Paul Mason

When you trust your life to an airliner flying at 40,000 feet, you do so because you believe there is a real world, independent of your senses, whose laws the aircraft engineer has understood. However complex that world is, however full of randomness, to retreat from the belief in the 400-year-old scientific method that guides the aircraft engineer would be a seriously retrograde step.

Trump thrust this nicety aside, saying to the racists, sexists and Islamophobes: go ahead and vocalize all the hate inside you. The rallies brought together a mixture of born-again Christians, amoralists from the alt-right movement and porn-addicted right-wing bigots – and created an atmosphere in which they could all yell the word ‘cunt’ every time he mentioned Hillary Clinton.

So Trump represents something bigger than a takeover of the federal government by one fraction of US capital devoted to protectionism and the small state. He represents the triumph of a reactionary theory of human nature in which inequality – of race, sex and economic status – is determined by our genes. This, as we will see, is the problem that’s going to be hardest to overcome, because it is deeply rooted in the economic practice of the past thirty years.