I’M WRITING this before the outcome of the Italian constitutional referendum is known. Opinion polls in Italy have been banned since the middle of November, so the result is anyone’s guess – though given recent experience with polling results, one might be better looking at a sheep’s entrails as the ancient Romans did.

But if Prime Minister Matteo Renzi loses his gamble to centralise power, the better to ram home neoliberal economic reforms, then Italy joins the list of countries where the electorate has stuck up two fingers to the ruling establishment.

This is not what is surprising given nearly a decade of Western economic crisis. What is surprising is that unlike previous wobbles in capitalism, the political shift seems to be wholly in a rightwards direction.

On present form, next year’s French presidential contest will be a duel between an avowed fan of Margaret Thatcher and a far-right candidate who wants to quit both the EU and Nato, then ally with Putin’s Russia against Germany. Some choice, unless the ailing French socialists can mount a resurrection that would put Lazarus to shame.

As it is, with a popularity rating of only four per cent, the current socialist president Francois Hollande has decided not to humiliate himself any further and bowed out of the race last week. This in a France that has had more revolutions than hot dinners.

In the US, of course, we have seen the Trump phenomenon. Yet as the appallingly inefficient US electoral system finally gets round to counting all the votes, it turns out that Hillary Clinton actually won 2,564,000 more than The Donald.

However, as the US right is always happy to tell us, America is not and never has been a democracy. Rather, according to its Constitution, the US is a republic. Meaning that the popular will is distilled through a voting system that leaves a rich and powerful oligarchy in control.

Thus it was that last week president-elect Trump announced he was appointing Steven Mnuchin as his Treasury Secretary (ie economic supremo). Mnuchin is a hard-nosed banker and former partner at Goldman Sachs, the top US investment bank. His appointment is only surprising because Trump spent much of the election campaign denouncing Hillary Clinton for having given secret, paid speeches to Goldman Sachs executives. The inference was that Clinton was in the pocket of the big banks. But it turns out that Goldman Sachs gets to run the US Treasury whoever is in the White House.

This tells us something about the supposed populist uprising against the Western political establishment: it is largely smoke and mirrors. Certainly, popular discontent is being channelled through new, right-wing and anti-establishment movements. And this can cause electoral upsets. Brexit was not in the original Tory script for the EU referendum. Trump is detested by the official leadership of the Republican Party and most US neo-conservatives.

But do not be fooled. Ultimate power to make and break events lies less with elected politicians than with the banks and economic elites.

Which is why there is usually a Goldman Sachs banker running the US economy, regardless of who “wins” the presidential election. Robert Rubin (26 years with Goldman Sachs) was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1999. Henry Paulson (32 years with the same firm) was Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush from 2006 to 2009.

Mind you, Goldman Sachs alumni are found in other countries too. Mario Draghi, boss of the European Central Bank, is another. As is a certain Mark Carney, now running the Bank of England.

History is replete with examples of right-wing, so-called anti-establishment movements ultimately being co-opted by those who own property. Populist movements are given a head of steam to see off the socialist left and anyone who is a real threat to the economic status quo.

Then – surprise, surprise – the leaders of those populist movements are reined in, bought off or otherwise disposed of. The political machine that brought them to power is deftly integrated into the old establishment structures and – surprise, surprise again – ordinary citizens find themselves no better off when the merry-go-round stops.

To take the most extreme example, 1930s fascism in Europe began as an anti-capitalist movement, albeit falsely equating capitalism and communism and blaming both on the Jewish people. Once in power, and having destroyed local communist and socialist parties as well as the trades union movement, fascism meekly served as the handmaiden of existing industrial capitalism. Workers were more exploited than ever and the result was a world plunged into war and misery.

Fortunately, fascism was defeated. The recovery of the left ensured a new democratic settlement in Europe and – thanks to the construction of powerful industrial trades unions in Europe and North America – the share of wages in GNP rose substantially, spreading wealth. A post-war social democratic consensus brought new civil, human, women’s and sexual rights. Europe swapped centuries of internal civil war for borderless, peaceful co-existence. Now all that is in retreat. What has happened to the left?

Here in Scotland we have avoided – so far – the rise of populism. This is because the left was mobilised successfully around independence to “take back control”. Because the current SNP leadership, born of the post-war social democratic upsurge, was brave enough to eschew any use of immigration or cultural xenophobia as the basis for political action. And because Scotland – already a land of Irish, Italian, Polish and other immigrants – was less prone to the blandishments of a right-wing project which appealed to Britain’s imperial (and racist) past.

But Scotland is not immune to the right-wing political virus that is infecting the Western world. We certainly won’t inoculate ourselves by appeasing it. Mainstream social democracy, particularly in the UK, France, Italy and Spain, made a similar mistake by embracing Thatcherism in an attempt to protect its electoral base. As a result, mainstream socialist parties are in deep crisis across Europe as their traditional voters seek alternative solutions to falling living standards, the housing crisis and rising work insecurity. It is these voters who are falling prey to the siren calls of Ukip and French National Front that their problems are fault of immigrants and Brussels.

The lesson to be drawn in Scotland is that we will not stem the tide of right-wing and racist populism by being moderate or doing nothing. We have to offer our own radical alternative vision. Sadly, across the Western world, such a vision is in short supply from a dysfunctional traditional left.

I appreciate the old nostrum that elections are won by commanding the centre. But the centre – everywhere including Scotland – is now a moving target in these desperate political times. It might just be time to redefine that “centre” by offering a more radical model of the good society – less market-driven, more collectivist, more caring.

There is another, overused nostrum: politics abhors a vacuum. Unless we offer an alternative social vision to the populist right, we cede the game. And the winner will be Goldman Sachs.