It was the night the American media were too demure to call Pussygate. At the time, Donald Trump had won nothing. Twenty-four hours later, he would be celebrating his first victory in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, setting him on the path to face Hillary Clinton in November. But on this frigid Monday night in February, while a blizzard whipped outside, Trump stood before a packed Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire and prepared to unleash his tongue.

After a rambling monologue that moved from his TV career to the happy, sunny world that would follow his elevation to the White House, Trump came to another of his pet themes: the inadequacies of his rivals. He was attacking the Texas senator Ted Cruz for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the torture technique of waterboarding when a woman in the standing area directly in front of the stage, a kind of Trumpian moshpit, called out, “He’s a pussy!” Trump pretended to look appalled, even walking away from the lectern in faux disgust, before finally, as if under pressure, repeating the insult for the benefit of the cameras that might not have caught it. “She said, ‘He’s a pussy.’ That’s terrible … Ma’am, you’re reprimanded,” he told the heckler, in the manner of a lax teacher going through the disciplinary motions.

And thus Trump secured his dominance over yet another news cycle – as the talkshows, cable TV and his fellow candidates all debated his lapse into vulgarity. As he has been throughout this campaign, starting in July of last year, Trump was the star of the show.

At the same time, he sent a powerful signal. It’s the same one he transmits every time he denounces “political correctness” or violates one of its supposed strictures: mocking the disabled, judging women by their looks, bragging about his fortune, insisting that, when he is in charge, shop workers will go back to saying “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays”. The message every time is the same. It says: I’m outside the system. I don’t obey its rules. I’m different.

Welcome to the age of Trump – audio long read Read more

Why is this so effective? How have these outbursts – which were at first assumed to be terminal to his candidacy – instead garnered him endless media attention and, more important, millions of votes?

Part of it is sheer showbiz. Ever since he got himself a daily place in the New York tabloids in the 1980s, Trump has known that outrage sells. Long before Australian political consultant Lynton Crosby advised his clients to change the subject by throwing a dead cat on the table, Trump understood that people will always tune in to watch a taboo being broken.

An underestimated part of the formula is humour. Trump is funny. His speech pattern is funny, his use of the word “so” is funny – “It’s gonna be so great” – his flamboyant self-love is funny, his mocking of his enemies is funny.

But most powerful is the thrill Trump generates in the room, and in the audience watching on TV, when he dares reject the rules of the game. For those voters who feel the game is rigged – who feel that the game has turned them into perennial losers – the sight of someone prepared to defy its conventions is exhilarating. It signals the arrival of an outsider, a maverick unbound to the old order and ready to destroy it in favour of something entirely new.

For his followers, Trump’s willingness to trample on the pieties of civic discourse is a sign of his bona fides, even a statement of intent. If he’s prepared to say that about Carly Fiorina’s face, maybe he’ll be prepared to come down hard on an American company about to relocate a manufacturing plant from the US to Mexico. After all, he’s clearly not fettered by the restraints that hold back the rest of those politicians.

On this logic, Trump is the fearless truth-teller. Which may seem an odd accolade to give a man who has been caught out as a serial liar and perhaps the most provenly dishonest candidate to seek, let alone win, the nomination of a major US party. But that is to forget that Trump’s core supporters believe it is the establishment – the media and political elites – that have lied to them for at least two decades. So when those same elites brand Trump a liar, his supporters either don’t believe it, or else they don’t care.

Trump is funny. His speech pattern is funny. His flamboyant self-love is funny, his mocking of his enemies is funny

For the next five months, Trump will face off against Hillary Clinton – the ultimate embodiment of the US political elite – in what looks fated to be the ugliest campaign in living memory. But even if he loses, he’s proved that he has deep appeal to a section of the US electorate that has come to regard him as their champion.

Their anger, which Trump has so deftly tapped, goes beyond this or that party, or even the current economic situation. He is channeling a rage at the state of America’s political system. And this fury is not confined to the US. There are versions of it surging across the world, hot with wrath at the status quo. In almost every case, those voicing it claim to be speaking for the people and for true democracy. But in their most extreme forms they threaten to shade into something darker: a revolt against the norms, the agreed boundaries, that make democracy possible.

