Corbyn and Trump are symptoms of the same malaise

The crisis in Western democracy is more tangible, alarming and deep-seated after the British election — one of the most remarkable since 1945 — that saw Jeremy Corbyn, a radical, protest-movement ideologue, almost steal office from the ultra-establishment Tory, Theresa May. The Corbyn eruption springs from the same political furnace that generated the Donald Trump eruption last year. Don’t be fooled by the differences between Corbyn and Trump. Both men declare their political systems are broken, rigged and betray the majority of people as they pose as agents of transformation seeking to dismantle and replace the established ideas and orthodoxies.

Both men are false prophets, unfit to lead their nations, yet they have won momentum that defied almost every expectation and accepted norm. Their success, once inconceivable, is no accident or aberration. It arises from a cultural and probably a civilisational trauma revealing the sickness of our societies that nobody can yet fully understand, but leaving us with the responsibility of trying.

The first place to start is to realise that when a political culture begins to disintegrate it throws up false prophets from both the left and the right. Once faith is eroded and hope is compromised then people decide to experiment with reckless adventurers. Such sentiment is often captured in the immortal line from WB Yeats that “the centre cannot hold”.

The second idea to grasp is that the false prophets spring from different, even rival, traditions and can offer stark personality contrasts: witness Trump, a flawed, flamboyant, selfish, transactional populist, drunk on celebrity culture; and think Corbyn, a narrow-minded, self-righteous, softly spoken protest move­ment activist, an anti-war rebel whose socialist ideology has never been troubled by real-world events and who loathes much of what his country has done and represents.

The West these days is too democratic to stage horror events such as the French or Russian revolutions. But nations are capable of having their “revolutions” within the system and Corbyn and Trump are united in openly seeking to transform their systems, not merely introduce a few radical policies. Both have deep roots in their nation’s cultural traditions.

Trump springs from American paranoid and populist folklore, pledging to “make America great again” — a genius slogan suggesting a glorious past that had been stolen from the people by elites and foreigners.

Corbyn’s mantra is that “we care for all, everybody caring for everybody else: I think it’s called socialism”. His equally genius election slogan “for the many, not the few” suggested the need to purge a corrupt power structure governing for the few and replace it with public sector intervention and equity of the pre-Thatcher age, a romantic idea testifying to the influence of cultural amnesia.

Trump and Corbyn shared the same path to power — staging revolutions within their respective parties as a prelude to winning mass support at elections.

Trump’s hijacking of the Republican primaries was an unprecedented spectacle, with the extreme policies he championed winning currency because of his apparent authenticity — telling it like it is. Corbyn’s stealing of the Labour Party was an inside tactical job even more gobsmacking as a political operation, which revealed a party decaying from within.

Rated as a 100-to-one joke when he nominated for the leadership, Corbyn initially struggled under the rules to get 15 per cent of Labour MPs to agree to put his name on the ballot paper. Incredibly, he won because he mobilised thousands of activists, got people to join the party, went into the streets, asked the believers to kill Blairism and the third way forever, and relied on social media to circumvent the ferocious campaign against him from mainstream newspapers and the Labour right.

As leader he never had the support of his own parliamentary party. The crisis reached a showdown in mid-2016 when MPs voted no confidence in Corbyn 172 to 40, with another series of frontbench resignations. But Corbyn denied the legitimacy of the caucus vote, defied his colleagues, said he stood for a new brand of politics — in effect grassroots activism and protest — and prevailed with a mass recruitment campaign that saw party membership sail to more than 500,000, constituting a new power base for Corbynism.

In short, the internal upheaval in the Republican and Labour parties driven by the frustrated radicalisation of the rank and file delivered leadership to Trump and Corbyn. The crisis of the parties is pivotal to the crisis of the system.

Indeed, this got double verification in the US campaign when an American version of Corbyn-lite, an ageing leftist, Bernie Sanders, ran Hillary Clinton close for the Democratic nomination, again mobilising a radical rank-and-file sentiment. In his book Our Revolution, Sanders says his campaign “was about transforming America”. With perfect timing he told Britain’s Financial Times last weekend that his socialism could go mainstream in America.

