IT was billed as the election that would triumphantly restore the liberal-capitalist centre: back to 2008, before the financial crash and succeeding crises shattered political systems globally. 

Even if the late counts narrowly deliver more states than Joe Biden needs to secure the 270 votes in the Electoral College, an anti-democratic product of the slave-owning era, the US presidential election has certainly not done that. 

Against what had been growing chatter this autumn that we were on the cusp of a new epoch as this decade ends, events in the US dramatically confirm continuing political and social polarisation. 

Donald Trump, though again behind in the popular vote, gained probably 5 million more votes than in 2016. The big majority of those say they chose Trump positively. The largest part of Biden’s support says it cast its vote against Trump. 

That was the main theme of the Biden campaign: I’m not the other guy. Friendly commentators talked up his policies to meet multiple crises – the pandemic, the slump, the environment – but they paled beside that central message. 

It is probably enough to win the White House, despite Trump’s incendiary efforts to delegitimise the election. It was not enough to make hoped-for gains in the US Senate – where the Democrats spent record sums on some contests – or to put the genie of “populism” back in the bottle.

It means a Biden presidency will have to govern from the outset with a veto-wielding Republican Senate (barring a surprise result in elections to take place in Georgia in January) and a conservative Supreme Court. 

What’s more, far from its “moderate”, big business powerbrokers reasserting control, the Republican Party has become Trumpised in the last four years. It is an acceleration of a decades-long process. 

The main party of big business has serially forged a devil’s pact with radical right and ultra-conservative forces at elections. John McCain is now beatified as a bipartisan statesman. He chose the wing-nut Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. 

The result was to authenticate the conspiracist right and to give birth to the Tea Party. That in turn radicalised the very structure of the Republicans, providing the bloc of forces that allowed Trump to gain the nomination four years ago. The corporate centre right mainstreamed the far right. 

That process in now further advanced. The other side of it is a greater detachment of much of corporate America from the Republicans and many of them turning this year to the Democrats, their historic second choice, despite the tax cuts Trump gave them. 

They could do so secure in the knowledge that Biden offered a more rational renewal of US power at home and abroad than the chaos of the Trump years. His economic programme was not as ambitious or left-wing as touted, and in any case the parts big business did not like could be culled by Republicans and Democrat placemen in Congress. 

Biden had beaten democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders in the primaries. The Democrat machine has proven more capable of deploying loyal, older black voters to stop Sanders than it has in mobilising black voters as a whole on Tuesday. 

He was so committed to marginalising the left’s modest presence, epitomised in the “squad” of four left Congresswomen, while demanding their enthusiasm in the election that he promised to include Republicans in his administration. 

That is set to happen. But it is with a Trumpised Republican Party, in which QAnon conspiracy theorists can get elected to legislatures. 

That is far removed from even the election of Emmanuel Macron to the French presidency three years ago. That too was heralded as the decisive victory of liberal-centrism over the forces of populism that upended politics in 2016. 

All premature. Macron’s response to recent terror attacks in Europe is legitimising the racist right so much that this week he tried to row back from the process he and his ministers have unleashed over the last few months. 

Instead of a renewed centre, Biden’s centrism will mean governing with a radicalised right over which Trump, even out of the White House, has unprecedented influence. It is a notional centre.

For at the same time we have seen the extraordinary Black Lives Matter movement and other eruptions. It is not just that 20 million are estimated to have taken part (though with protests petering in the election period). 

It is also that unlike at its inception under the Obama presidency in 2014, it has now garnered considerable white support and led for the first time to most white Americans agreeing that there is police racism against black people. 

Exit polls showed seven in ten voters in favour of a “government-led healthcare” scheme. A national health service was the signature policy of the Sanders’ campaign. It was not on Biden’s platform. 

Florida voted more strongly Republican than predicted. It also voted for a $15 an hour minimum wage in the state. 

Trump’s core support is of the right, drawing on the middle-class white base of the Republicans. You have to reach the above-$100,000-a-year household income bracket before he outpolled Biden.

It should be noted, however, that Biden outperformed Trump among those over $200,000 – an indication of institutional business backing and of liberal middle-class support. 

Conservatives are playing up the breadth of Trump’s appeal: some liberals are denying reality. He did increase his vote and it seems the only sex/race demographic where his percentage share declined was that of white men. 

A vicious red-baiting campaign organised by wealthy Cuban and Venezuelan families in Miami certainly helped Trump hold Florida. But a local Democrat pollster also says that while the Trump machine worked the area for five years, Biden’s campaign rolled up in the last seven weeks. 

And the 90 percent Mexican-American border area in Texas, one of the poorest in the country, saw Trump gaining shock votes. That is despite his racist immigration policy, which he did not highlight in this election. 

Activists on the ground say he held his vote in rust-belt towns in areas like north-east Pennsylvania. 

In 2016 Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries there thanks to those blue-collar voters. Some of them went on to back Trump. It is a sign of the lasting damage of the Clinton years and the disappointment with Obama, whose promise of historic change turned into rejuvenated corporate power in the neoliberal recovery from the 2008 slump. 

Socialist Sanders also did very well among Latino voters in Nevada in this year’s primaries. It looks like that carried over to Biden. Thanks to militant organising efforts among largely immigrant hotel workers Nevada is the most unionised state in the US (though it is a low bar). 

Armies of pollsters and rival analysts in the US produce at every election a plethora of statistics of greater or lesser reliability. 

There is plenty of scope for vested political interests to cherry-pick. Already, Democrat operatives, echoed by Republicans, are trying to blame some losses in races for the Congress upon Sanders and the small number of left representatives saying that they are socialists and pressing radical policies. 

That is bound to increase and would have done even had there been a Blue Wave of Democrat gains. 

There was much anticipation this summer of the Democrat left holding “Biden’s feet to the fire.” A much bigger pressure will be to fall in behind a weak presidency assailed by a Trumpist right in and outside the political institutions – that, and to hunker down for the next election cycle. 

Whether the left side of this increasingly polarised national reality in the US does find effective expression is going to depend on all sorts of choices. 

They are connected to things we can confidently say at this stage. Right-wing populism is not fading away on account of exposure through holding office. Nor are the capsized political systems of the neoliberal era automatically righting themselves. 

The centrist forces in alliance with the right have had success in throwing back the radical left electorally. See what happened to Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. But even against Trump and with unprecedented bipartisan backing the Democrats have managed only narrowly to avoid losing.

That will not stop the centre’s push against the radical left. Look at the British Labour Party and equivalents in Europe. 

Turnout was up in this polarised US election except among 18-49 year olds where it flat-lined. Sanders advanced disproportionately among younger voters in 2016, which in many ways was the Occupy movement of 2011 going to the polls in the primaries with its slogan of for the 99 percent against the 1 percent. 

Conservative and liberal commentators have in different ways barraged us with claims that the social-movement eruptions of 2010-2015 and their political repercussions in the second half of this decade are over. 

They are not. The radical left is far from being a parenthetical aberration of five years ago. The challenge we face is doing better this time round. And that is not by sliding back to the conventional and flailing centre.