I've long been puzzled by Donald Trump's popularity - until the thought occurred to me, that one key to this perhaps lies in the TV show Deal or No Deal.

My befuddlement has not been that Trump is a right-wing git: history tells us that these often win support in hard times. Instead, it's that his popularity grew after he insulted John McCain, even among the sort of people who usually revere war veterans.

George Lakoff takes us a step towards understanding this:

"Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing"...Consider Trump's statement that John McCain is not a war hero. The reasoning: McCain got shot down. Heroes are winners. They defeat big bad guys. They don't get shot down. People who get shot down, beaten up, and stuck in a cage are losers, not winners.

This overlooks a fact which many of us think important - that the difference between "winning" and "losing" is often due to luck. McCain was a "loser" because he had the bad luck to be shot down in Vietnam. But that ill-luck should not detract from his character. As Kant said:

A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes...Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a step motherly nature, this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose-if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left (not, of course, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all means insofar as they are in our control)-then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself.

This is where Deal or No Deal enters. That show demonstrates that people fail to distinguish between luck and merit; they have "strategies" even for what is a game of pure luck. To this mentality, Trump's insult to McCain makes sense; he is indeed a loser. By the same token, Trump is a "winner" even though his wealth is due not to business acumen - he'd probably be even richer if he'd simply invested in tracker funds - but to the good fortune of the 70s property boom, a rich father and generous bankruptcy laws. His talents, such as they are, consist in self-promotion and for "using the government as a hired thug to take other people's property."

It's not just uneducated hill-billies who conflate luck and merit. For one thing, the US is not the only country in which an oddly-coiffed cunt from a wealthy family has achieved undeserved political popularity. And for another, experiments at universities in Barcelona and Singapore have found that even otherwise bright students are willing to pay people for a fictitious "expertise" in predicting the toss of a coin.

Sadly, though, the failure to distinguish between luck and merit doesn't just help explain the hopefully brief and futile rise of a demagogue. It has longer-lasting pernicious effects. The narcissistic fiction of the rich that they owe their success to merit rather than to a lucky accident of being born in the right country leads to opposition to redistributive taxation. And supporters of immigration controls fail to see that the difference between ourselves and poor Mexicans or Syrians is due mainly to accidents of birth. In these, senses,as well as in their deference to the "well-born" Trump and Johnson, voters seem to think it right that people's fates should be settled by where they were born.

Ironically, therefore, the failure of capitalism has led to the rise not of socialist attitudes but of feudalist ones.