In the interest of knowing your enemy, here are some thoughts on what former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, a.k.a. Trump's Brain, represents. Whether these two in fusion -- a political Vulcan mind meld -- can uproot two centuries-plus of American liberal democracy, is what's at stake in the coming years (or weeks). For instance, are Bannon and the alt-right, for which, he acknowledges, Breitbart has been "the platform," racist?

How did Auden (W.H.) get it so right? He died in 1973, but his lines come to mind during the 21st century's most wracked moments.

Sept. 1, 1939, was written around that date from "one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street" in New York, at the end of "a low dishonest decade," the 1930s. It included the Great Depression and the global spread of fascism, with World War Two just ahead. Fair enough, he was there.

But on Sept. 11, 2001, with Auden long dead, his poem seemed to rise from the rubble in Manhattan -- reprinted, quoted, viral etc. That was at the end of a proud, boastful decade, which followed the Soviet Union's demise, with smug Western declarations of victory and much reaping of economic spoils.

Let's be clear on why Trump won. (Won the Electoral College, not the election. A strong enough majority of Americans voted against him.) It wasn't because of racism, fear of immigrants or misogyny. White supremacists and Confederate flag buffs didn't do it -- though they backed him.

He won because he carried four states in the rust belt, where factories once guaranteed people decent lives and which Democrats had always taken for granted. Hillary didn't even campaign there. Without them, Trump loses. In those states, the issue was hatred of free trade, largely in the form of NAFTA. It's now so despised that the term, free, is absent. People refer disgustedly merely to "trade deals."

I hated myself for loving The Crown -- the Netflix series -- so ardently that I devoured the first 10 hours as soon as they went online. I've always been revolted in a morally smug way by anything in popular culture that suggests some lives count more than others. That goes particularly for celebrity coverage. It leads people to undervalue their own lives and overestimate the merits of being famous. There are people who sound more intimate with media figures than with their own family -- as if they know them better.

Besides, what Dickens said about the endless law suit in Bleak House should've applied to The Crown: "It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing."