Progressives are still so pessimistic, but why? The populist right can and will be defeated | Andy Beckett

From the US midterms to Brazil and Hungary, extremists are floundering yet the left still overestimates their power. Reality is on our side

From Brazil to Hungary and Britain to the US, why are so many people so surprised by the right's election defeats? Flavio Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, Reform UK, the Tories and a vast array of Republican candidates have all been rejected in national or local contests this year, even in usually reliably conservative Mississippi. Apparently impregnable incumbents and populist insurgents alike have been beaten, often by big margins. The supposedly ascendant global right has been out-organised, out-thought, outmanoeuvred and outnumbered.

Yet each time this happens - which is more often than the usual gloomy narrative of our politics allows - many liberals and leftists absorb and share the good news almost with wonderment. Rightwing governments such as Donald Trump's may have been struggling for many months, having made countless impossible or incompatible promises and strategic blunders, and opinion polls may have been consistently pointing towards a meltdown, but their actual election defeats are seen as miracles: unexpected moments of joy in the morning news, often followed over subsequent months by a creeping conviction that the right's supremacy will inevitably return.