There were four elections that were meant to change the world. They did, but understand how and why is a task with a problem – there are so, so many learning points.
As a political strategist by trade, writing this article is proving tricky. I'm beset by both paralysis and option overload; there have been four seismic elections in a matter of days and the amount of analysis is overwhelming. Every time I get going another comes along with new information. These four elections were expected to change the world. They did.
So what key learning points are most important? Like I say, choice paralysis – let me here try to stick to three. The first is 'learn to recognise class politics again because they are dominant'. The second is 'remember, reality is real'. And the third is 'there is no shortcut'.
One of the three elections is all but irrelevant – Israel is now so far to the right politically there isn't really an international comparator. But Brazil then Serbia then the US marked a real, meaningful change. Since you can't copy and paste from one democracy to another, what should we really be learning in Scotland? (I'm going to assume you know the basic outcomes.)
Let me start with class politics. I strongly suggest you read this piece by Yanis Varoufakis on Brazil and this one by Aditya Chakrabortty on the US. Both make the point in a similar way – what dominated both of these elections (and Serbia in a different way) was class politics. The reason this isn't more obvious is because the language of politics has changed so much over the last 40 years.
To grasp it, see Texas Senate winner James Talarico who said that the election wasn't 'left and right' but 'top and bottom'. Now he knows fine that these are the same things, but the left has now been so associated with sex and identity politics saying 'left' is toxic for a lot of people.
The new language of class politics isn't about proletariats or class consciousness but 'oligarch', 'corruption', 'cost of living', 'rigged', 'quality of life', 'billionaire'. Polls wavered between putting cost of living top of people's priorities and anti-corruption depending how questions were asked (see this and this), and these have basically become the same thing. People are aware that corruption is making some people rich, but not them.
In fact there is probably one proxy for this bigger than any other and it is AI and data centres. As I tried to explain quite a while ago, this is an almost perfect concoction of concepts certain to make ordinary people furious. AI promises that they will take your jobs, make very rich people unfathomably richer and do it by making you live next to a horrible data centre which pollutes your drinking water and makes your electricity more expensive.
There were ten state-level referendums on banning data centres and all ten passed with thumping majorities. A data centre moratorium is Democrat policy.
The Republican-to-Democrat swing for Congress looks like it might have only one comparator – the Congressional elections after Watergate. But this is different. Watergate was sort of a proxy for a ruling class that dragged them into wars where people died on their behalf. This was about money.
It was about Elon Musk getting the keys to government and Trump's family cutting real estates deals and hoovering up corrupt crypto money and Pete Hegseth buying shares in defence companies just before he started the Iran War and the sheer number of billionaires who hang around the Trump administration.
Data centres, crypto grifters, medical insurance companies, insider dealing, inflation, foreign wars, that photo of smirking oligarchs at Trumps inauguration, Sam Altman this week realising the world hates him and he's in trouble, Musk deleting tweets calling for people to vote Republican, Bezos's Washington Post desperate for you to know it was only the Iran War that did it. The rich know this is a class war moment. They are panicking.
I'm going to stop on that theme. The evidence for the class analysis of what happened in Brazil and the US is beyond extensive. Like I say, Serbia is slightly different in that it wasn't financial oligarchs so much as ruling cliques (it all started with a cover up over the collapse in a train station roof which involved government and corporate corruption). But 'rich politics' isn't selling any more.
To get the second theme, the crash-back of reality, let me introduce you to the Maga Mascots – red pill young men and tradwives. The reason they are so important is that they were at the heart of the far right strategy in the US. They were primary targets in the strategy of trying to create new cultural realities through the expenditure of vast sums of money.
The right has access to insane amounts of money compared to the actual left. They used a lot of that on a theory that said culture led politics, and that the liberals always win culture because the people who run media are educated and therefore mostly liberal. That is why the creation of hard right-coded cultural archetypes was so important.
Stay at home, look pretty, bake cookies and enjoy your life while your man makes the money, as long as you're subservient. That was the tradwife concept, a cultural fightback against what the right saw as the relentless march of feminism.
Young men were 'red pilled', moved into discussion spaces dominated by aggressive, testosterone-fuelled masculinity where conspiracy theories and grievance was to radicalise them and divert their angry emotions towards right-directed targets like feminists and immigrants.
So now meet the tradwife regretters. It turns out there was a point to feminism after all. Like 'don't get physically abused in silence', and 'having your own bank account is helpful in an abusive relationship' and 'being expected to be constantly subservient isn't as great as they made it out to be'.
Basically a bunch of (mostly young) influencers who were taken in by all of this have discovered feminism from first principles, having experienced first hand the humiliations, abuses and coercions experienced by the 1950s housewives which kick-started feminism in the first place.
