LAST night I had a discussion about the US election with a friend. A politically savvy person who considers things in the round and interrogates the campaign rhetoric of the day. They’re not what you could call a political passive. In the middle of the discussion, he piped up: "I don’t really care, because this doesn’t affect me". I paused for a second, unsure of the tone, before realising it wasn’t a joke. In my naivety, I assumed most of the people I know would have been equally dismayed at the events of the last week and the campaign prior to. There is so much for us outside of the US to lament. Our own vote for Brexit, rather than being an isolated act of mass stupidity, was the canary in the mine. It seems it has become the prologue to the end of western social values many thought unshakable.

The radical right have seized power in the round, controlling both houses, and now we must sit and watch as the misery unfolds for everyone who isn’t a white American man.

To truly appreciate the horror that awaits us – the rest of the world – it’s important to consider interconnectedness. Interconnectedness of individuals and of nations, of ideas and national mood percolating and diffusing through western countries right now. On January 21 2017, we’ll all watch as the first black president of the United States of America hands over the White House to Donald Trump, a "birther" endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. If that’s not enough of a metaphor to capture where the west is headed, I don’t know what is.

We non-Americans are not just casual spectators in this. The US elections are not sport. They’re not just something we watch because we’re super into politics and don’t get enough of it at home. We have a vested interest in who sits in The White House. The nice, neat geo-political border around America is not a force-field – however much Trump et al would like that – ideas cross borders freely.

Over Obama’s tenure, we’ve seen progress. We’ve seen triumphs for gay rights and marriage equality, the Affordable Care Act, the rise of powerful grassroots movements such as Black Lives Matter in response to growing police brutality. For the first time, we even saw a woman with a serious chance of becoming president. But rather than march unencumbered into the future, it seems that progress was latched to a bungee cord, and now we must watch as the US snaps back to a time of dangerous, angry intolerance. A time of public racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia and reaction against every type of "other" conceivable. There is a man in the highest, most powerful global office who has allegedly sexually assaulted women. He’s been a tax-avoider. He believes in waterboarding as an interrogation method. He wants to build that wall and called Mexicans drug dealers and rapists. He wants to keep Muslims out of America. He wants to repeal Obamacare. He believes Nato is obsolete. He believes in an abortion ban and controlling the reproductive rights of women. These are but a few of the many horrors to go with him into office. How has this happened?

EACH time the left cry political apocalypse and there isn’t an immediate tangible consequence, the right dismiss our warnings as undue panic and unhinged, prophetic hysteria. This is how the right gain traction. The ideas we should fear become habitually normalised. And with each new normalisation, we take a step towards a darker place. A place that increasingly looks like fascism. Something most of us in the west were naive enough to believe we wouldn’t see in our lifetime. Yet here we find ourselves, with toxic ideologies spreading throughout the unbordered wastelands of social media. The dangerous manifestations of the souring national mood, the deplorables emboldened by this symbolic victory, are no longer confined to traditional country-specific media channels. Xenophobes and racists in America will more readily connect with xenophobes and racists elsewhere. Misogynists in America can easily find women elsewhere to rail against. Islamophobes have a direct line to Muslims around the world.

This election is not the reaction to a violent, threatening leftist agenda. This – the ascension of an unqualified, unlettered, bloviating demagogue to the presidency – is a revolt against ideas most would consider to be the norm, or at the very least, the direction of travel for a civilised, progressive society. Seemingly rational adults have chosen to accept the rhetoric of hatred, fear, and appear to be blind to the potential consequences. Trump voters choose not to acknowledge the "black lives don’t matter and neither do your votes" signs, or the middle-school students filmed chanting "build the wall" at their Hispanic classmates, or the Muslim teacher’s anonymous letter from a student inviting her to hang herself with her own hijab. It’s all "leftist propaganda" ...

And it’s not just the adults that ushered Trump in that we should be concerned about as there will be a generation of children raised under his imprint. As the Strauss-Howe generational theory explains, these historical events, the political, economic and social anxieties resulting from this new era of American history will shape the adults they will become. The election has set the wheels in motion for a very different future than the one we were raised to expect.

George Orwell once said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Right now, in the wake of this global tragedy, it seems frighteningly apposite.