Just as today the question is who should pay for the Covid-19 recession, it was basic class antagonism over who should pay for the Great Depression that led to the mass unionisation of Hollywood studios.

The election means nothing has been resolved. Trump might be done but his defeat – if that’s what we’re seeing – wasn’t sufficiently crushing as to destroy his legacy. On the contrary, many would-be demagogues, both in the US and elsewhere, will see his surprisingly strong showing as evidence that the old culture war incantations still retain some of their magic.

Ocasio-Cortez showed that it is possible to run on a social democratic platform, against the machine, and win. Not everyone in DSA is all that committed to electoral politics. The meeting that heard back from the campaign also heard from direct action groups who work on housing justice and immigration, as well as those connected to the revival of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign which is mobilising the religious left. The DSA is a big-tent organisation.

That Biff Tannen is now in charge of the US is proof positive of a kink in the fabric of our space-time continuum. Like a VHS tape that’s been played, replayed, and copied over, the ghosts of movies past linger in the background of the world Americans now inhabit.

In an era of Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson and the alt-right, it’s easy to forget the uniting power that George W Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, had over the world. For the duration of his eight years in power, Bush was a near universal symbol of mockery, derision and utter hatred.

In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful polemic Between the World and Me, racism in America is seen as the equivalent of a physical law of the universe, a cosmic injustice with tenacious gravity. When a cop kills a black man, Coates explains, the officer should be understood as ‘a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.’ Society is equally helpless against this natural order because in America, ‘it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage’.

In February, Mexican journalist Martín Méndez Pineda walked over the border at El Paso and presented himself to the immigration officers, saying he feared for his life and was seeking asylum in the United States. Méndez Pineda was detained and held in federal custody for more than 100 days. On 16 May, facing the certainty of indefinite detention in the US, Méndez Pineda ‘agreed’ to be deported, and was walked over the border, back to Mexico, and to the people who want him dead.

While Sparrow’s admiration for his subject is palpable (and amply justified), the book is never triumphalist or hagiographic – or, worse still, nostalgic – nor are the central claims concerning the relevance of Robeson’s political thought uncomplicated. The book reads rather like the story of a haunting. What is it that moved a white Australian writer to travel the world in search of the ghost of a black American artist? And what did he learn?

The only thing more disempowering then watching Donald Trump’s surrealist acceleration of American revanchist conservatism is relying upon the Democratic Party to lead the #Resistance. After Clinton’s misreading of the electorate and colossal failure one would hope that even the most willing corporate servant might understand, even if only cynically, the necessity of a left-populist tack.

There’s a strange sort of surety that a lot of folks in countries like Australia and the United States carry from birth. It begins with the words: ‘that would never happen here.’ It’s couched in the sense that only a really flawed society would descend into the types of totalitarian regimes that plague nations in the Middle East. Last night, my cousin Shirin in North Carolina told me America is reminding her more and more each day of Iran. ‘And, I don’t mean in the good way,’ she said.

I decided to go along to a meeting full of people against Trump at the Queer Center in Manhattan. Hundreds of people were there. Being in that room, with queers, I fully felt the gravity of the situation. Many of the older people who took the floor to speak are the reason that I can be an open queer woman today.

Grey’s Anatomy actor Isaiah Washington was onto something when he called for African Americans to lay down their economic tools a few months back. His solution to the issues of police brutality and poor race relations was a Black boycott of the American economy, or a #blackout as some named it: no work, no school, no shopping.

It seemed some kind of cosmic synergy that the week Donald Trump was elected POTUS I happened to finish reading a particular novel by feminist surrealist Angela Carter. The backdrop of The Passion of New Eve is an America aflame, torn apart by contradictory combinations of visions of freedom and prosperity on one hand, and the right to bear arms on the other. For me, the surprise of Trump’s victory was accompanied by the idea that an Englishwoman may have predicted its aftermath 40 years previously.

Wikileaks was quick to post to Facebook a video of Žižek endorsing Trump as his candidate of choice. A post-election interview has him repeating, somewhat chastened in the rainy streets of Manhattan, that Trump is unconscionable but preferable to Clinton. What do his claims amount to now that that possibility is fact? What might before the election have passed as a hope for a radical displacement of what Žižek calls ‘status quo’ Democratic exceptionalism, now promises something more radical than even Žižek had in mind.

During the first US presidential debate in September, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were asked to explain how the escalating threat of cyber warfare would be combatted by their prospective administrations. Clinton, whose candidacy was undermined by a hack on Democratic National Convention emails in July, went immediately on the offensive, accusing Russia of waging cyber-attacks on the US and voicing concern about the increased risk of state-sanctioned intimidation via malicious web leaks.

For Trump, nation-building is essentially a form of ‘politically correct’ warfare, in which one tries to sort the good from the bad. The premise of nation-building – that other people were virtuous, ‘yearned for freedom’ and should be liberated from their oppressors, and turned into loyal American allies – is detached from its position on the political right, and re-attached to liberalism/progressivism, which is where it was located from Theodore Roosevelt to the fall of LBJ in 1968.