Thread by @lokiscottishrap

Trump has no guiding philosophy - just self interested instinct. Experience tells him by following it he will succeed at anything. Coincidentally, his instincts are perfectly calibrated to illicit a Liberal response that illustrate precisely how useless liberalism has become.

Even if Biden scrapes a victory, that it was so close in the first place, would represent the latest in a catalogue of failures of this vaccuous orthodoxy. Beneath Trump's disordered vulgarity lies something different in the eyes of many disillusioned Americans.

They want globalisation reversed. They want jobs back from overseas. They want less foreign meddling. And they want liberals who despise them for it to be repeatedly humiliated. Trump provides a sense that all of these things are occurring simultaneously.

The problem the Liberal class has is they still win even if Biden loses. They'll be able to take a moral highground for another 4 years. Their screeching commentary, containing manufactured melodrama, will fly off shelves - and they'll all get tax cuts.

Its precisely because many establishment liberals have so little at stake beyond their professed 'values' that they exude such phoney empathy and performative outrage.Smug surety remains their defining characteristic when humility would be far more appropriate.

Maddow, Colbert and Morning Joe are the epitome of this absolute failure of the Liberal class. They watch their careers and incomes explode in the age of Trump, with their two-bit tittle tattle masquerading as incisive and rebellious. If Trunp wins, they stand to do very well.

And to avoid any confusion, for the benefit of good folk like @dhothersall, by 'liberal' I mean status-quo centre-ground types who have repeatedly dodged the big conundrums feeding the very populism they profess to loathe.

There are areas where I air more on the liberal side than the left - aspiring to be civil in debate, steel-manning (not straw-manning) opposing positions, and a recognition that consensus is important and that social and economic problems are complex and defy simple ideology.

But as someone with insight into both the working class experience, and also a news and media industry dominated by 'moderates', I am quite comfortable in asserting that the 'living in a bubble' characterisation often levelled at them is entirely accurate.

What are sure to follow now are various attempts to correct my definition of 'liberal' as well as suggestions on how I may implement less imperfect grammar.

I'm not claiming the left has answers to the fundamental political challenges either. But prominent liberals hold a unique position within public discourse to shape and drive change - one they sadly use, all to often, to concur endlessly with themselves.

Many of the same people who turned a blind eye to the Iraq War and bankers not being jailed for crashing the economy, are, today, puzzled as to how American voters can turn a blind eye to Trump's misogyny and racism.

You love to see it.

You'd think some would have been shocked by events into more than platitudes. It appears many 'moderates' possess an uncanny ability to simply mutate into whatever the political context requires - eliminating any obligation on them to risk their position by behaving immoderately.

At what point, in the face of such immoderate global calamity, do we begin to identify 'moderates', and their easy does it corporate managerialism, as just another extreme position, like all the others?

Now here's Tom with the weather....

(definitely copying and pasting this thread about the world's woes into a word document and porting it furiously to podcasts, books, tv shows and radio appearances for maximum exposure and profit extraction - but what do I know about centrism?)