The worst mistake the centre left across the world could
make now is to confuse what happened last Tuesday with the inevitable.

Instinctively, in the aftermath of a huge political event,
we retroactively impose the coherent narrative structure that frames it in a
grand historical context.

In doing so, we always overlook the part played by accident.
So if you are tempted to see Donald Trump as a gigantic wave in a tide of
reactionary horror that will never ebb, please don’t. His victory was not
inevitable. It should not be read as proof that America is terminally racist,
or that the future belongs to the populist right, or that Martin Luther King
was wrong about the long arc of moral history bending towards justice.

Trump won for a complex range of reasons: some profound, but
more arbitrary.

In the US, as in Britain, the political class has failed to
gauge the strength of working class white resentment towards a smug elite and
its apparent indifference to the wage stagnation created by outsourced jobs,
cheap migrant labour, and the snaffling of almost all growth in GDP by the
wealthy. This was profound.

Also profound was racism’s part in turbo-charging Trump’s
insurgency, though one shouldn’t exaggerate its hold on the US electorate when
Obama, whose approval ratings are in the mid-fifties, would have been
re-elected but for the 25th Amendment’s pesky two-term limit.

With this result, the accidentals far outweighed the
fundamentals. But for the random tragedy of losing a son to cancer, Joe Biden’s
authentic voice as the patron saint of hardscrabble America would have made him
the President-Elect. Had James Comey, the FBI director, not gone rogue with the
11th hour reopening of Hillary’s deplorable basket of emails, she would have
won.

The fact that Trump’s victory is more an aberration than
confirmation of the Marxist view of history as the unstoppable sweep of
economic forces, hardly makes its potential for damage any less alarming.

But it does make it less sinister in the sense that it can
quickly be reversed. If Trump fails to recreate America as an earthly paradise
within four years, as he might, a fresher Democrat with a more resonant message
than Hillary’s “Hey, guys, I’ve hung around for like a million years, so come
on, gimme a break” will probably reclaim the White House in 2020.

By the crudest statistic, Britain is precisely as evenly
split as the US. At the last election, the combined Tory and Ukip vote was
almost identical to the aggregate for Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, Plaid
Cumru and the Greens.

If we live in an effective one-party state, that’s due in
large part to the vagaries of a crazy electoral system. Should the Tories win
the anticipated landslide in 2020 (assuming Theresa May doesn’t go to the
country early for a Brexit mandate), a realignment of the opposition  – whether as an electoral pact between the
centrist party created from the ashes of Labour and other centre left parties,
or as a formal confederation – would be inevitable.

Led by a politician with empathy with disaffected
traditional Labour voters and the language to communicate it, such an alliance
would reinvigorate progressive politics. Of course, 2020 is an aeon away in
domestic and geopolitical terms. What now looks like a finely balanced see-saw
between the forces of reaction and progress might be tilted decisively next
year by the election of Marie Le Pen in France and an anti-immigrant German
Chancellor.

The path this country has taken has never been a straight
line,” said Obama last week after meeting his successor in the Oval Office. “We
zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and
others think is moving back. And that’s OK.”

Well, this is one helluva zig, and it’s not remotely OK. But
nor is it over until the tangerine fat man punches in those codes. The American
centre left has no more time to waste on infantile “Not My President”
self-indulgence than its British equivalent has in whining about Jeremy
Corbyn’s legitimate mandate.

What Boris Johnson, in a diplomatic term presumably borrowed
from Lord Carrington, calls the “whinge-o-rama” needs to end without delay on
both sides of the ocean. The progressive future we risked by complacently
thinking it was guaranteed won’t be rescued by cry-babies. It will take
grownups that understand and speak to the alienation that drives swathes of the
electorate to succumb to the worse angels of their nature.

Anyone in need of some inspiration, or even just a decent
cathartic weep, is directed to the start of Saturday Night Live. The
magnificent Kate McKinnon appears again as Hillary Clinton, though this time
with no attempt at humour. She sits at the piano and, eyes glinting with tears,
gives a hauntingly beautiful rendition of the massively lamented Leonard
Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah. “I’m not giving up,” McKinnon’s Hillary says to camera
when the song is done. “And neither should you.”

By Matthew Norman

(The Independent.)