In the days since the midterm elections in the United States, many commentators have argued that the “blue tsunami” signalled a popular rejection of US President Donald Trump, but not a new love for Democrats. They are right to warn that if the Democratic Party fails to deliver, it will likely face the same kind of anti-incumbent anger in the next election cycle.

I have personally spilled loads of ink arguing that the Democratic old guard’s embrace of neoliberalism is a huge part of what created the crisis conditions that enabled Trump’s rise to power in the first place, and has severely hampered their ability to stop him over the past decade.

But this election cycle was different in remarkable ways. To put it in plain terms, the Democrats started “sucking less” — not all of them, but a lot of them. And this recent demonstration of “sucking less” is what is presently providing me with at least an ounce of hope that the party might actually manage not to blow this historic opportunity.

How did the Democrats “suck less”? First off, there was a proliferation of progressive economic populist candidates who explicitly took on powerful corporations and positioned themselves clearly as fighters for working-class people. The economic populist insurgency within the Democratic Party gained significant ground in this cycle.

Some might wonder, what took so long? For one, it’s easy to forget that the electoral insurgency within the GOP had an eight-year head start on the insurgency within the Democratic Party — and that head start has been enormously consequential.

In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, it was, ironically, conservative anti-establishment energy that first captured populist momentum through the Tea Party. With the help of organisations such as FreedomWorks, that energy was quickly channelled into Republican Party primary contests. By 2014, Tea Party activists had unseated GOP House Speaker Eric Cantor and set the stage for Trump.

Nearly three years after the Tea Party kicked off, Occupy Wall Street was the left’s opening salvo in the populist era. By framing a popular class conflict (the 99% vs the 1%) and naming........

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