The day after Pussygate, Trump won a crushing victory in New Hampshire, defeating his nearest rival by 20 points. And yet even then, he was still being dismissed. The pundits remained adamant that he would implode, that sooner or later the Republican electorate would cohere around one of the other contenders, that Trump could not be for real. After all, despite the rising discontent in western democracies, the people who actually win elections in the world’s richest nations still tend to be the likes of Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and David Cameron, with not a rabble-rouser among them.

But that was to reckon without a trend visible across the democratic world. While every case is different, it is undeniable that populists and demagogues are making extraordinary strides, the examples almost too numerous to list. The world’s largest democracy, India, is now led by a Hindu nationalist, one distinguished by what his critics fear is a wide authoritarian streak. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose AK party won a sweeping victory against the established parties in 2002, has become increasingly dictatorial with each passing year. In France, Marine Le Pen and her nativist Front National denounce a political establishment which she alleges has betrayed the (white, non-Muslim) people of France. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán makes a similar pitch. Earlier this year, German regional elections produced a surge for a party making much the same case: the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. And the tune is echoed by the Danish People’s party, the Swedish Democrats, which has roots in neo-Nazism, the party formerly known as the True Finns as well as the People’s Party of Switzerland. In Holland the notoriously anti-Muslim Geert Wilders is still a dominant figure. Britain has its own low-tar version of the type in Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence party which garnered four million votes at the 2015 election. Coming in a parliamentary system all but designed to thwart such an insurgency, it showed that Britain too is not immune to the appeal of populism.

Donald Trump tore up the rulebook of American politics – and is winning | Jonathan Freedland Read more

The individual personalities and contexts are different, but this disparate collection of parties and candidates feed on the same discontent. Usually the voters rallying to populist insurgents are those who feel failed by conventional politics, left behind either economically or culturally. They are the ones whose incomes have been squeezed, whose jobs have been shipped abroad or who simply have seen their neighbourhoods transformed before their eyes, by a changing, diversifying population. If two decades of globalisation have had their winners and losers, it is, brutally, the losers who are rallying to the populist flag – though that flag comes in stripes and colours that vary from country to country.

Indeed, it can be deepest red. For the disaffected are also heeding populist appeals from the left, from Bernie Sanders to Podemos, from Jeremy Corbyn to Syriza, appeals which adopt the usual motifs of populism – speaking for an oppressed majority against a corrupt political elite – together with an assault on a reviled economic establishment.

What connects many – not all – of these figures is a rejection of the political system as it currently stands. The new populists don’t simply say that the ruling party has failed and now the opposition should have a turn. They insist that the entire system is broken.

This is why Trump rails against Republicans as splenetically as he does Democrats. And this, it’s worth stressing, is the meaning of Pussygate and the rest of his serial violations of conventional political etiquette: through them Trump signals that he represents a total rupture from a system he insists has failed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump greets an excited supporter at a campaign rally in Lowell, Massachusetts. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

All this works best with the audience that doesn’t just agree with Trump’s message, but feels it. It fits with their own lived experience. Trump’s most devoted legions are those who are ready to break with the system because they feel the system broke with them long ago, that it abandoned them and let them down.

The group in question is the demographic that was known in the US journalistic shorthand of 20 years ago as the “angry white males”, now more politely referred to as the white working class.

The most measurable disappointment – some would call it betrayal – for this group is economic. For nearly two decades, longer according to some estimates, they have seen their wages stagnate or even decline in real terms. While the rest of the economy has grown, albeit inconsistently, and while the richest have grown ever richer, they have seen their own spending power and standard of living remain static. Indeed, median net worth fell for every group in the US between 1998 and 2013, except one: the wealthiest 10%. Working-class Americans saw their net worth decline in that period by a staggering 53%. Meanwhile, the richest tenth got 75% richer. In the US, that represents a fundamental breach of the basic American promise: that if you work hard and play by the rules, a comfortable life will be yours.

