During her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was right to mention the disturbing implications of Donald Trump’s attitude to democracy. But it didn’t start, or end, with him.

As Clinton and others pointed out, a successful democracy depends upon a peaceful transition of power. The losers of the election have to be prepared to accept the results and wait for the next elections instead.

But in both Britain and the US, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stomach the idea of things not going the way we might want. There is, perhaps, good reason for this. There’s no doubt that Donald Trump is uniquely unqualified to be president of the United States, and whatever the arguments over the European Union, there’s no doubt that the public view has been distorted from decades of lies and misinformation. Not to mention the empty promises made by the leave campaign. Many people have been expressing the opinion that referendums are undemocratic and, as Margaret Thatcher once said, a device of demagogues.

Furthermore these results have given comfort to incredibly reactionary groups who have taken them as a mandate to ramp up their campaigns of hatred. If we are increasingly compelled to overturn the results of these recent electoral losses, however, so are their supporters increasingly inclined to prevent such a circumstance, even if it is achieved through totally legal means. The judges who ruled that an invocation of article 50 would have to go through parliament, for example, were branded “enemies of the people” by the Daily Mail. I imagine the author of that headline did so with tongue in cheek, but that kind of language is no joke. I should not have to remind anyone of the recent murder of a politician, who was targeted because of her humanitarian concerns. The man who murdered her believed he was doing his patriotic duty.

I believe in the principles of free elections and a free press. But these events are symptoms of a collapse in trust. Many people have tried to address this, asking questions such as ‘how can we get people more engaged in politics?’. This somewhat misses the point. People are losing faith in our institutions because our institutions are being made irrelevant. More specifically, the nation state is being made irrelevant. International corporations are increasingly beyond the reach of any government’s control. Not only that, but governments across the globe are becoming subject to the interests of international corporations.

Since the left is in disarray, the opposition to this trend is being led by national corporations and small business owners, who are finding it difficult to compete. Naturally, populism and nationalism is their answer to this. Raise the walls and the tariffs.

Meanwhile, Putin in Russia and Erdoğan in Turkey are working to dismantle their countries constitutions and install themselves as presidents for life. Too many other countries to name are showing signs of rolling back on democracy.

But even this token resistance to global neoliberalism is, ultimately, futile. It is impossible now for a government to actually control its own economic policies. Investors can pull out, companies can move their factories abroad, speculators can raise or lower the value of a currency. Governments now spend their time trying to persuade corporations to do business in their country. The former British Chancellor, George Osborne, was personally thanked in the credits of Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the tax relief scheme he engineered to persuade them to film in the United Kingdom.

The direction governments go from here is towards acting as private security for corporate interests, while monopolies arise in every industry and begin to merge with one another. The corporate dystopia will not remain fiction for much longer. When the public has finally lost all trust in the establishment, there will be no reason left to maintain the institutions of democracy. Future police states will have access to technology far in advance of anything the public can use as a means of resistance, and they will have the full backing of their corporate sponsors, who will be able to exert immense financial pressure on any dissenters.

As long as we are in competition with other countries, there can be no preventative measures against this future. The only hope we have is a revitalisation of the internationalist left, with new ideas, new philosophies and a new strategy. So far, we have only seen the re-emergence of old ideas, but that isn’t going to cut it. Sanders and Corbyn cannot save us, but can give us hope that the world is ready for us. When we can finally say what needs to be said, people will listen.