This is my farewell post. I am not deleting this account, as I don’t want to lose the archive, and I don’t want my name taken by imposters. But, for as long as Musk owns the platform, I’ll no longer use it. I’m now posting at Since Elon Musk bought this.

11. Our task is to revitalise democratic politics, by imagining a genuinely democratic dispensation, and by building support around those who are prepared to fight the rising tide of economic power.

10. The likes of Starmer, Macron, Scholz, Albanese, Trudeau look like little more than placeholders, waiting for the inevitable.

9. We are completely unprepared for this. “Liberal” governments display no interest in reversing the spiral. They bend to accommodate the escalating demands of capital and class power, rolling out a red carpet for the new autocrats/oligarchs/fascists/emperors.

8. To counter the spiral requires massive political effort: dissent, protest, non-cooperation and the building of alternatives on a vast scale. The response by power will be extreme repressive violence. Only societies prepared to withstand it produce alternatives to tyranny.

7. But SUCH THINGS DON’T HAPPEN BY THEMSELVES. Society does not automatically produce such solutions. Quite the opposite. Societies without active efforts to reverse the spiral automatically produce tyranny.

6. Now we could conceive of a state that is 50%, 90%, perhaps even 100% democratic, a state that works for all its citizens, not just the emperor and his court, or (in the best case) certain favoured classes. I’ve suggested what this might look like in various columns and books.

5. The effect has now fully worn off. Capital and class power are triumphant once more. Autocrats scarcely need lift a finger to gain and retain power, as the patrimonial spiral has been turning uninterrupted since 1980 (thanks neoliberalism!). The emperors are back.

4. A semi-democratic state (and as I’ve argued on these threads before, we never achieved more than about 5% democracy at the best of times) was a result of the partial destruction of class power by two world wars, and the opportunity this created to reverse the spiral.

3. These reversions happen because of the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation, described by Thomas Piketty. This leads (unless society is prepared actively to stop it) to a patrimonial spiral of power accumulation. Economic power translates into political power.

2. While fascism had peculiar features, it was a variant of this default state. Trumpism will be another such variant. We find these reversions surprising because we imagine that the default state of societies like ours is democracy.

1. There have been plenty of debates about whether or not Trump and his circle are fascists. In this column, I argue that the debate solves nothing. We’re seeing a reversion to the default state of politics in centralised societies: autocratic tyranny. 🧵.

Maga fanatics, whipped up by the frenzy of hatred on X and other media, might gain nothing from Trump’s presidency except the satisfaction of inflicting pain. But this is sufficient to ensure their absolute loyalty. It will induce them to commit any atrocity Trump demands.

"This is the great discovery of the conflict entrepreneurs: what counts in politics is not how well people are doing, but how well they're doing in relation to designated out-groups." So people support a class war against themselves. My column this week.

One day to go before the #Xodus. Tomorrow afternoon, UK time, January 20, join me in leaving this platform for Bluesky.

Tiktok has been banned in the US on the grounds that China could use it "to manipulate and control Americans by spreading propaganda and misinformation." In other words, China *might do* exactly what Elon Musk *has done* with X. It's a blatant double standard.

Vaccines are among the best of inventions. There's a high chance that without them, and the herd immunity they can deliver, you'd either not be here or would face a lifelong disability: *whether or not you had them yourself*. It's obvious, but many are determined to forget it.

On CBC last night, I spelt out the moral case to keep on trying, however hard it might be. Defending the living planet is not an option we can abandon. Ultimately, it is all that counts.

She's become perhaps the leading exponent of what I see as far-right para-environmentalism. An ideology which has some of the outward trappings of environmentalism, but which looks anti-scientific, anti-human and aligned with some of the grimmest political forces on the planet.

I remember when @drvandanashiva was a scientist who cared about humanity. Now it's wall-to-wall this. Disappointing doesn't begin to cover it.