The failure of the counterfeit left to understand Donald Trump’s presidential victory was lamentably evident in Tim Walz’s response the following day. The defeated Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate said: “It’s hard to understand why so many of our fellow citizens - people that we have fought so long and hard for - wound up choosing the other path.” The message was clear: how could you do this, you ungrateful shower of knuckle-draggers?

How did they think this was all going to end? They’d been given fair warning more than eight years ago that America’s working-class communities and its most marginalised minorities had grown weary of those who had purported to represent them. Look again at some of those numbers.

Rodney David, a former Republican congressman, offered the Democrats some advice. “They need to take a step back and look at Ansen County in North Carolina. It’s a 40% black county and Donald Trump won it. So, when Democrats call Donald Trump racist and Republicans racist, why don’t you have a little self-reflection and look at Ansen County and understand there are a lot more issues that are important to Americans all throughout this country, that have given him what may be a landslide victory.”

If Kamala Harris’s campaign team hadn’t been so out of touch with the preferences of real people in working-class communities they might have divined something valuable: How could so many in the poor Latino communities have voted for a man who describes some of their countries of origin in such disgustingly dehumanising ways? Well, it might help if you in turn weren’t so insulting and dismissive of their Catholic faith. As the SNP are beginning to discover, you can only disparage people’s Christian faith for so long before they say that enough is enough.  

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And so, the gas-lighting of millions of working-class Americans has begun in earnest and shows no sign of abating. It’s your fault; not ours. We’d under-estimated how thick you all were; how racist; how misogynistic. If only we’d spent a couple of billion quid setting up citizens’ correction facilities when we were in charge we could have re-educated you.

In truth though, many of us had under-estimated how thick the artisan left was. They’d had almost a decade to prepare for this, yet had allowed Joe Biden to renege on his promise not to run for a second term and to choose as his running mate a privileged establishment state prosecutor who effectively had ‘Washington Elite’ stamped on her forehead.

What does it say about you when your natural support base has become so sickened by your Ivy League sanctimony that they have opted instead for a man who doesn’t give a Friar Tuck for them either, but at least knows how to speak their language and how not to patronise them.

The message was clear: how could you do this, you ungrateful shower of knuckle-draggers?The message was clear: how could you do this, you ungrateful shower of knuckle-draggers? (Image: Alex Brandon)

Why do the artisan left both in America and across Scotland and the UK insist on believing that working-class communities aren’t very bright, just because they may lack their smooth vowels and boot-licking skills? These families attend school parents’ nights too; they know what their children are being taught in schools. They have access to social media too. They have become aware of how many millions of their money is being spent on groups who actively despise working-class people.

More importantly, they know what the real left looks like and what it means to be a Socialist. It’s not complicated. It means working to achieve a fairer re-distribution of a nation’s wealth and spending much more of their money on reducing health and educational inequality. It means taxing the rich to feed the poor.

'The bad Alvin Stardust tribute act that is Alex Cole-Hamilton''The bad Alvin Stardust tribute act that is Alex Cole-Hamilton' (Image: PA)

They know too what people pretending to be left-wing look like. When these people substitute ‘progressiveness’ for fairness it’s an early red flag. Outbreaks of ‘progressiveness’ occur often amongst affluent white males who have reached a stage when they want to appear radical without leaving the comfort of their chi-chi, G12 abodes.

Buying a Kawasaki; attending music festivals and snorting the odd line of the Bob Marley used to get them through this turbulent spell. Now they adopt ‘progressiveness’ and use it to bully middle-aged feminists. Almost the entire Scottish trade union movement now hides behind ‘progressiveness’ rather than embrace authentic Socialism.

There might have been some value for Holyrood in sending a delegation of grown-up representatives to monitor the ebb and flow of the US Presidential campaign. Instead, we got a pair of self-aggrandising opportunists who embody faux-left sanctimony and the bad Alvin Stardust tribute act that is Alex Cole-Hamilton.

Read more on Trump and the US Election with Lawrence Donegan:

The SNP, unlike the US Democrats at least have had a couple of early wake-up calls about their ruinous obsession with maligning real people. In the eight years since Donald Trump was first elected they’ve tried to introduce a series of measures that have betrayed their contempt for the working class: Named Persons; Minimum Unit pricing; The Hate Crime Act; the GRR legislation and their deranged alliance with the infantile Scottish Greens.

They lost heavily at Westminster and then, last week, saw four Council seats fall to the Tories in Aberdeenshire. The Scottish Tories are now led by Russell Findlay who, unlike anyone senior in the SNP, was brought up in Glasgow; knows what working-class people look like and, just as importantly, where they live. A recent Sunday Times poll predicted Reform would win eight seats at the 2026 Scottish election. Who do you think will be voting for them?

After 25 years of devolution, an increasing number of ordinary Scots have reached the conclusion that the Holyrood elites haven’t just failed them; they know they are detested by them too.

Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. Among his paltry list of professional achievements is that he’s never been on the payroll of any political party or lobbying firm. He didn’t read any decent books last week or go to the theatre, but spent most of it watching 1970s crime capers.