Here we are after another flabbergasting victory to
ignorance and I hear the explanation again that this is because people are disenchanted
with the establishment. They want change, they want action, so on, so forth. So
it was the British voted for Brexit, Australians voted in a bunch of raving
nutter One Nation senators and now the US has voted in Trump. I’m sorry, but
Trump is not anti-establishment. He is a rich, white, heterosexual male in a
first world country. You don’t actually get much more establishment than that.
Why do these results supposedly reflecting the people’s rejection of what is
happening in our world all end up supporting conservatives? Le Pen, the
National Front, Rise Up Australia and myriad other right wing unthinkers around the world have taken
off. Call me cynical, but I think this is really reflective of the desire of
straight, white and usually male people to return to the good ol’ days when
they didn’t have to share power, space, respect and resources with everyone
else. Thus the Brits voted to return to colonialism, Aussies to a daydream of
the 1950s and, actually, I’m not sure what America voted for … the
constitutional right to be an offensive, sexist, racist imbecile?
If people were genuinely sick of the current state of the
world and powers that be, we should be seeing a surge towards parties and
people that are striving towards environmental sustainability, equality, peace
etc etc. Instead we are seeing the rise of a bunch people who don’t appear to
have thought much further than their own arsehole and advocate ideas that
appeal to some sort of nostalgic unreality in the already privileged and the
not so well off but still reasonably privileged who somehow think that the less
privileged are the source of their woes, not the more privileged.