What’s more, for many of those on median incomes, the financial squeeze is only one part of a double betrayal. The US has grown steadily more liberal over the last two decades, with a loosening of attitudes to diversity, gender equality and sexuality, a trend that is especially pronounced among the young and well-educated. The symbols of it are obvious, whether that be a black man in the White House or the law that allows same-sex couples an equal right to be married.

For many of those angry white males this is deeply unsettling. A society that gives a prominent and equal place to, say, black men or gay women can seem to contradict the values in which these traditionalists (some would want to call them reactionaries) were raised. Put more harshly, one of the consolations available to a straight, white, working-class American man of the past was the knowledge that there were others below him in the social hierarchy. He was in a society that validated him above the gay, the non-white and the female. Now that knowledge, along with the job and the affordable home, has gone. Recall that the title of a landmark book on white southerners in the age of civil rights was There Goes My Everything.

There was a small hint of that on display at Trump’s victory party in New Hampshire. You didn’t need to be a political consultant to see which demographic Walter Collings fitted into: his gnarled and blistered hands gave that away. Aged 65, he had worked as a volunteer parking attendant at 18 different Trump events during the course of the New Hampshire primary. His devotion to the billionaire was total, even though they inhabited different economic worlds. But the clue was in the button on Collings’s lapel: Blue Lives Matter. That was not just a declaration of solidarity with fallen police officers, it was also a counter-punch to the Black Lives Matter movement, a stance against political correctness and a way of saying, “White folks like me count too.” Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays.

And for men like Collings, the grievance is directed against the Republican party as much as the Democrats. If anything, they blame the former more than the latter. After all, the Republican party has offered the white working class a kind of unspoken deal since the days of Richard Nixon: lend us your votes for the sake of your “values” – God or guns or gays or, unspokenly, race – and we’ll get the majorities we need to pursue our cherished programme of low taxes for the richest and deregulation for big business (a programme that, as it happens, works to your economic disadvantage).

For decades, that deal paid dividends for the Republicans electorally: note how evangelical voters, many of them blue-collar, turned out to reject gay marriage in an Ohio ballot initiative in 2004 – ensuring George W Bush’s re-election while they were at it. But now the evidence is in. This bargain may have helped the Republican party, but it did little for those voters. They’ve lost their jobs and their conservative protectors have failed to hold back the tide of social change. They’re out of a job and on Modern Family, Mitchell and Cam are married.

Squeezed economically, the world around them increasingly unrecognisable, these are the voters who believe both parties, and therefore the system itself, has failed. And so it makes sense to turn to someone entirely outside it – someone who promises to smash it to pieces.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump supporters in Macon, Georgia. Photograph: Christopher Aluka Berry/Reuters

This rage at the system – the fuming insistence that democracy is failing to deliver for the people it’s meant to serve, that the system that bears its name is no longer truly democratic – powers not just Trump but many of the populist movements now making waves around the world.

Some of this fury fuels the Sanders candidacy, for example, as he argues that both main parties are the twin faces of a sham democracy, bought up by Wall Street and the big corporations. (Tellingly, both Trump and Sanders are outsiders to the parties they seek to lead: not long ago, neither were even members.) It defines the Brexit campaign too, with its core contention that Britain has lost democratic control over its own destiny, that only a break from the EU will allow Britons to govern themselves again, no matter who’s in Downing Street.

This rage against the system powers many of the populist movements now making waves around the world

The Sanders or Brexit positions are predicated on the notion that democracy is still the ideal: the problem is that the current arrangements do not deliver it. But there is a disaffection that can run further and deeper. It asks whether democracy even remains an ideal to be pursued.

Think of Hungary, where Viktor Orbán rules as a strongman, unafraid to declare, as he did in 2014, that “the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state”, one that puts “national” needs ahead of such liberal values as freedom. In Poland, the Law and Justice party stands accused of trampling on the country’s constitution to establish an “illiberal democracy” of its own. One reason why Trump seems sinister rather than simply clownish is the hint that he is hostile not just to the current two-party system in the US, but to the very norms that underpin liberal democracy: the separation of powers that keeps elected leaders in check; the free and independent media that perform the same task; the reasoned, civil debate that makes collective, public deliberation possible.

