Trump's voters have seriously incoherent understanding of politics, but they knew they were right about one thing, that they were not invited to the high table of modern wealth creation, and their fate was perceptibly worsening.

The identity that was all that was left to them was not socially liberal enough to make them house pets for the Democrats, no brownie points for adopting their children.

They had become used to being ignored out in the boon docks and we're pretty OK with it as long as they could play the fringes of capitalism, farming, marketing and local real estate, a trip to Vegas every so often.

Then the bottom dropped out. Church and opioids, semi-deserted towns and trailer camps, for sale signs, self-worth crumbling and no-one caring about how to include them in the 'post-recession' party.

Hillary keening for more war. More debt, more sorrow.

Pity there wasn't a kinder, gentler alternative to the Trumpster, to at least give him a run for his money.

Oh wait...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Clinton did not make Asian Americans overly enthusiastic either:

Clinton's Asian American snub could have cost her Michigan

Asian Americans, after the final ballots were cast on election day, had voted for Clinton over Trump by a whopping 79% to 17% nationwide margin, according to exit polls by the nonprofit Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

But there are hints that Michigan might have gone "blue" if Clinton had won a stronger and earlier endorsement from an influential national Asian American voter organization. As it turns out, Michigan's Asians favored Clinton by a 65% to 29% margin, noticeably less than the nationwide average.

[...] S.B. Woo, the president of the 80-20 National Asian American PAC, a political action committee, contends that Clinton could have pulled more Asian American votes in Michigan, as well as nationally, if she had actively pursued the group's endorsement.

Woo noted in an article posted on 80-20's website that Clinton was asked to attend 80-20's endorsement convention in August with the promise of a full endorsement if she showed up. But Clinton declined.

They haven't managed to penetrate the deep state to anywhere near the extent they have in the US, but I suspect that it is less due to the absence of Baptist bigots and more due to a deeper cultural suspicion of public displays of piety among the non-sectarian majority. In the US you have the problem that your culture gives great latitude to public displays of piety, and pointing out that the preacher man is by any reasonable standard a frothing lunatic is not done. This cultural taboo is less pronounced in Europe, so the crazy cultists stick out more and can be purged more easily.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

What is crucial about the "identity" of identity politics appears to be the experience of the subject, especially his or her experience of oppression and the possibility of a shared and more authentic or self-determined alternative. Thus identity politics rests on unifying claims about the meaning of politically laden experiences to diverse individuals. Sometimes the meaning attributed to a particular experience will diverge from that of its subject: thus, for example, the woman who struggles desperately to be attractive may think that she is simply trying to be a better person, rather than understanding her experience as part of the disciplining of female bodies in a patriarchal culture. Making sense of such disjunctions relies on notions such as false consciousness--the systematic mystification of the experience of the oppressed by the perspective of the dominant. Thus despite the disagreements of many defenders of identity political claims with Marxism and other radical political models, they share the view that individuals' perceptions of their own interests may be systematically distorted and must be somehow freed of their misperceptions by group-based transformation.