they have put their faith in the unknown -v- the known.