President Trump: the fall of Rome and the collapse of industrial society.

President Trump: the fall of Rome and the collapse of industrial society.

My Psychohistory maillist said: "The "id candidate" has won.” America’s unconscious, the return of the repressed. Psychoanalytic models for understanding collective behavior.

Sounds right to me. We already know that resentment drives anti-establishment movements. Trump supporters represent the American unconscious: a little boy, angry at being frustrated in his desires and fearful of losing his self-coherence if he turns to his mother for succor.

And monied though Trump is, Hillary is too much the face of the existing system. He’s the rich kid who makes trouble right alongside the class losers. So everyone who feels rejected by the elite can find it easy to identify with him.

Or, more simply, (sociologically, rather than psychologically) America has failed sufficiently to educate her populace. Conceiving of education as a private benefit rather than as a public good, and refusing sufficiently to finance it from the public share of the national wealth, to finance it like any such necessary infrastructural element should be financed . . . roads, clean water, the national energy distribution system, health care, education. (And misconceiving wealth as primarily (inherently) private, rather than as primarily (inherently) public.) Capitalism is distinctively suited for maximizing growth, which is required in the early stages of economic development, but which exacerbates a dysfunctional degree of social stratification after those early stages, besides using up the resource base.

America, by failing to educate its population, has failed sufficiently to distribute the benefits of rational ego control to everyone. So expressive leaders get elected to satisfy symbolic/emotional needs, rather than functional leadership to satisfy the material reality needs.

We’ve got a crazy ride ahead, with a mad gilded clown at the helm for the next four years. It’s our great-grandkids, though, that I mostly fear for.

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