The political aftershocks of Trump 2.0 are still in force, and any consensus will have to wait until the acrimony and blame has receded. My sense is that in the USA it will cause an entire generation of politicians to be retired from the stage. And they probably won’t leave holding hands. Expect books.

But I think the shock requires more than a change of personnel or even a generational clear out.

What Trump 2.0 has shown us, along with Project 2025 etc, is that the extreme right has been playing a very long game, from packing the US Supreme Court to the Tea Party insurrections within the Republican Party. In hindsight they were doing what the European New Left in the 1960s called, The Long March Through the Institutions, taking a leaf out of the writings of Gramsci and Italian Marxism.

But sixty years later, left wing politics seems to have retreated from an analysis of how to best win, keep and use institutional power. Instead it feels at times that the Left is most comfortable within the personal space of identity – as if the personal is political has become, only the personal is political. In this narrative we just become consumers of the services of the state where we have rights to be enjoyed, but we forget we could also gain power to change them. At worst, our politics can become one of personalities and identities above policies.

Not to be too gloomy, there needs to be some hope for a better world. But perhaps for the Left we need to find a way to synthesise the newer thinking around identity with the older thinking about the state and institutional power.

Currently any political discussions in the UK on the power of the state are focused on terms such as productivity, efficiency and even league tables. Perhaps the main lesson from Trump 2.0 is that we need more impactful plans that begin to use institutional power for income and wealth fairness, for ending destitution, and for sustainable living. A long march, comrades.