Think of how Trump positions himself as the answer to every problem, the strongman ready to cut through the bureaucracy and complexity and make things better, even if it takes brute force. How else to make sense of the hint of violence that accompanies his campaign? At rallies Trump has spoken of his desire to punch protesters in the face, longed for the days when hecklers would be dealt with physically rather than politely, and all but urged his followers to beat up those who raise a dissenting voice. At several events, Trump devotees have followed that cue. Trump’s own campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was charged with battery for his manhandling of a female reporter. Those charges were dropped, but Lewandowski retained the backing of his boss throughout.

The threat of violence is not confined to these confrontations. It is central to Trump’s message. It’s there in his promise to inflict “a hell of a lot worse” than waterboarding on terror suspects, and to not only kill terrorists but to “take out their families”, action which would amount to a war crime. It’s there in his description of the Geneva Conventions as “a problem” to be eradicated, as well as his refusal to rule out a nuclear attack on the Middle East or Europe. It’s there in his cavalier ignorance of the US constitution, his insistence that military commanders will do what he tells them to do, whether legal or not.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban rules as a strongman. Photograph: Tamas Kovacs/EPA

This is more than a rejection of the current Democrat-Republican gridlock. This is a contempt for the very notion of constitutional democracy. And if Trump is pushing it, it may be because he knows there is a ready audience for just such a message.

The World Values Survey of 2011 included a stunning figure. It found that 34% of Americans approved of “having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections”, the figure rising to 42% among those with no education beyond high school. It’s worth reading that again, to let it sink in. It means that one in three US voters would prefer a dictator to democracy. Those Americans are not repudiating this or that government, but abandoning the very idea of democracy itself.

These figures reinforce a pattern revealed by recent academic research that shows a body of US opinion predisposed toward liberal democracy’s polar opposite: authoritarianism.

Usually that sentiment lies dormant. Understandably, voters are reluctant to admit to such feelings openly. When asked, they intuitively know that to admit to authoritarian leanings is to give the wrong answer. Political scientist Stanley Feldman found that the easiest way to break through that barrier was to ask four questions apparently not about politics but about raising children. Which is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders? Obedience or self-reliance? A tendency to be considerate or well-behaved? Curiosity or good manners? How you answer those four questions reveals all researchers need to know about how highly you prize conformity and order over other values.

Strikingly, the research revealed some 44% of white Americans presenting as authoritarian, with 19% registering “very high” on the authoritarian scale. And those feelings are not new: they have been picked up by surveys since Feldman first started asking those questions in the 1990s. Mostly, these “authoritarian” sentiments remain snoozing below the surface. But scholars find they become “activated” when authoritarian-leaning voters are under stress, especially when the social order or hierarchy that they value is threatened by change. That change could be a shift to greater ethnic diversity, it could be same-sex marriage, it could be stagnant wages – anything that seems to endanger the status quo that once offered those voters a secure place in society.

Besides, researchers found, when that threat is combined with a perceived external or physical menace – such as Isis – not only do the feelings of authoritarians become even more activated, those who ordinarily would give non-authoritarian answers to the four child-raising questions can shift, out of fear, towards the authoritarian camp. In the words of Vox’s Amanda Taub, these insights combine to suggest “one terrifying theory: if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.” Which sounds a lot like Trump. Indeed, polling shows that the best single predictor for support for Trump is authoritarianism. If you tick the authoritarian box, you’re likely to be for the Donald.

So what might explain this erosion of democratic faith, sufficient that it has driven large numbers of Americans to long for a strongman unbound by the irritating business of elections?

In the US, there’s an immediate culprit, in the form of the Republican party and the wider American right. For more than two decades, conservatism’s noisiest wing has declared – on talk radio, on Fox News – that government and, by implication, democratic politics itself is morally suspect. Some of that was expressed through their loathing of the era’s two Democratic presidents, both cast as not just wrong, but fundamentally illegitimate. That was the unbending right’s view of Bill Clinton, suggesting in the darkest corners of their collective conversation that only a criminal conspiracy could have installed such a man in the White House. It came to a head in the attempt to oust him from office through impeachment. Against Barack Obama they have distilled the accusation of illegitimacy into the traditional matter of birth, insisting that the president gained the presidency by deception, lying about the fact that he is a secret Muslim born in Africa. It’s worth remembering that the high priest of the so-called birther movement was one Donald J Trump.

