Two years ago, the US presidential election was closing in on us. Like many, I thought Hillary Clinton would win.

I wrote a long tweet thread at the time (captured in full here) which you can read in your own time (please do!), but the thing that was motivating me was from what you could describe as a ‘sustainability perspective’. There’s little that’s settled in the analysis of sustainability, but one of the things that ought to be is to be able to spot when something is unsustainable because the means of keeping it going are being systematically depleted. And I was, then, pondering what the end point of what looked to me like an unsustainable political evolution would be, but we’ll come back to that, kind of.