So, like the rest of the planet I’m enjoying the brief sense of liberation that the election of Barack Obama has brought - we are finally heading back to a world where the worst lunacy’s of the Neo-Cons will be shoved into a darkened box somewhere and forgotten, at least for a while.

It was interesting to see America have an election in which there was some sort of “debate” about “socialism” - even if it was couched in the language of the last-gasp, try-any-smear-once, McCain campaign - which was surely about as squalid and unpleasant attempt to grasp an election as anything in recent history. McCain’s concession was handled gracefully and with statesmanlike aplomb - perhaps if he’d held his nerve and behaved like that throughout the whole campaign he’d at least be able to cling to some shred of self-respect in what will now be a long and hollow retirement during which he can be recalled as the man who gave up everything he ever believed in to pursue power, and lost.

I am, of course, hopeful about Obama’s election - I don’t think America’s quite ready to embrace social democracy like the rest of the civilised world - but I think Obama’s clever enough to use the tools he has available to sneak Keynesian investment into core industries to reboot the American economy. FDR did it in a time of crisis by investing in infrastructure (and WWII), Reagan did it (accidentally) by ramping up the sense of crisis in the Cold War and pumping cash through high tech military/aerospace industries, Obama can do it by using the financial crisis/war/oil prices to justify strategic investment . Such investment will be good for America and good for the rest of us, because right now we need an American economy that’s up and working hard towards some sort of goal. (I’m hoping he’ll target America’s dependency on unstable sources of oil as a means of justifying the heavy investment in green technologies that would be (i) good for the planet, and (ii) give America a new industrial/technological arena to dominate - but that might be a longshot. He might even sneak some comprehensive health care reform in as well).

But I’m not expecting is miracles - in fact, I’m afraid that (as with Labour in 1997) expectations of Obama are already so impossibly high that if he doesn’t personally knock on every elector’s door and deliver nirvana for all then everything he might achieve will be washed away in a see of impossible hopes.

So, given that just by getting elected and delivering a quite beautiful victory speech (kudos to the writers), he’s already achieved more than most American presidents could manage in two terms, here’s a list of my minimum requirements from Obama:

1. He keeps his dick in his pants.
2. He keeps his hands out of the till.
3. He tries not to get assassinated (I’ve got a lot of time for Joe Biden - a good union man and anyone with the good taste to “borrow” from Neil Kinnock’s finest speech is fine by me - but he’s not got Obama’s charisma, which might just be crucial in some of the challenges ahead).
4. He always remembers to at least consider what the right thing to do would be, even if he can’t always do it.

More than that and I’ll be ecstatic.

But the other side of that is that I also have a list for the Obamanauts, who are currrently circling cloud nine, and building up their hopes.

1. Well done on getting out to vote, you really have got a black president, but just because you’ve achieved one impossible thing doesn’t mean that you are about to get every last item on your wishlist of the improbable.
2. Some days it’s still going to rain on your BBQ, and your favourite sports’ teams may still lose - none of this will be Obama’s fault, even though after a while you’ll start (irrationally) to blame him.
3. He didn’t promise you a golden toilet seat in every home/an immediate end to the exploitation of chickens/world peace and a hug for everyone from Dermot O’Leary - even though you will eventually convince yourself that he did and start hating him for not doing what he never said he would.
4. A millionaire, Harvard-educated, lawyer is unlikely to be the man to begin the process of deconstructing the infrastructure of international global capitalism. If you’re holding out for that, you’re likely to be disappointed. Try hoping for laws to give yourselves the same rights at work that Europeans consider a minimum for sweatshop workers in China.

The use of the words “socialist” and “liberal” as pejoratives in the American election did highlight, once again, the enormous gulf between American and European government. The UK is the European nation closest to America in terms of politics but here we have a PM who isn’t just happy to call himself a socialist but regards his socialism as an extension of his religious beliefs and who built ten years of economic success as Chancellor around an openly redistributive economic policy.

I call myself a socialist. Actually I usually call myself a democratic socialist - which is my way of reminding myself that I’m not a utopian.

This is of course a lie. All socialists are secretly utopians - though not all utopians are socialist - but the good ones can keep a check on the evil that lurks in their hearts. And if you don’t believe that utopianism is evil, take a look at what utopians will do to impose their version of the best of all possible worlds on the people around them. There are essentially two types of unreconstructed utopian - the tedious cynic who dismisses all change as irrelevant unless it is the one big leap to perfection and the enthusiast who is likely to pursue a rampaging trail of murder, ethnic cleansing and brutal re-education to remake the world in their image. The latter are the most obviously evil but the former are insidious and sapping. I use the democratic prefix to remind myself that I can’t just run off and try and force other people to live in my utopia.

Like a recovering alcoholic, recovering utopians have to fight everyday against the urge to slip back into their old and dangerous ways. Fabianism provides the recovering utopian with something like the Alcoholics’ Anonymous twenty step programme. Fabianism lets the recovering utopian focus on overcoming a series of small, incremental challenges that, over time, deliver a more comprehensive change.

Okay, so I am a utopian, but I’m not someone who regards any change short of my utopian ideals as a total failure. Like a good Fabian I’m willing to get there by a series of incremental steps. My aim is not the perfect socialist society (whatever that is) but the best that might be possible in a real world.

Therefore, what I’d like is that every human on the planet gets to live their lives in a society that is as oppressive/exploitative/undemocratic and generally evil as (say) Sweden.

Now I’m well aware that Sweden isn’t perfect - otherwise I’d be trying to create a utopia, and that way madness lies. I’m sure that there’s lots of freedom loving libertarians who regard the Northern European model of social democracy (favoured in Scandanavia, France, Holland, Belgium Germany and about half of the UK) - with it’s high levels of education, comprehensive health care, high quality social services and emphasis on creating environments that are safe and clean paid for by relatively high levels of personal and corporation taxes - as an unbearable imposition on their right to tell the rest of the world to fuck off. Equally there’ll be plenty of comrades who regard the social democratic sticking plaster as an abomination against the working class struggle.

These people are, of course, wrong.

My creed is that, once we’ve raised all the workers to (say) Sweden’s level of miserable exploitation by the forces of global capitalism then we utopians can afford ourselves the luxury unleashing our inner bastards and fighting about how to make things really good for our fellow men. Until then everyone should shut up and start shovelling at the coal face of social reform until there aren’t people dying through poverty or living under dictatorships that are more oppressive than (say) Norway or who through ignorance or neglect are denied the opportunity to reach their full potential. And since liberal democracies never go to war with each other, we’d also have abolished war.

But I’m not hoping that Obama will deliver us from evil - or even deliver us unto (say) Sweden - but I’d love to see him persuade the American public that the majority of them would be better off if their country moved away from the “devil take the hindmost” approach of unreconstructed capitalism and the worse depredations of the Neo-Cons (who would let the devil have the middlemost as well as the hind) that have dominated US politics since Reagan and take the first gentle steps towards making their country more like (say) Sweden - valuing social cohesion, with high quality public provision of key services, and high achievement across the whole of society.

A lot of Americans are under the mistaken impression that the rest of the world hates them. For the most part that’s not true. We have very high expectations of America and, when you let us down, we tend to let you know. But nothing makes us happier than when you do something that makes us proud – like the Gettysburg Address or walking on the moon or boycotting buses in Montgomery – then you become our inspiration. And now you’ve done it again. You, of all nations, have elected a black man to lead you.

And our hopes rise again.