The imminent tenth anniversary of the 2014 independence referendum has struggled to break through a wall of public indifference. Amid surging inflation, record high NHS waiting times and a new wave of austerity, constitutional debates are slipping ever further down the list of priorities.

If the wider public seem disengaged, that’s equally true of Scotland’s political and media insiders. Glance across all the factional divisions and agendas of public life, and nobody is claiming 2014 changed Scotland forever for the better, nor that 2014 wrecked a previously well-functioning devolved settlement. In stark contrast to the enthusiasms and animosities unleashed a decade ago, there’s an almost unanimous impulse for moving on and forgetting.

Admittedly, there are now a few hastily convened commemorations. The glitziest of them is hosted by Alex Salmond, which signifies, if nothing else, the variability of factional fortunes within the nationalist movement. But even that event has an impromptu feel. Indeed, given the lack of fellow feeling within the historic SNP, it could feel more like an inquest than a unifying rally.

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Until Salmond’s event was announced, I had the dubious honour of organising the only 2014 anniversary event in the Scottish landscape. And likewise, among our organising team of political scientists, all of whom previously supported independence, none of us felt especially eager to commemorate or revisit the referendum.

Doubtless, we had experienced 2014 as a phase of unusual optimism. For all the campaign’s faults, thousands of marginalised people took political action for the first time against a backdrop of embitterment with Scottish Labour rule.

2014 was perhaps the biggest and most concerted mass movement in modern Scottish history. It certainly has few rivals. And the aftermath could have made the SNP itself into a laboratory of democratic possibilities. After decades where political parties across the world haemorrhaged members, they were rewarded with an unprecedented surge of eager new recruits.

But these facts can further sour the memory. Disenchantment set in long ago. It’s hard to point to concrete achievements that remotely match the scale of radicalisation, optimism and excitement. Whether in the SNP internally, or in wider society where thousands of working-class voters were won to a nationalist message, there is a sense that loyalties went unrewarded. The party’s problems are well publicised.

It’s possible that 2014 may have reinforced the democratic deficit the upheaval was meant to fix. The popular legitimacy bestowed on Sturgeon’s leadership shielded favoured political insiders from scrutiny. As with so many recent insurgencies, the beneficiaries of an anti-establishment mood quickly settled into the routines of power; many seemed to expect re-election as a given.

Nicola Sturgeon speaks at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow, where she outlined her vision for the SNP and Scotland at the gathering of some 12,000 party membersNicola Sturgeon speaks at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow, where she outlined her vision for the SNP and Scotland at the gathering of some 12,000 party members (Image: PA)

It's sometimes tempting to contrast the referendum’s grassroots participation culture with its aftermath – above all, the Americanised, near-presidential rallies where passive spectators waved those (now notorious) foam fingers. But my current research casts doubt on this dichotomy. Alongside colleagues at the University of Stirling and Glasgow Caledonian University, I claim that the SNP’s apparently abrupt turn to charismatic centralisation reflected inherited weaknesses in mass political feeling.

Much of the energy around the Yes campaign in 2014 was “anti-political”. Participants rejected traditional structures of activism and organisation: Westminster and Scottish Labour most obviously, but also any type of party organisation and anyone perceived to have an “agenda”.

2014 was instead founded in a politics of immediate emotional expression, identity and interpersonal connection. In the context of defeat – and ultimately, that’s what 2014 was for the Yes side – those same sentiments made the movement brittle and vulnerable. Hence the ease with which autonomists embraced a centralised leader promising to clobber the proximate enemy: the Scottish Labour politicians who “sided with the Tories”.

Like so many recent success stories, Sturgeon’s perceived popular touch and difference from normal politicians – her sense of being “just like us” – allowed her to evade routines of scrutiny, in the party or in the public sphere. Recruits could relate to Sturgeon directly, emotionally, without intermediaries, almost as a “friend”.

This was always liable to end badly. In retrospect, the problem was less that Sturgeon’s SNP exploited anti-political sentiments (even if this would be the party’s eventual undoing). The bigger issue was that too much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite became too proximate to power and too willing to indulge politicians who made it feel good to be Scottish. If the SNP coasted on vibes under Sturgeon, so too did much of civic Scotland.

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Now, the fever has broken, and we face a reckoning with a debilitated SNP presiding over a crisis in public services and further cuts to come. There’s few policy or constitutional breakthroughs to show for all those years of polarisations. What’s worse, there’s also a feeling of having learned nothing. Absent the fug of progressive patriotism and good intentions, the Yes movement’s programme lacks intellectual rigour.

So why organise a commemoration event? Partly out of dogged intellectual duty. Somebody had to catalogue what remains, for better or worse, a landmark in Scottish culture, public life and (if we’re being frank) national mythology. We also wanted to recover a lingering intellectual curiosity about the forces that brought 2014 into being, and what linked that very Scottish moment to a much wider British, European and global political crisis.

And at some level, despite ourselves, we wanted (paraphrasing the historian EP Thompson) to recover 2014 from the condescension of posterity. Many intellectuals and most of the Scottish establishment dismissed the populist wave of 2014. They felt alternately annoyed, amused and afraid at the eruption of mass political sentiments that they didn’t understand.

2014 may have been what the social movement theorist Sidney Tarrow calls a “moment of madness”. It was disillusioning to the participants and unsettling to elites. It inaugurated a new normal in Scottish politics that some would call worse than before. The defeat of the movement and now the SNP can seem like a moment to breathe a sigh of relief – or to sneer.

The problem with that sentiment is that “normal” politics isn’t working anywhere in the world. Scotland is no better, perhaps, than elsewhere; it’s merely typical in labouring under a democratic malaise and overlapping crises. To recover some hope, Tarrow would say we must seize on the “creative aspects in the moment of madness”. Above all, we must learn to treat defeats not as sources of shame, but as rich opportunities for learning, because the problems that led to 2014 aren’t going away.

James Foley is a politics lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University. He is organising a conference tomorrow called 2014-2024: Scottish Independence and the British State Ten Years On, from 9:30am at Glasgow Caledonian University. The event will be live-streamed on the Independence Live YouTube channel.

10 years ago, the 2104 referendum took Scotland to the brink of independence. Over the next few days we’ll be examining indepth the story of that seismic vote – and where Scotland goes next.