Election night in America has come and gone, and anyone surprised by the result clearly has not been paying close enough attention. It was entirely predictable, with the only real surprise being the magnitude of the Trump’s victory by popular vote.

The democrat campaign was abysmal. The policies, the tone, the condescending and arrogant moral superiority complex – it was mindboggling to observe as an outsider. But it is not an isolated incident. Left wing and liberal parties throughout the western world aren’t listening to people. The Harris campaign didn’t just ignore but completely and totally repudiated the concerns people have about the state, the economy, and about the general health of democracy. Harris appeared so many times on television with a constant barrage of slogans and a constant flow of non-sequiturs, seemingly like any other elitist bureaucrat. She came across as clueless, and, in many instances, it was difficult to find a logical basis for her arguments and her policy proposals.

But I think that is just the start. Obviously, a lot of people were disgruntled with the Biden administration. And just as obvious, there was a deep desire for change, for something different in government. It is a message that has been gaining strength in other western countries as well, that the status quo is not working. And yet, the Harris campaign was a campaign for the status quo, and its sales pitch was the same bullshit, prescripted, elitist political jargon that has grown ever so tiresome. To me, that seems the root of it. There is a disassociation with reality. Americans would say they couldn’t feed their families and that they have no opportunities, and Harris would go on some diatribe about hope not hate. Whenever there was pushback, American democrats and large portions of the media looked for reasons to explain away key issues, to dismiss the concerns of the average working class voter, applying generalised labels to these people as racist or some other ism or ist. In many ways, it reminded me about the commentary around Brexit: that if one voted for Brexit they were immediately racist or whatever else. But then I think of my old neighbour, a typical white working class man married to a women who immigrated from Africa, who voted for Brexit; and I think about how badly the left and many of its commentators (in the UK and the US) have got it wrong.

Trump is the antithesis of all this. He ran on a ballet of action. Even if one didn’t like all of his policies, it would have been impossible to vote for Harris. So yeah, the result really is not surprising.

The satire is thick, but in the satire there is some truth (great video):

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Another thing I found interesting when reflecting on the US election: comparing the US exit polls with the polling history of British voters, a lot of the top issues for US voters mirror the concerns of many here in the UK. There is the same distrust and distaste for the political class; the same general dissatisfaction with government and the economy; the same concerns about uncontrolled, illegal, and immigration; the same concern about the erosion of key social institutions and the efficiency (or lack thereof) of their management. And yet, many of the articles I have read and news reports I have watched, I have been left dumbfounded by much of the commentary. I find it genuinely difficult to understand how the political situation is not obvious.

Let’s keep to the UK for a moment. Go to any northern English town, it is not difficult to understand why the average working individual might feel completely abandoned. The situation seems analogous to the experience of the average working individual in the American rustbelt. In the Midlands, and in the north of England, entire towns have been decimated due to globalisation – people have lost jobs, entire industries shut down. (For example, I’ve written a little bit on the sociology of some of the small towns in Norfolk here). As one lives pay check to pay check or is struggling to find a decent job, it is understandable that they may have concerns about uncontrolled, illegal, and mass immigration. Rightly or wrongly, to agree or disagree with this concern completely misses the point. These are real, lived experiences and real concerns for lots of people struggling to make a good life for themselves, who feel like they have no control over their lives and their communities. But in the UK (indeed, just as with the US democrats), it seems like much of the contemporary left have a reality problem; they can’t grasp that the average voter, working long hours in some factory in the east Midlands or in some small town in the American heartland, struggling to put food on the table or progress their standard of living, doesn’t want to hear about gendered bathrooms, or about token diversity initiatives in the corporate workplace, or about socioeconomic factors behind a heinous act of crime. Again, right or wrong, agree or disagree, it doesn’t matter on the level of the lived political reality weighted by such genuine concern and struggle. Right wing parties have learned to speak to these concerns, while the left just seems completely clueless absent of any genuine attempt to find resolution. Labelling the average Trump voter as racist is not a solution; rather it seems to me as an attempt to disregard genuine concern for the benefit of the status quo.

