Joe Biden’s tight win in the presidential race has brought relief to those of us fighting Trump, but this relief is uneasy at best. Trump’s defeat should be celebrated, but razor thin contests in many states, the failure of the Democrats to take clear control of the Senate and their losses in the House confirm what Momentum said earlier this week: corporate centrism cannot deliver a decisive defeat of insurgent right-wing populism or deliver real change. However small its ambition, a Biden government will be a hamstrung one. 

The demise of corporate centrism may have been exaggerated by some, but without the broad coalition of progressive and community organisations that mobilised on an immense scale and drove voter registration and turnout – with communities of colour and immigrants playing a central role – it is likely Biden would have lost. 

It is also not clear whether the defeat of Trump means the end of Trumpism. Trump substantially increased his vote from 2016 and made gains with non-white voters. He has also emboldened new far-right protest movements and helped fuel a growing network of online alt-right conspiracists. 

Despite the efforts of progressive Democrats in attempting to shape the policy platform Biden stood on, he does not offer a convincing political vision that can finally overcome the powerful right-wing populist politics that Trump has helped consolidate, or that can match the scale of the interrelated crises of Covid-19, climate and capitalism. Four years of deadlock in Washington and minimal changes to a country gripped by division and inequality may fuel this politics further and lead even to the return of Trump himself. 

But down the ballot there was a more encouraging story unfolding. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won 20 of 29 races. The DSA also helped secure victories in 8 of the 11 ballot initiatives they backed at the local and state level, on issues such as a $15 minimum wage, protection for tenants, a green new deal, and raising taxes on the rich to provide preschool to all.

The story behind these results is more complex than ‘good policies are popular’, or that Bernie would have won. The sheer graft of organising and grassroots mobilisation behind these successes is what we should really be looking at. This is not limited to mobilising people to vote, but hours of painstaking organising to build coalitions and create political support for policies and candidates that were often outspent 10-to-1 by corporate-backed opponents. The lesson is that when we organise around good ideas, we can win.

While the 2019 general election defeat has made it fashionable again in some parts of the Labour Party to denigrate even the idea of political education and organising, the last few years (the 2017 general election and the work of tenants’ unions especially) have provided plenty of evidence that here in the UK we can have success with a similar approach. 

There is no shortcut to this but we should take confidence in the fact that the organisational and communication infrastructure of the Left is stronger than it was in 2015, and we are more experienced. We must continue to build on this and learn from left victories and defeats internationally, as Momentum will do through our exchanges with socialists across the world, including the Democratic Socialists of America. And while there are many differences between US and UK politics there are some similarities in the situations we now find ourselves in. 

Mirroring the Democratic Party establishment, the traditional European parties of social democracy have in recent years been hampered by an intellectual and organisational exhaustion, often shifting back towards a centrism which had ill-served them in previous years. Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party may be another chapter in this story, or it may signal a temporary and limited revival of a political current previously on life support. Either way, the prospect of big change looks unlikely. 

There are certainly parallels with Biden in Starmer’s targeting of socially conservative voters, his reluctance to adopt transformative policy, his embrace of big money donors, his dismissal of issues facing people of colour, and a party establishment antagonistic to the left – as we are seeing now with the crackdown of Labour members expressing solidarity with Jeremy Corbyn. 

Starmer is currently doing well in the polls, but his rightward shift may in the long-term cost him votes to the Left, especially among a younger generation of voters, frozen out of stable work and homes, and supportive of policies that address the deep structural imbalances in the UK economy. If the worst enemy of Corbynism was outrage, then the worst enemy of Starmerism might be apathy. 

The inspiring organising work of our US comrades may provide the Left in the UK with a route through this difficult terrain, yet perhaps the biggest lesson we can learn from the US in confronting our new circumstances is that the movement is more than one man: not him, us. 

While Bernie has provided national leadership to progressives across the US – channeling the momentum of his primary run into campaigns for radical policy – he has been joined by a new generation of political leaders and, most importantly, there has been an explosion of organising at the state and local level. 

Here in the UK the anti-democratic suspension of the man much compared to Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, is an outrage and must be forcefully resisted on the basis that it is fundamentally an attack on the left and the very idea that Labour should be a socialist Party.

But long-term the future of the Left and of socialism in this country rests not on the shoulders of one man – inspirational as he has been and is for millions of us – but on building a politically-educated, locally-rooted and national movement that organises around popular transformative policies and key material issues, such as housing and a higher minimum wage, and that helps develop the next generation of leaders.

This is Momentum’s goal, and one we are absolutely convinced is necessary. Biden’s victory should be celebrated, but it must also be acknowledged that his presidency will almost certainly be ineffective in stemming the rise of right-wing politics in the US or in providing any solutions to the cataclysmic challenges facing our planet today. In the UK, we must organise for something better.