Hungary, Brazil, Serbia, and now the US. So far this year, when their hand has been held to the stove, voters have chosen what the Texas senator-elect James Talarico, the new face of the US’s Christian left, campaigned on as a “politics of love”: a society where we aren’t at each other’s throats, or a police state at ours.

Is it any surprise that when there is clarity about the choice on offer, voters have started to shrink away from a vision fuelled by billionaire wealth and runaway inequality? Away from oligarchic rule and unapologetic corruption, connivance with aggression, expansion, colonialism and war; environmental degradation and the surrender of the human spirit to a reality mediated by the algorithm.

Are we living, perhaps, through an extended “democratic spring” that began in Budapest in April with the overthrow of Viktor Orbán, and will continue all the way through to the arrival of the Élysée Palace’s next occupant in May?

That’s what it felt like to wake up on Wednesday morning, blanketed in an unexpected optimism sparked by a country that has fed my inner cynic for too long. In Michigan, voters chose a man who responded to a hate-filled question about sharia law with disarming, acerbic humour about shawarma law instead.

In neighbouring Ohio, where I grew up, voters refused to suffer the fundamental indecency of one candidate (the billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy) trying to weaponise the childhood abuse suffered by his opponent........

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