But I’ve noticed that it is not just working class towns and communities. To give one example, I was thinking today about someone who I chatted with at my university. They raised the concern about how many very competitive specialist positions in academia are open, on first call, to international applicants; the question being, if there is a British individual with those specialist skills, should they not have first opportunity? It is a reasonable question, which could be applied to many specialist positions in a variety of industries, not just academic ones. Saving the merits of the arguments that one can formulate on either side, my point is more that what I take from such discussions and from observing many contemporary political events – from the UK summer riots to the US election – is that a most basic fact of the political reality speaks to how a lot of people feel fed up toward the current state of things. It is in another way an expression that things are out of control. And, if nothing else, as a first principle of analysis, it is interesting to try and understand why this is so and fundamentally what it means.

For instance, it is not a coincidence that in the recent UK general election, Starmer intentionally spoke to these same concerns of working people; instead of dismissing them, he strategically realigned the Labour party in attempt to offer solutions. He spoke to issues of immigration, he refused to entertain re-joining the EU, he spoke to hard truths about needing to rebuild the economy and about ensuring things like energy independence (to invest in British nuclear power plants and build a British workforce for a self-sustaining energy sector). Starmer (much like Trump has done), also spoke of the elitist political class – professional politicians that have absolutely no connection with the people. (Of course, like with Trump, perhaps there is great irony here; but that is beside the point). Speaking of a world where the democratic leaders seem to rarely be held to their manifesto promises, because the political class and their political agenda is least concerned with the everyday suffering, I think is one of many lines that drove Starmer to victory. Whether one believes him or not, and whether one agrees with this political shift in direction or not, I think again misses the point. The lesson of the UK general election, aside from the absolute disaster that was (and is) the Conservative party, was Labour realising they needed to again become in touch with working people. (Again, how genuine this is, and how successful Labour policies may or may not be, is a completely other topic).

At the end of the day, it was not surprising that it was a coalition of working class people of many different races and backgrounds that gave Starmer his victory. In the US, from looking at all of the polling results, it seems clear it was also a coalition of working class people of many different races and backgrounds that gave Trump his emphatic victory. Strong leadership, American and British first policies, and economic growth coupled with direct recognition of the feeling of abandon by everyday working class people, are what both leaders spoke to. And that says something important and interesting about our present times.

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Consistently in elections throughout the Western world the top issues are: immigration, economy, and the status of democracy along with my many subset issues, for instance health care, which I file under economy and related issues pertaining to the strains of contemporary global economic systems. They were top in the US election. They are issues that have largely defined the politics here in the UK in last decade and half. And the only voices that have presented something coherent by way of policy and action have generally been right wing voices. The popular political left, on the other hand, has in my observations completely lost the capacity to speak to average working people. Indeed, left politics has become so deeply lost in a jungle of bizarre ideas and rhetoric, it is really hard to make sense of what left politics even means in the 21st century. (It strikes me that this perhaps carries more than a hint of historical irony, seeing how the political left once sought to be a champion of working people). Bernie Sanders, one of the few interesting popular left wing voices in the US, hit a home run (to use American lingo) when he said yesterday: “[i]t should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

Is it possible that a set of left wing policies (and no, the current Labour party is not left wing so I don’t include them as an example) may also speak to such concerns and offer unique solutions? I honestly don’t know. There is maybe only Sanders (some of whose policies and language have unsurprisingly been adopted by the Trump administration). The political left has largely been a failure for decades. There is no organisation; little to no coherent view of the world; no definitive vision for an economic future that may provide more and better to working class people – there is just not a lot of anything of substance. In my opinion, the left seems generally absent of sources of well reasoned and rational discourse on concrete evidenced based policies. In the UK, some left parties still speak of hopeful economic dreams from the 1960s and 70s without any semblance of evidence or logic for why they are realistic. They speak of environmental policies without entertaining even a modicum of awareness about how such a policy may impact another area of society. An example that immediately speaks to me is the Green party ticket in the last election being anti nuclear; meanwhile the UK is constantly on the brink of an energy crisis because of decades of fear mongering and disinformation has undermined public trust about nuclear power by the same Green party members. How can a well reasoned individual take seriously such a political option?

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Democrat consultant Julian Epstein absolutely nails it. One of the best pieces of televised analysis I’ve seen so far: