For the rest of the day I'll be tweeting like a centrist who doesn't really have much on the line whoever wins.
''America, what have you done?''
''Oh I can't take this, I'm off to to do some box-breathing exercises in the den.''
"This is really happening, isn't it?"
''Razorlight were right''
'The entire free world is hanging on Wisconsin'
"To give you an idea of the emotional dynamic in the household, the missus is keen to maintain her positive aura chakra thing and is therefore ignoring all news. She is smiley and chill. I am obviously a pile of anxious human rubble."
This one is real.
'Politically, I am as good as homeless.''
"There was a time, it seems long ago now, that politics was for serious people."
• • •
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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.
Perhaps the sorest aspect of Corbyn's downfall is that it came down to accusations of racism - the definition of which the left has expanded in recent years. A lot of the intersectional concepts introduced to political discourse or cosigned by the left became its ultimate undoing
You had a lot of people resisting antisemitism accusations in a manner they themselves would deem unsatisfactory in any other case of racism. That they themselves would insist was just evidence of 'internalised' something or other.
It wasn't a good look to have elevated 'lived experience' as the ultimate benchmark of what constitutes truth to then be seen dismissing the 'lived experiences' of many Jews.
The death of George Floyd has rightly provoked anger, outrage and condemnation. The parallel discussion on-going in the UK around the racial disparities in the context of Covid-19 gathers pace by the hour.
Nearly every news report, and every opinion being expressed in traditional media about the issue (and of race generally) was that of a white person. Obviously, that should not have been a great surprise. but in the context of the current moment it made me uncomfortable.
Into my awareness came the complete realisation that even though I am often identified as ‘working class’ and that my writing deals mainly with matters of inequality, I am now also part of a larger structural problem – mainstream media dominated by white perspectives.
The reason Boris can lie with such ease is because he comes from a background where believing something is true is what makes it true.
Consider other false beliefs held by many which trickle down from the top. Meritocracy. Social mobility. Poverty as a personality defect. Addiction is a choice and a moral failing. Affluent people do better because they have better genes.
People with no direct experience of these things harbour erroneous beliefs about all of them. Their beliefs filter down as a prevailing sensibility regardless of their veracity. Boris believes his lies are true.