Joe Hildebrand: US midterms offer stark lessons for Australian Labor
Just two years after the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency, the Democrats are heading for a result that will make the Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like Peppa Pig, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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During the next 24 hours, tens of millions of Americans will go to the polls. On paper, it will be to elect hundreds of congress men and women, senators and governors to federal and state offices all over the country.
But in truth it is a referendum on just one man: Joe Biden.
And it is for this reason that just two years after the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency, the Democrats are heading for a result that will make the Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like Peppa Pig.
It would be easy to say that this is because Biden has spent much of his presidency mumbling incoherently and attempting to shake hands with pot plants, but the seeds of this disaster lie right at the heart of the Democratic Party itself – and offer stark lessons for Australian Labor.
The fundamental question is: How is it that the biggest political machine in the world’s greatest democracy was faced with a president they derided as a dangerously incompetent fool, and yet when the time came to defeat him the best they could come up with was a brain-damaged geriatric who could barely string a sentence together?
The reason is that the Democrats forgot about the middle.
Not just Middle America, but the middle of their own party.
At the bottom it had been hijacked by the same green-left activists we see buzzing around in Australia – feeding silly, identity politics-obsessed ideologues into congress – and at the top the party was effectively a multimillion-dollar seatwarmer for the Clintons.
And so you had a party structure comprised of bourgeois radicals talking about defunding the police, stitched to a personality cult around arguably the most powerful couple in the world and deeply embedded with the most elite corporate and political establishment.
But where were normal people?
Indeed, it might as well be put down to divine intervention that spoilt Hillary’s first dance and gave Barack Obama eight effortless years in the White House.
As soon as that was done, Hillary popped back up like an inflatable punching bag only to lose another unlosable race.
And when the Dems needed someone to take on Trump, the cupboard was bare.
Why? Because instead of searching for and developing mainstream middle-American candidates who could beat Trump at an actual election, both Hillary and the activist left were too busy whingeing and whining about how the election was stolen from them because the voting system wasn’t fair or because social media was spreading fake news – ironically, the same claims that Trump and his supporters make about his own loss.
They were so obsessed with delegitimising Trump – whether by endless court cases, violent protests or inane #notmypresident hashtags – that they forgot to find someone who could beat him legitimately.
And so when the time came and the party’s top brass realised that if middle-Americans ever came across a typical Democrat activist in the wild they’d pull out a 12-gauge, the closest thing they had to a leading moderate was Joe Biden.
That is how the biggest democratic political operation on the planet ended up staging a real-world re-enactment of Weekend at Bernie’s. That is why Biden was only elected thanks to an unprecedented and one-off anti-Trump coalition ranging from Romney Republicans to Sanders Socialists.
And that is why the Democrats will be trounced in the midterms even as Trump is contemplating a resurrection that would put Lazarus to shame.
Likewise, British Labour was destroyed not so much by the electorate, but by its own hard-left base and their slavish devotion to the unreconstructed socialist Jeremy Corbyn – a man hated by his own colleagues.
Corbynites were given false hope after riding a post-Brexit wave to come closer than expected to the beige and hamstrung Theresa May. In fact, Corbyn’s party was obliterated at the next poll once the Tories had a charismatic leader in Boris Johnson.
Now under the centrist Keir Starmer, Labour is on track to win back power from opposition for the first time since the centrist Tony Blair did the same in 1997. And the lesson for Australian Labor is equally obvious. For a major party to win and hold government it must be mainstream and that means its membership and values must reflect those of mainstream Australia.
So far, Anthony Albanese has done an admirable job of holding the centre line, but it is a thankless and sleepless job.
Hardline elements are always seeking to hijack the ALP for their own personal or ideological purposes. They think they are activists, but they are more like electoral saboteurs.
On Tuesday, the American Democratic Party is going to suffer the impact of such activism under somnambulant leadership.
God willing, the Australian Labor Party won’t have to.
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