November 2.

2016-11-02T14:40:42Z

November 2. This election is getting bizarre. As scandals go, Hillary Clinton's email thing is chicken feed, and it does not begin to explain Trump's surge in the polls over the last week. It's like those people were going to vote for Trump all along and as the election gets closer they'll take a smaller and smaller excuse. And why has Trump fallen in the polls when he's been most in the public eye, right after the conventions and debates? He's like that thing you do that you hate and you always promise yourself you'll never do it again, but then as it fades in your memory it becomes more and more attractive.

I'm not endorsing Hillary. She's a political dinosaur, a predictable synthesis of 1970's liberalism and 1990's neoliberalism, and she's on the wrong side of my favorite issues: unconditional basic income, drug legalization, copyright reform, and retooling the economy for zero growth. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is a crazy hybrid of 1950's conservatism and a 2050 post-crash warlord, and he's on the wrong side of everything except metapolitics.

I see Trump as a correction, bringing together two things that have grown too far apart. On the one hand is how our civilization really works, a vast and inhuman network that is best managed by competent and dispassionate technocrats. On the other hand is the show, the public perception of how it works, that it's all about the personalities of human "leaders", like the tribal leaders of our ancestral memory, and if your life sucks then we just need someone strong and decisive to straighten those folks out.

I appreciate Trump as a performer, and I agree with his instinct that the political show has become a farce and deserves to be played like a farce. But if he actually becomes president, people will learn in the most painful way that their primal view of politics is bullshit, that you can't fix your computer by getting the most confident person to smack it with a hammer.

Trump is not even a good businessman -- he has less money than if he had just put his dad's money in an average investment fund. His positions and his personality are completely authoritarian, and I would expect him to make so many more things illegal that people I know would go to prison. He's an enemy of the poor and I would expect economic desperation to create more crime, which would be used to justify more brutal central control. Ironically his own supporters would be worst off, while blue state liberals could soften the federal trainwreck with adjustments at the state level.

Another irony: Hillary Clinton's most extreme position is her hostility to transparency, her belief that ordinary people shouldn't know how the government really works. If you live by keeping people stupid, you die by keeping people stupid.

Ran Prieur

November 2.