The Dem establishment will obviously blame anyone but themselves. That’s what establishments do. That’s why, assuming there are still free and fair elections in America in two years time, left wing voters in the US need to start planning now how they’re going to primary out every last establishment Dem who thought that leaning right was the answer, and replace them with people who do believe in real progressive politics.

It won’t work everywhere. It can’t. And some of those people will inevitably get caught up in the machine, or turn out not to be what they claimed. Reality is messy. But get enough of them in and you can make a real difference. The mid-terms are the American left’s opportunity to do what the right did in 2010.

But at the end of the day none of this matters, because we’re just two outsiders pontificating over another country’s politics. Despite how deeply those politics affect the whole world, there’s nothing we can actually do about it, other than focusing on what we can do in our own back yards.