Look and learn, not from across the Irish Sea as George Osborne once famously enjoined, but from over the Atlantic. Let even atheists among us pray that Hillary Clinton will secure a narrow victory over Donald Trump in the US presidential race this week. But that proposition looks far from certain; she may yet, God forbid, lose.

Either way, ideological factors underlying her dire performance need to be registered and processed by the left this side of the pond. The recoil against the dominant politics of the centre-left over last twenty years stands revealed for all to see. In short, the Third Way is over.

Being the half of ‘Billary’ that thinks with its brain, Ms Clinton has fair claim to be one of the co-architects of the brand of the ideology that hegemonised both European social democratic parties and their bastard American half-cousin in the 1990s.

The New Democrats were the number one formative influence on New Labour. Blairism was, to no little extent, Clintonism with British characteristics. In Cool Britannia, we loved the governor, and we all did what we could do. From welfare reform to tax credits, from deregulation to free trade, Bubba was always the go-to guy.

One of the most striking features of these years was New Labour’s calculated decision to emulate the Clintons’ love-in with what Trumpist demagogy excoriates as ‘the elite’.

All of a sudden, speedo-clad cabinet ministers were to be found sipping pina coladas on the sundecks of Russian oligarch superyachts, reassuring their hosts that they were intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich. Six-figure donations were none too subtly solicited, with peerages for those willing to sign the cheques far too statistically frequent to be down to chance.

And there were deals to be done, money to be made. In return for ‘light touch regulation’ tantamount to no regulation at all, investment bankers were invited to extend their remit to running what had previously been the public sector.

The heartland vote, as we rebranded the working class, was among the beneficiaries, or so the Blairite sales pitch ran. 125% mortgages were dished out to anybody that asked, while the private finance initiative rebuilt schools and hospitals, even if expensively so.

And, as the Labour right never stops telling us, the electorate loved it, and rewarded Labour with three successive election triumphs. If the party is to win again in 2017, 2020, or whenever the next race comes, it needs to ditch all that Corbynista nonsense and return to the tactics that secured success two decades ago.

The biggest problem with this argument is that the world has changed. However well the model worked in its time, this is no longer its time. Ms Clinton’s travails surely highlight that. Even if she does make it to the White House, touch wood, the lack of electoral enthusiasm behind her is readily apparent, and not least attributable to her open affinities with Wall Street.

What may yet fell Clinton is what the pundits call populism, a term stretched across a range of phenomena so diffuse as to render it meaningless. But however defined, backlash is already a reality that can be observed across the globe in the wake of the global financial crisis.

In Britain, discontent has been mounting for more than three decades, rooted in the deindustrialisation that destroyed many communities long before globalisation got round to finishing the job.

Cash for questions, cash for honours and the MPs expenses scandal have generated widespread disengagement from all major parties, culminating in the sort of widespread alienation as much at work in the Brexit vote as hostility towards the EU and immigration. Earth calling Planet Westminster, can you hear us?

Erstwhile Labour leader Ed Miliband was clever enough to see some of this coming, and clumsily tried to frame his appeal accordingly. The problem was, he lacked the guts – not to mention the street smarts – to articulate this correct understanding with any clarity.

The key themes were present, at least in embryo. Predator companies were duly bashed, even as the inherent virtues of the hardworking families that played by the rules were endlessly extolled.

But his efforts were always beset by very British circumlocution, the punchline always omitted. It was never specified exactly who was shafting the squeezed middle, beyond perhaps an errant energy major or two.

Keepers of the Blairite flame derided Miliband as some sort of unreconstructed leftist who had fatefully departed from the one true path. Those same people are naturally apoplectic about his replacement by Jeremy Corbyn.

Interestingly, many of those who counsel a return to centrist managerialism are fully paid-up West Wing box-set owning US politics junkies, who will have already gotten the beers in for a television overnighter on Tuesday. Yet few seem to have clocked that Clinton is walking it like they talk it, with potentially cataclysmic results.

Nor have they factored in the evidence from Europe. However low Corbynite Labour has sunk in the polls, its support still surpasses that of all major sister parties that are still triangulating like its 1999, including those in France, Spain and Germany.

It even seems to have escaped their consciousness that Labour has been reduced to a third party status north of the border, largely as a result of the inept mishandling of the Indyref that ceded Scotland to a populist-tinged nationalist party.

That we need to win over people who voted for other parties in 2010 and 2015 goes without saying, but the question is how best to do this in the era of inchoate rage against the machine. Splitting the difference with the Tories, thus reinforcing the prejudice that ‘politicians are all the same’, is precisely the wrong way to go.

British society currently evinces a mood for change that either we tap into, or run the risk of it being exploited by a resurgent ugly right. In this new political period, the task is to develop what might be called ‘a Labourism of the left behind’.

In somewhat twisted manner, the more brutish section of the Labour right are already on the case. Some of them have even turned to immigrant bashing by way arguments that flirt with Powellism stripped of pretentious classical allusion. Even if that tactic wasn’t counterproductive, it should be unacceptable from a democratic socialist perspective.

The next manifesto needs to be class-based, but not as that proposition is frequently caricatured, by way of a narrow retro appeal to an industrial proletariat that is there only in vastly diminished numbers. It needs to bring together the 99%, including a goodly chunk of the middle class, around a politics of hope.

Success can only come from finding solutions to stagnating wages, the housing crisis, the shortage of school places. We will also need to demand the highest standards of personal probity from Labour politicians, which hasn’t always been a feature of the last 20 years.

In short, it’s time to kick elite ass, or cede the ground to noxious forces ready to ramp up the rhetoric while continuing to deliver policies that only benefit an increasingly discredited ruling class. If any Labour leadership is going to deliver that, it will be the current one.