To a certain wing of the American right, it’s not only Obama or Clinton or even the Democratic party that is illegitimate. It’s the federal government itself, even the very idea of government. (Of course, that suspicion of authority is as old as the republic, which was, never forget, created in an act of rebellion against overmighty government.) I witnessed this for myself in the early 1990s, as the wilder shores of the Republican right began to overlap with militia movement, which was then on the rise – always railing against “federal bureaucrats” and “big government”, regularly slamming Washington DC as the remote, corrupt, imperial capital, without ever quite saying what the alternative might be, without ever admitting that those in Washington were sent there by the votes of the people, and that if you were convinced that elected officials were always destined to be irredeemably evil and incompetent, then you were eventually saying the same about democracy itself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Trump fan at the South Carolina Tea Party Convention in Myrtle Beach. Photograph: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Given what it has been doing these last 25 years, the Republican party can hardly now throw up its hands in horror at Donald Trump. For he is only taking to its logical conclusion an argument that the party itself pursued, albeit at the prompting in recent years of the Tea Party movement – itself a populist surge, which denounced Washington and everybody in it as innately corrupt.

And it’s not just words. For the last eight years, congressional Republicans have been quite explicit in declaring their legislative mission to be sabotage. Senate leader Mitch McConnell spelled out that his key objective in 2010 was to make Obama a one-term president. Driving that was a disdain for the very business of compromise, for negotiation, for the balancing of interests and making of deals – a contempt for politics, in fact. So if large numbers of Americans have concluded that representative government doesn’t work, that’s hardly an accident: one political party has set about ensuring that it doesn’t work. Yet, though Trump and the Republican degeneration that made him possible are the most vivid manifestation of this phenomenon, it is hardly confined to one party or one country. This is a shift evident across the democratic world.

Indeed, the Eurobarometer measure of public opinion in all EU member states tells a revealing story. European disenchantment with the democratic system spiked after the crash of 2008, just as it did in the US. In 2007, fewer than 39% of Europeans were unhappy with the way democracy worked in their country. By 2009, after the crash, that figure had grown to 45%. That surely owes something to the fact that the crash and its aftermath exposed the limits of democracy. For what struck many people in that period, including those who had not regarded themselves as especially wide-eyed or naive, was the powerlessness of their democratically elected leaders in the face of financial turmoil. The notion that there were banks that were too big to fail, which had to be bailed out regardless of their past behaviour or the immense cost to the taxpayer; the notion that governments were at the mercy of the masters of high finance, men who had to be deluged with cash in order to ensure the world’s economic survival – all this came as a moment of brutal revelation.

The austerity era that followed was similarly exposing. Voters were told that their leaders would have to cut spending on schools or hospitals or roads – no matter how much they, the voters, opposed such cuts – in order to placate the faceless gods of the international bond markets, who would refuse to lend to those governments deemed lacking in fiscal discipline. From London to Athens there spread the queasy feeling that sovereignty did not quite reside where voters had thought it did, that someone other than those we elected was in charge. Suddenly voters were let into democracy’s dirty little secret, the one expressed with rage by President Bill Clinton when, two decades earlier and supposedly the world’s most powerful man, he fumed at advisers who had warned him that he had to trim his plans for public spending, lest he anger the markets: “You mean to tell me that the success of my programme and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”

These arguments were not new on the left. Left analysts had long argued that power was shifting, that corporations that spanned nations were becoming more powerful than any national government, that bulk privatisations had left elected leaders without control of vast areas of the economy and infrastructure over which they nominally presided. After 2008, that impotence was no longer abstract, but all too visible.

