I’ve been reading The Archdruid Report regularly for a long time now, because unlike me, John Michael Greer posts every week and always writes something interesting. Given that we’ve got a federal election coming up in Australia and that I’ve mentioned one of JMG’s notions on the current state of politics to several people over the last few months, I though I’d provide a TL;DR here:

If you want, you can split people in the US into four classes, based on how they get most of their income:

1. The investment class (income derived from returns on investment)
2. The salary class (who receive a monthly salary)
3. The wage class (who receive an hourly wage)
4. The welfare class (who receive welfare payments)

According to JMG, over the last fifty years or so, three of these classes of people have remained roughly where they are; the investment class still receives returns on investment (modulo a recession or two), the salary class still draws a reasonable salary, and life still sucks for people on welfare. But the wage class, to be blunt, has been systematically fucked over this time period. There’s a lot of people there, and it’s this disenfranchised group who sees someone outside the political establishment status quo (Trump) as someone they can get behind. Whether or not Trump is elected in the US, there’s still going to be a whole lot of people out there pissed off with the current state of things, and it’s going to be really interesting to see how this plays out.

You should probably go read the full post, because I doubt I’ve done it justice here, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine the same (or a similar) thesis might be valid for Australia, so my question is: what, if anything, does this mean for our 2016 federal election?