“When hope looks impossible in Scotland, just remember – honestly, reality and hard work are still wonderful correctives to despair”
Meanwhile it turns out that the biggest issue for young men wasn't 'trans athletes' (early evidence suggests the crazy amount spent on anti-trans advertising was completely and utterly useless) but housing costs. Again, what we see here is about a decade's-worth of extensive cultural manipulation created at great expense dissolve on contact with reality.
The truth is that the political commentators were conned by all of this more than most of the public were. Again, I wish I could go into all the evidence that young men never bought 'red pill' stuff like was claimed and that tradwives were more a meme about home baking than a politicised cultural war for most people. Centrist commentators can't think straight whenever right wingers tell them they have shifted the culture.
For a long time now centrists and some on the centre left have been obsessing about how to replicate the right's culture wars strategy and almost convinced themselves that the material realities of life can be massaged out of the picture. They can't see that people voted against Biden because of inflation and Trump because of housing and corruption and oligarchs.
Because (excuse me for sounding a bit Marxist here), the material conditions of life really are the most powerful political driver we have. Hating Latino immigrants does not pay the bills or get you a house or feed you. This obsession with 'finding a way to reach them other than on bread and butter issues' was always a delusion and it has fallen apart.
The lesson is simple; accept people's economic reality and address it or you will be eaten alive by the reality you're trying to deny.
Third, there is no shortcut. I want you to take this very seriously; in the elections just past, one side tried to take shortcuts and the other went the long way round and the shortcuts failed abysmally. The right tried to buy the election. So did the 'Super PACs' (fronts for corporate funding) and the vested interests like the US Israeli lobby.
Well it turns out that Musk trying to skip the politics part of politics by spending £450 million in Texas and the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (the biggest of the pro-Israeli funders) spent £40 million trying to prevent Abdul El-Sayed getting elected actually turned out to work against them and for their opponents.
Aipac has publicly acknowledged that candidates it funded actually did worse than expected (they have announced they will no longer endorse candidates because it is so counterproductive) and there is pretty good evidence Musk money shifted Texas in the wrong direction (for him). Trying to skip engaging with the public by using money to saturate-broadcast at them failed catastrophically this week.
Almost everyone who won had extensive and effective ground operations. The model of peer-to-peer grassroots campaigning I have tried and tried to persuade people has been most globally effective was be seen overwhelmingly in Brazil where Lula won because of turnout in the second vote. Bolsonaro played social media games using Trump-backer money.
Team Lula mobilised grandmothers to find and turn out people in their communities who didn't vote in the first round. The shift was way beyond what the commentators thought was possible, because in truth, just like the 'alternative reality' issue above, they have been led by the nose by big money to believe that ordinary people can't really fight back.
Now let me distill these three points into one person; the afore-mentioned El Sayed in Michigan. You know all about it, right? How he ran culture war fights against Israel and played shallow grievance politics? Well, if you do, you're wrong. He demonstrated every strategy above.
First, he had three messages – cost of living, corruption of oligarchs, medicare for all. Go and watch – when he was attacked on 'antisemitism' or the Muslim Brotherhood or his religion or trans athletes, he replied respectfully and articulately but by the end of the sentence, if you paid attention, he was talking about cost of living and oligarchs and medicare for all. He was incredibly disciplined.
But he also represented a reality – you can like him or not like him but you have to admit how impressive he is. He is clever, funny, can pivot from reasonable to angry and back again in a way that feels natural. He can answer questions and see a trap and avoid it. He was a pretty full package. Look at the Scottish Parliament and weep.
The point is that he did not live in a manufactured online reality like so many of the Republicans (go watch Trumps ill-equipped choice of Lindsey Graham's sister in the seat vacated by his death, how they thought she would win on manufactured name recognition and how responding to a debate question on national security as “not my thing” handed her opponent the win on a plate).
And he had a real, grassroots movement that turned out the vote. He won (shocker) by caring about his voters, being clever and articulate and informed and engaging with voters at a grassroots level. He represents what is really happening in these elections and it has nothing whatsoever to do with his religion or Israel. (That said, all these elections were an absolute disaster for Israel.)
Scotland needs to learn these lessons, but can it? The Greens insist on being the wrong kind of left, over and over. The SNP still think they can manufacture an online reality and win elections without activists. Labour is still creating an alternative reality where you can challenge neoliberalism without doing anything differently. What is happening globally makes Scotland look silly.
But everything changes. That is what we see. Eighteen months ago everyone was certain this was impossible. People were talking about permanent far right rule in the US, the end of Brazilian democracy and Serbia as part of a resurgent right wing nationalism in Europe.
So when hope looks impossible in Scotland, just remember – honestly, reality and hard work are still wonderful correctives to despair.