Now the wider public began to feel its own frustration at the apparent inability of governments to tame corporate might or even to get the biggest corporations to pay their taxes. Voters told pollsters they were incensed at the sight of elected leaders appearing pathetically grateful when the likes of Google or Starbucks decided to pay a modest sum in tax, offered in the manner of a charitable donation, performed as if it were a voluntary gesture worthy of applause.

Whether it’s tax avoidance, globalisation – in the form of free trade, outsourcing and mass migration – the even greater challenge of climate change, or the ever-widening gap between the 1% and the rest, democracy has come to look impotent, unable to protect people from the mightiest forces confronting them. In Europe, Farage or Le Pen play on similar rage at migration, Farage making the case that British democracy has vanished – with power over the nation’s borders shifting not to the corporate boardroom, but to Brussels.

And so voters’ faith in democracy has been shaken. You might have imagined that the crash would have channelled the fury in a different direction, that the backlash would have been against capitalism rather than democracy. Yet perhaps too many voters believe the economic system cannot be changed, that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. For all Sanders’ success, the word “socialism” remains a tough sell in the US and in much of Europe. And the “third way” alternatives associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are also deemed to have failed. Technocratic and non-ideological, they promised loyalty only to “what works”. But given the way inequality was allowed to soar in that New Labour/New Democrat period, too many have concluded that “what works” didn’t work either. So now we live in an age when fundamental change to the economic system has come to seem all but impossible. No wonder voters turn their ire on democracy instead.

But it’s not just the economy that keeps advertising democracy’s weaknesses. Explosions in Paris or Brussels terrify voters, not least because there seems to be so little their governments can do to stop determined people murdering other people in social spaces: stations, airports, concert halls. It’s possible that a tyrannical government cracking down hard would fare no better, but the apparent powerlessness of the current, liberal democratic order to eradicate this threat surely feeds the fantasy of the iron fist that would scatter the terrorist enemy with a single blow. It’s this anti-democratic fantasy that Trump expressed in a characteristic tweet posted after the Brussels attacks: “I alone can fix this problem!” It’s crass and megalomaniacal, but its appeal rests on a frustration with the slow, careful, laggardly mechanics of democracy. And this surely is what Trump (and several other populists, Farage included) have in mind when they express their not-so-sneaking admiration for Vladimir Putin: now there’s a man who gets things done. For Putin is not held back. He does not bear the burden of democracy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian president Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images

We are not yet living in a post-democratic world. There are still elections and most of them are not being won by populist insurgents – not yet anyway. The changing demographics of the US say that will be true of Trump too, though in a 50-50 contest against a candidate as flawed and unpopular as Hillary Clinton you’d hesitate before betting the farm on it. Still, win or lose, that a man like Trump has come this far still means something. It means the world is not the same as it was.

What does it look like, this new landscape? It is a place where the core institutions of liberal democracy – parliament, the universities, the civil service, the media – are regarded with deep scepticism, if not outright cynicism. Where once the public conversation might have agreed that some media organisations, say, could be trusted to tell the truth, more or less, now there is no such assumption. The word of the BBC or the New York Times will not just be contested but presumed to be false and mendacious, serving some other agenda just like the rest of the hated mainstream media, the “MSM”. That suspicion is voiced as hotly on the left as on the right, but the effect is on the middle. It makes that common ground shrink a little every day, leaving a queasy sense that there is a diminishing place where we can stand together and conduct a civil public conversation, one in which we all agree on the basic facts.

Elsewhere, if voters increasingly assume democracy to be impotent, they will trust less and less those politicians who so much as attempt to inspire hope. They will listen instead, if they listen at all, to those who exploit fear. With few exceptions, the current wave of populist insurgents are all in the fear business. The only promise they make is an impossible one: to protect the faithful from change, to stop the world for those who want to get off.

This is the world of Trump and Le Pen and Orbán and Wilders. They don’t have to win to change the way our world works. They don’t have to win to make the public mood more sour, to turn majorities against those minorities who are most vulnerable, to make us doubt the possibility of collective action, to make us cynical about the possibility of truth.

The billionaire reality TV star doesn’t even have to become president – for we are already living in the age of Trump.

Main picture: Christopher Furlong/Reuters

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.