I read a lot of serious newspapers — online and off — today, and in the end got tired of the whining. These publications are mostly written by and for the socio-economic groups who have done reasonably (or very well) out of the neoliberal years and it’s as if they cannot believe that this has happened. So they constantly repeat the long list of terrible downsides that will follow from this catastrophic election. But we knew about those downsides before November 8, so another recitation of them seems redundant. The real question is: what should those who are dismayed by the Trump ascendancy do now?

For American citizens, the answer seems obvious: focus on the mid-term elections that are due in 2018. We know from long experience that new American presidents generally get an electoral kicking in those mid-terms. Given that Trump is likely to make a hash of many things in his first two years, the chances of getting some rationality back into Congress seem worth considering.

For us in Europe, some rethinking is due. Top of my list would be NATO, which was allowed to engage in really pernicious mission-creep after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. What the hell was NATO doing in Afghanistan, for example? Given Putin’s belligerence, NATO in its original conception — to protect Europe from Soviet advances — is still valid. Trump’s scepticism about the organisation might provoke some useful rethinking among the European democracies who most need it — and who have clearly been taking it for granted if you look at the proportion of their GDP that they devote to defence. Kate Bush’s Joni Mitchell’s¹ great line — you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone — comes to mind.

Searching belatedly for a silver lining in this cloud, I’m struck by the thought that Trump’s election is likely to take the wind out of Silicon Valley’s sails. After all, Peter Thiel was the only one of the Valley’s oligarchs who supported Trump, and Hillary Clinton’s email trove is littered with the names of tech titans who were clearly part of the Clinton inner circle. And just as I ws thinking this, I came on a column by Andrew Orlowski which likewise sheds no tears over the Valley’s reverse:

Despite inflicting on people the greatest loss of shareholder value in human history, Silicon Valley managed to restore its reputation after the dot.com crash, but only did so because the political and media “thought leaders” were entranced and in awe of Facebook and Google. Google’s extraordinary grip on Government agencies has been well documented here at El Reg, and only took place thanks to Obama. Obama was even prepared to give Google something even Google was nervous about asking for – Class II reclassification. If it was good for Uber or Facebook, it must be good for America.

The tech oligarchs had an extraordinary ride of luck. Silicon Valley successfully disguised an attack not just on the heartlands, but the unwritten social contract. If you study Google closely, what emerges is how much the very idea of humans irritates it, what an inconvenience we are. “Post human” isn’t some sci-fi fantasy, it’s a reasonable description of a world in which many jobs have been automated, and the individual’s property rights and identity rights have been pared right away to the bone. People have begun to notice that Silicon Valley doesn’t create jobs or prosperity – except for the oligarchs themselves.

There are 3.5 million trucking jobs in the US, and a further 5.2 million job associated with transport. Trucking is the most popular job in 29 of the 50 states. How many will survive in a decade?

And the relevance of this? If Silicon Valley gets its way, most of those jobs will disappear.

Naomi Klein, writing in the Guardian:

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe….

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The sad truth, though, is that a lot of people who weren’t directly disadvantaged by globalisation voted for Trump — and for Brexit in the UK. Globalisation is an important part of the explanation for the populist revolt. But there are other, nastier, facets to it also. Racism and xenophobia, for example.

From Dave Winer

On a panel on MSNBC last night, Steve Schmidt, a Republican consultant, said the question for American workers wasn’t that jobs were being shipped overseas. That’s last century’s problem. Today’s concern is that automation replacing a lot of workers, and it’s about to accelerate. A lot more Americans are going to be out of work next time around.

Trump didn’t mention it because the smart people in the Republican Party either weren’t advising him, or he wasn’t listening. And Hillary didn’t mention it because it’s true, I’m sure she knows it, but she doesn’t have an answer.

I’m writing this as the US election is in progress and before votes have begun to be counted. My guess (and hope) is that Clinton will win. But even if she does, I don’t think things will get better. For one thing, the insurgent forces that created the Trump onslaught will not go quietly into that good night. The explosion of populism that 2016 has brought is not just a passing rage. Something has changed. Something big. Things that we have taken for granted for decades are suddenly looking fragile. Political theorists tell us that liberal democracy is a surprisingly resilient organism. My feeling is that it is fragile, and the events of 2016 have provided us with some insights into ways that it might begin to fail.

All of which is by way of introduction to a remarkable essay that the Economist has published this evening. It’s about precisely this subject: the fragility of liberal democracy, and the circumstances under which it might flip. It’s really worth reading in full, but here’s the central passage.

What is a political institution really? It is a social consensus supporting particular behaviour in particular contexts, designed to prevent people from pursuing narrowly rational actions when those actions are detrimental to long-run welfare. We all agree we are going to do things a particular way, because when there are defections from doing things that way, society doesn’t work as well. We all agree that we are going to pay at the end of the meal, even though we have already eaten, because when too many people defect from that norm the experience of dining out becomes dramatically worse for everyone. We all agree that politicians shouldn’t base their campaigns on falsehoods, because the norm that campaigns should be at least somewhat rooted in reality makes for better public policy.

Inevitably, people have an incentive to defect from the norm established by an institution. Not paying for dinner is easier, if you can get away with it. Lying throughout a campaign is a useful strategy, if you can get away with it. For useful institutions to persist, then, there must be punishments for defection from the norm. Sometimes there are civil or criminal penalties for defection, though in the absence of a true social consensus regarding the norm those penalties might be too weak to support the institution (think about extralegal use of alcohol or drugs). Most of the time, social opprobrium is a critically important part of the process of defending the norm. Society relies on its members to shame people who run out on dinner bills. It relies on its members, and on institutions like political parties and the press, to shame and discourage people who flout important political norms. In liberal democracies, when an important political figure gets caught in a blatant lie, or ignores a public norm that leaders should not engage in open racism, or declares his intention to violate constitutional principles, we expect the public outcry to be fast and furious, and we expect the figure to suffer some professional consequence as a result: to face a loss of power, or a loss of status, or a loss of position.

If these social costs decline, or if public shaming becomes less effective, society can flip from a good institutional equilibrium to a bad one. If the cost to defecting becomes easier to bear, then more leaders will do it, which further reduces the stigma of defecting…

It seems to me that what Trump in the US and the fanatical Brexiteers in the UK have been doing fits this template pretty accurately. Their method has to undermine and erode the social consensus surrounding politicians’ behaviour which used to keep things on a moderately level playing field. And in so doing they’ve triggered a downward spiral in which we are all enmeshed — and which they will not be able to control, even if they wanted to. The maelstrom starts here.

Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Answers:

1. Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism
2. One of the current candidates for the presidency of the United States.