This notion defies US history but in the age of disruption there is a golden rule: don’t discount the impossible and prepare for the improbable. The arrogance of the established power elites suggests a brainless divorce from reality. The essence of the US and British people’s revolt lies in stagnant wages and living conditions. The US figures for 30 years have shown weak real wages growth and relative declines in living standards for much of the workforce. More recently, it took until 2015 for US median income to regain the 2009 pre-global financial crisis levels.

In Britain, average wages in real terms are below their pre-GFC levels of a decade ago. The age of globalisation has bequeathed a historic challenge for the West. The evidence is that the creative-destruction cycle of the digital economy is failing to deliver replacement jobs with adequate income levels. As the Financial Times’ Washington commentator Edward Luce says, half the people in the US are “suffering from personal recessions”. The numbers for Britain may be similar.

If the middle-income affliction of the West is systemic and entrenched there is one certainty: political upheavals will intensify, people will become more agitated, and extreme policies — whether proven failures or populist stunts — will escalate. The politics we have known since World War II will exhaust itself before a new and unpredictable beast.

The mistake is to view the crisis of the West through partisan prisms. Progressives who hate Trump struggle to see any real problem with Corbyn, while conservatives who adore Trump denounce Corbyn with fury. These perspectives are self-defeating.

Trump and Corbyn are different manifestations of the same underlying malaise. They repre­sent the two ugly and competing movements thrown up by this malaise — the rise of the authoritarian, selfish, populist right as represented by Trump, and the revival of the failed socialism and peace movement ideology embodied by Corbyn.

Trump’s chaotic beginning as President is on graphic display. Corbyn just lost the British election while lifting the Labour vote from 30 per cent to 40 per cent, higher than that achieved by Bill Shorten last year. These movements reflect ideologies tied to social and educational profiles — Trump loyalists come from the disadvantaged industrial class, the elderly, white, regional, socially conservative, patriotic and religious coalition that spans middle America. Corbyn voters congregate in the unions, among the displaced and disadvantaged work­ing class, the university educated, the social progressives, the cosmopolitans, believers in identity politics and the young. A new network of ideological division is being created based on the fracture over values as well as interests.

Corbyn may have peaked, with his high vote driven by disillusion with the Tories, not enthusiasm for his new politics. On the other hand, he may have created a platform from which to ascend as prime minister in what would be the biggest shock to the British system in 70 years.

On balance, he must be judged a security and economic risk for Britain. He has expressed sympathy for terrorist movements, the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah, opposed anti-terrorist laws, opposed on moral grounds almost all British military commitments since World War II, says he is not a pacifist but refuses to commit to deploy British forces to defend a NATO ally, sheets Islamist terrorist attacks back to Western foreign policy, criticises Trump for confront­ing North Korea and sending missiles into Syria, repudiates US policy since 9/11, equivocates over Britain’s nuclear capacity and gives every impression he would run a quasi-pacifist, alliance-sceptical, UN-oriented policy based on a false morality almost certain to betray British interests. On the economy, he stands for renationalisation of industries, huge spending increases in health, welfare and education, protecting pensioner benefits, higher minimum wages and elimination of university fees, with total spending increasing by $49 billion annually, supposedly financed by higher taxes on business and higher-income earners whose marginal tax rate would lift to 50 per cent.

Independent analysts say the numbers don’t add up but the slick politics is the alleged 95-5 per cent split between winners and losers. The Tories, however, deserved the humiliation heaped on them. May dismissed Corbyn’s agenda with isolationist arrogance. But, incredibly, she didn’t argue against it; she didn’t make the case against Labour’s tax-and-spend fantasy to the British people.

Britain, like the US, is a profoundly divided nation with the conflict of interest and ideology deepening rapidly. This reflects the tribulations of a West divided over the challenge to its values, moral order, its security, how to halt the decline of middle-class prosperity and, ultimately, how to sustain the ethics of liberalism and conservatism — ideas that made the West successful and underwrote its political systems to the benefit of all. The notion can be dismissed that Australia will be immune forever from the crisis afflicting America and Britain, the two great democracies from which we have drawn much hope and inspiration during our history.