The mother of all American course corrections

The writer is an FT contributing editor

Lest we forget, there have always been two versions of majesty. In the beginning was the majesty of vanity, embodied in heavily decorated palaces and fawning courtiers; a taste for military expeditions; an appetite for plunder and the rearrangement of reality in the interest of self-admiration. The opposite model, which spoke loud and clear in the US on Tuesday, is the majesty of the people expressed in free utterance, the sovereignty of laws enacted by elected legislatures and the institutionalised impermanence of leaders.

The US midterms are the latest confirmation that reports of the death of liberal democracy have been much exaggerated. They were preceded by a succession of elections in which overbearing leaders were overthrown at the polls. Viktor Orbán's "illiberal democracy" was sunk by an opponent whose last name, Magyar, is the same as Hungary's people. Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia was swept aside by an opposition so allergic to leader cults that it had none, billing itself simply as "Student List". And in Israel, nearly 60 per cent of voters repudiated Benjamin Netanyahu's governing bloc, ushering in the momentous possibility of a coalition of Arabs and Jews.

Complacency is, of course, dangerous, but the shredding of Republican supremacy in the US, even where it seemed immutably enthroned, is the mother of all course corrections and a sign that democracy in America is alive and eager to kick.

Tuesday night brought the evaporation of four reigning truisms as to what is required for electoral success. First of all, that money rules, an assumption crushed by the inability of Elon Musk's $474mn, much of it injected into Texas, to save would-be senator Ken Paxton and governor Greg Abbott from the dumpster. Second, it turns out that all the redistricting you can finagle will be of no avail when facing a hurricane of loathing for your president.

Third, comes the axiom of Lee Atwater and Roy Cohn, the latter the McCarthyite mentor of Donald Trump, that there is no abyss of slime so clotted with untruth that one ought not to draw from it a bucketful of gross matter to smear one's opponent. This tactic got its comeuppance after Vivek Ramaswamy unearthed the estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton, to accuse her of lying about the sexual abuse she endured as a child at the hands of her stepfather. Rather than garner him votes, the outrage at the ad, shared by Republicans and Democrats, probably sealed Ramaswamy's defeat.

Fourth, the rule of thumb that voters are locked into tribal allegiance came spectacularly undone as states like South Carolina and Ohio, which gave Trump massive vote margins two years ago, turned a dazzling shade of blue.

All this unfolded, not to the strains of "YMCA" (does anyone want to hear that ever again?) but rather to the "World Turned Upside Down" piped by the Redcoats as they lowered their colours in surrender to Washington at Yorktown. The last time Kansas elected a Democrat to the Senate was 1932, the year of Franklin Roosevelt's first landslide. Back then, rural economies had been devastated by successive droughts and collapsing prices. This year, the shortage of fertiliser, partly caused by the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as market shrinkage thanks to Trump's trade wars, had the same effect.

Kansans, who had given Herbert Hoover one of the highest vote margins in 1928, felt he was blind to their desperation. So too, voters in states that had shown tenacious loyalty to Trump -- Iowa, for instance -- are correspondingly furious at his preference for tooling around in his ballroom rather than taking heed of their pain at the checkout and the gas pump.

Cindy Hyde-Smith, the incumbent junior senator for Mississippi, likewise invited derision when she responded to complaints about the price of beef by urging people to pick another protein. "Pick another senator instead," her opponent Scott Colom replied, a suggestion voters seem to have followed. Pending the final vote count, Mississippi is on the verge of electing its first Black senator since 1874.

It is self-evidently true that pocketbook issues determined the recoil from Trump and his party. But it's also true that voters made a connection between their economic straits and his insulation from regular folk. Along with the war with Iran, outlandish corruption and a sense that the self-designated swamp drainer is actually one of its most avid bottom feeders has been one of voters' biggest concerns.

Could it be that the congressional class of 2027 will actually replace self-serving with service? If so, particular credit should be given to America's women, for more than anything this has been their revolution. All three of Georgia's most important offices -- governor, attorney-general and secretary of state will now be held by Black women. At least 17 governors will also be women, including a Native American in New Mexico. And women veterans -- precisely those for whom Pete Hegseth has least use -- will have a strong presence in the new House of Representatives. My local New York district now has Cait Conley, formerly deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there's Eileen Laubacher, the rear admiral on course to defeat Maga-stalwart Lauren Boebert in Colorado, despite all her posing with her home arsenal.

There will also be senators and representatives from the world of medical science besieged by the unproven fixations of Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of health. And it did no harm for Adam Hamilton and seminarian James Talarico, the new senators for Kansas and Texas, to have been forthright about public duty rooted in Christian belief.

All this, I know, may just be a song of "Tomorrow" sung by a wide-eyed orphan Annie. But it is the business of historians to spot moments when the tide of history really does make a turn. So pardon me if I vouchsafe to say, November 2026 in the American Republic may be one of them.