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What a week it’s been; first we had the English High Court make an official nonsense of Theresa May’s ludricrous tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit’ on 3 November and then across the pond on the 9^th, we had the unedifying prospect of a Trump presidency crystallise into crazy reality.

I don’t propose to spend too much time talking about the Brexit decision except perhaps to level one of my (by now obligatory) pot-shots at the UK media’s increasingly rabid take on the necessity of leaving an organisation that has – despite its neo-con agenda – managed to create more social and economic equality than a century of Conservative government would ever have achieved.

I won’t even bother to get too fixated on the danger of a press largely controlled by a bunch of cynical tax exiles with a ‘bread and circuses’ agenda of ‘taking our country back’ so that outside regulation can be done away with to the benefit of the same kind of cynical tax exiles. The inexorable lurch to the right in our day-to-day political discourse is part of an agenda being set by the same kind of people who, in the 1930s, were happy to run headlines like this one here. 

If we take a gander across the Atlantic, this was certainly a week that launched a million face-palms (and the rest).

The Donald’s victory didn’t really come as too much of a surprise to yours truly and last night, I certainly seasoned my supper with the salt of liberal tears. As a socialist from the hard (as opposed to the flaccid) left, I never for a minute believed that Hilary was anything more than a status quo candidate and a discredited one at that. She may not have overtly portrayed the sociopathy of the sentient orange haemorrhoid but her ostensible plausibility was perhaps even more dangerous. Clinton, to my mind at least, was never anything more than a Wall Street shill and her selection as the Democratic candidate was deeply problematic.

The comparisons with Brexit are inevitable: in both instances we had an electorate thoroughly disillusioned with a neo-liberal agenda which saw the hollowing out of working class neighbourhoods through off-shoring of traditional industry and the undercutting of the price of labour in a domestic setting through the active recruitment of cheap foreign labour and this resulted in voters being driven into arms of hard-right demagogues. This happened not necessarily because working people are bigots susceptible to racist dog-whistles as much as the fact that the would-be metropolitan elite of the left failed miserably in their attempts to reach out to what should have been their core constituency.

Interestingly however, in the US, it wasn’t necessarily just Billy Bob from Tennessee who provided the backbone of the Trump vote. The demographic that put Trump into the Whitehouse was decidedly more affluent and white bourgeois. This is troubling on all sorts of levels.

We could look at Trump’s victory as a vote against the neo-liberal agenda and it is to some extent but it is also a selfish gesture on the part of a class which has by and large profited hugely from the bitter fruits of that project. And their reasons therefore might after all have to be refracted through the ugly filters of racism and misogyny that the limp and condescending liberal left used to deflect from their own manifest and myriad shortcomings.

We could in this ugly inquest wander into the realm of ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ when it comes to the shameful way Bernie Sanders was given the elbow and there are plenty of reasons why this is also an avenue to be explored. In the final analysis however, it does come down to the self-appointed intellectual cockpit of the liberal left and its painful failure to offer a radical alternative to a dangerous psychopath to an electorate with such an obvious appetite for change. 

Already I can see those same metropolitan pundits trying to polish the turd by telling us that the most radical of Trump’s proposals will be shot down in Washington. The reality – at least to my mind – is that Trump isn’t a man who is likely to respect the institutions of government enough to pay them any mind if they don’t play ball. Telling outrageous lies and playing to the mob has got him this far…if it ain’t broke….