US election 2024: How Donald Trump victory is a lesson for Labor
Labor should be worried because Australian voters have suffered a much bigger decline in real incomes than the Americans who just threw out the Democrats, writes James Campbell.
Opinion
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ANALYSIS
Australian conservatives who are getting themselves excited into believing Donald Trump’s resurrection provides some kind of road map for a Liberal return to power need to calm themselves down just as much the Lefties who’ve worked themselves up into believing the End Of The World Is Nigh.
It’s easy to see how these errors could occur because two of the factors to which commentators are attributing Trump’s victory – anger at immigration and a rejection of while might be called the woke agenda – are issues here too.
But the historical contexts are completely different.
Though Coalition frontbenchers have shown they still know how to exploit allegations of Labor weakness on border protection, thanks to the failure of Kevin Rudd’s disastrous experiment dismantling the Pacific Solution, the leaders of the ALP understand clearly unrestricted immigration is political poison for left wing political parties.
But if you can imagine a world in which Labor For Refugees was running Home Affairs you’d have a perfect picture of the immigration policy mainstream Democrats have been running the past few years.
Australia too is experiencing the same backlash against identity politics and the growing demands of the trans-rights movement which helped Trump to victory.
But although political issues other than the economy cause political division, we tend to hive them off into referendums like the Voice or plebiscites like the same-sex-marriage survey.
There’s almost evidence you win an election in Australia by exacerbating divisions on social issues.
America is different – throughout its history the big political divisions – slavery, Prohibition, gun control, civil rights or abortion – have been non-economic.
A few years ago socially conservative migrant electorates voted against gay marriage in huge numbers and then months later turned round and voted Labor as they had always done.
That would be much less likely in America.
Labor links to the unions also inoculate it against a progressive takeover.
At an Australian uni the green-haired Democrat student of US cliche isn’t in the Labor Club – that kid is in the Greens.
Only on one issue is there a direct parallel with what just happened in America and our upcoming election and that is inflation.
Trump’s improbable return to power has demonstrated just how dangerous uncontrolled price rises are to incumbent governments.
Indeed it is hard to see how he could have won without the drop in Americans’ standards of living.
Labor should be worried because in the past two years Australian voters have suffered a much bigger decline in real incomes than the Americans who just threw out the Democrats.
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Originally published as US election 2024: How Donald Trump victory is a lesson for Labor
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