If my pet theory is sound – that most of the alarming events in the world today are symptoms of the ‘natural’ and perhaps even inevitable ‘evolution of capitalism’ in its later stages – there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence around to back it up.

The elevation of an Ayn Rand-type property developer to the presidency of the most advanced capitalist nation on earth is the most obvious sign; together with the simple transactional profit-and-loss way Trump seems to regard and conduct politics (The Art of The Deal), devoid of any other kind of principle, moral or otherwise. The support he receives (or used to) from the (alleged) richest man on earth, an über capitalist with openly Fascist and even Nazi sympathies, together with the said Elon Musk’s open involvement in British politics on the side of the Far Right, are further indications. In Britain Farage and his ‘Reform UK Party’ cronies – in spite of the pretence they make of representing ‘ordinary people’ – mostly, like Trump, worked in finance before they turned the skills and ideas learned there to politics. Another indication is the way the language of politics in Britain has been commodified, with railway ‘passengers’ now becoming ‘customers’, and voters seen as ‘stakeholders’. Professional football (soccer) has changed from being representative of communities (when I began following ‘my’ team, most of its players came from within ten miles of where I lived), to business ventures, controlled by the super-rich, many of them rich foreigners. The internet is rapidly being bought up by these people. Elon Musk has already taken over ‘Twitter’ to replace it with ‘X’, which has proved to be more amenable to his Right-wing views. He apparently dislikes Wikipedia because it’s non-profit, and is aiming to challenge it with a new profit-making web encyclopaedia, ‘Grokipedia’ (!), of his own. Most of the newspaper press is controlled by millionaires. – In all these ways, and in others, capitalists are now virtually running both America and Britain; as they may have done for many years, but far more openly and shamelessly today. So, if you are looking for broad trends in modern American and British history, this must surely be the most likely one.

It has been a slow-developing trend before today. For many years in Britain – and to a lesser extent in the USA – capitalists had to compete with political liberals, collectivists and socialists for command of the country and its future. This used to be a fairly equal contest, with both sides believing they could win, or at least that they could reach a workable compromise. That compromise was what the Labour government of 1945-51 pretty well achieved, with its ‘welfare state’ and ‘nationalisation’ of sectors of the British economy. Even later Conservative governments broadly went along with this in the 1950s, ’60s and a short way into the ’70s, persuaded that it really was the way of the future, and would maybe provide an essential safeguard against the threat of Soviet-style communism. Those who hankered after a return to a more 19^th century form of ‘free enterprise’ capitalism were marginalised, pushed on to the outer edges of conventional politics, or into tiny intellectual Right-wing ‘think tanks’, much mocked.

Their sudden emergence into the light of daytime politics coincided with the rise and then electoral victory in 1979 of Margaret Thatcher, whose whole purpose in politics, she stated, was to reverse the progress of what she saw as ‘collectivism’, and to restore the old capitalist values of Britain’s ‘heroic’ Victorian age. In this she (or rather the tide of history that carried her) broadly succeeded; and the ‘progressive’ alternative gave way to what we have today. The fall of Soviet-style communism in eastern Europe after 1989 aided this process, by removing the institution that for years had furnished both a beacon for some of the Left, and a salutary warning for the Right. Now the capitalist juggernaut was free to dominate American, British and much of world politics, by its own volition, and inexorably; until – maybe – its internal contradictions bring it down.

That may sound a bit Marxist, albeit a pound-shop version of Marxism, without Marx’s philosophy or economics, but based here simply on historical observation; and without the salvation that Marx promised, of a proletarian revolution that would put everything to rights. (Personally, I don’t think I would like a revolution in any case. I’m too comfortable as I am.)

Will very recent events in America – the impressive ‘No Kings’ demonstrations all over the country, and the ‘socialist’ Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York – put a spoke in the wheels of the juggernaut? We Lefties can but hope. Tides after all can ebb.