http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2017-02-01T13:10:10Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#d4e040c14e9a1401aad8be66a19b98ecee639a23 2017-02-01T13:10:10Z February 1. It's strange that Donald Trump was not anti-immigrant until he ran for president. Did he keep it secret all those years because he doesn't like to say controversial stuff that will get him in trouble? Was he cynically pandering to his base, and after he no longer needed their votes, he burned a lot of political capital to give them what they wanted that he didn't really care about? The only thing that makes sense is that Trump has been possessed by his followers -- or by the worst impulses of some of them.

Yesterday a reader sent me this John Robb post, Trump's Rollback of the Neoliberal Market State. Robb frames Trump's cultural agenda, closing borders and locking down human identity into fixed groups that are at war with each other, as the end of "cultural neoliberalism". That makes it sound like tolerance, inclusion, free movement, and mutable personal identity are just a blip in history, when really that's how the nice cultures have always been. It had nothing to do with global corporate rule until Bill Clinton and Tony Blair combined the two things in the 90's -- the biggest blunder the left has made since revolutionary communism.

The culture that has possessed Trump is also very old -- it's the compulsion of enraged monkey tribes to fling shit at their enemies. This release of primal energy might feel exciting, but this is seriously ugly, and I have no idea how big the fire will get before it burns itself out.

What we have to do is simple but not easy: protect and grow a culture of peace and openness and friendly curiosity, through the collapse of growth-based economics, and into whatever economic system comes next. Here's a song about it: the future's in your lap, so Keep It Warm.

]]>