Alastair Crooke — Trump’s Win — A Rebuke to the Elites

So, there it is: Brexit, as I had earlier suggested, was no extraneous “flash in the pan,” but a manifestation of wider and deeper discontents in Western society. Let us be clear: not only did 60 million Americans vote for Donald Trump, but a further 13 million, who voted for Bernie Sanders (in the primaries) similarly voted for strategic change – albeit from within a different political orientation.

I do not intend, here, to attempt any post-mortem on the U.S. election, but rather to try to see what may stand hidden behind the Brexit and Trump events – obscured for now by their overly prominent presence on the forestage of the media and politics.…

This is important because it is a combination of left and right. The "Bernie bots" can be viewed as an iteration of Occupy, which was dominated by the left. Trump supporters can be viewed as an iteration of the Tea Party, which was chiefly on the right.

While both Occupy and the Tea Party faded from the news, leading to the false conclusion that they were just flashes in the pan, the reality is that they were early symptoms of an etiology that was metastasizing as growing social dysfunction.

Failing to recognize this and being in denial of it resulted in a surprise for elites and a shock to the social fabric that threatens their rule.

Mr. Trump will succeed or fail, but the uprising will persist in one form or another – and is likely to spread to other parts of Europe, leaving the latter in turmoil and politically incapacitated.

These issues are not going away. In fact, this is just the beginning of a reset.

It represents a profound alienation. We should not expect any early return of the liberal world, should Mr. Trump somehow fail.

Consortium News
Trump’s Win — A Rebuke to the Elites

Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum and a former British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy