Crunch time on the right
Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen discusses how the ‘Great Realignment’ is rocking Australian politics. Interview by Nick Cater.
Nick Cater: The Great Realignment in politics. What is it, in a nutshell?
Henry Olsen: In a nutshell, it is the movement of formerly left-wing, often union-enrolled, working-class voters towards the right, and the simultaneous movement of educated, often upper-income voters formally aligned with the right towards the left. It's happening virtually everywhere in varying degrees, and it's been accelerating in recent years.
Nick Cater: Can you pinpoint a moment when this realignment began?
Henry Olsen: I can't pinpoint an exact moment, but it really takes off after the Great Financial Crash of 2008, that you have working class voters who had been getting hurt for years because of the movement of heavy industry away from Western, developed countries and the great financial crash tended to crash on them.
Simultaneously with that, you have the ‘woke-ification’, or the adoption of cultural progressivism, by more and more people in the educated classes who are also benefiting economically. They may have been hurt somewhat in the Great Financial Crash, depending on the country, but the fact is they had been benefiting and continued to benefit afterward. So you have this picking up steam after 2008 in most countries, and it accelerated at different rates in different countries depending on the specific circumstances.
The new political fault lines became apparent after the Great Financial Crash in 2008.
Nick Cater: So let's look at the parties of the left and this tension, if you like, between their two bases. The first one the industrial base, if you like. In Australia and in Britain, it’s very obvious. Both parties of the left are aligned formally to the trade union movement, not in United States, but the same basic sympathy supply. And you've got the new—now we call them woke, but we used to call them intellectuals—the intellectual class, if you like. The people who've been educated in university, drawn towards the left philosophically rather than because of their economical class interests. Is that essentially the divide, and is it now that the intellectual wing, if you like, of these parties is on the ascendance and the other side is on the decline?
Henry Olsen: That is basically what has been happening. Depending on the country, the intellectual wing of the left is either in ascendance or it is locked in battle with the other wing. Of course, in multi-party systems you often find the complete collapse of social-democratic parties as working-class voters find new parties to affiliate with, and people in the intellectual class form their own parties or are attracted to different parties and don't align with the centre.
But in two-party or roughly two-party systems like we have in the Anglosphere, that would be essentially what is happening and in recent years, you've been seeing a greater movement of intellectuals or people in the knowledge professions towards the centre-left. They rarely align with the hard left, but they decide that between a right-wing or a centre-right that focuses more on culture and is indistinguishable on economics with a centre-left, that in their mind is comfortable with the capitalist system and is in their wavelength with cultural issues. You find these people moving to the Canadian Liberal Party, here to the Labor Party, or to the teal independents, the Democratic Party in the United States, which simply adds to the tensions within the centre-left.
Nick Cater: To get to the essence of, what the left does, what its game is compared to the centre-right. It's looking to government intervention to solve problems rather than turning to individuals. So to what extent is the things which we expect, or the things which they expect on the left government to intervene in, have they changed from what they formally were? Is that what's happening?
Henry Olsen: It’s partly what's happening, and it's one of the things also that the right has to come to grips with because many of the new voters want government intervention in some way, but they want government intervention in different places, in ways that are antithetical to both sets of people in the centre-left.
The centre-left increasingly wants to intervene in matters of culture. Sometimes in matter of speech, depending on the country or the institution. They tend to want to economically intervene in favour of allocation of resources to fight climate change. They continue to support expansion of welfare state programs in general, but the passion is the intervention in the economy in order to decarbonise it, and that's something that is again, usually not in the material interest of the working class, which either disproportionately work in industries that will be put out of business, or work in industries that consume larger amounts of fossil fuel, such as trucking.
Nick Cater: To what extent are the old definitions changing here? I mean, this is not about social class in the way it once was. And it seems to cut across lines, doesn't it? So you get a movement like the Brexit movement or the Tea Party movement in the United States. It doesn't neatly fit within the boundaries of one party or the other.
Henry Olsen: That's right. But what you're finding is this. What you used to have was a classic structure where the more educated and wealthy you were, you were on the right, and it was a pretty linear, absent certain historical situations, places that for historical reasons would vote against economic interests. You would tend to see that Britain was a perfect example, that every election the Tories would do best among the highest social class, what they called the A/B set and would do worst among the lowest social class, the D/E set.
Looking at the Tory party is a perfect example of what has changed in the 2019 election where they won the greatest majority since the 1980s. They did equally as well in all four social classes for the first time in their history. They have lost some in the upper class, but they've gained dramatically in the lower social classes, and that means as a different class alignment as people are moving from the classes in opposite directions.
Nick Cater: And it has a very interesting effect to the political map of the country, I think, doesn't it? In the UK and similarly in the United States or even here, if you draw the lines of, in their terms, red for Labour, blue for Conservative, you draw those colours on a map, you end up with this big red blob around London and then dotted around university cities elsewhere. Everywhere else is blue, so it's almost a metropolitan, almost a cosmopolitan versus a regional divide.
Henry Olsen: Yes, and that's true in a lot of places. You take a look at the United States and increasingly high-income, high-education suburban areas. The United States has had no effective Republican representation in the major cities for many years, but the suburban areas are increasingly going to the Democrats, whereas working-class areas that were the heartland of the Democratic Party have increasingly gone to the Republicans as recently as 2012. There's a group of largely white working-class areas along the Mississippi River from Minneapolis, down to St. Louis, and virtually all of the districts that touched that area elected Democrats and voted for President Obama. In 2020, every single one of those districts voted for Trump, and after this election, I think every single one of them will elect Republicans to the House.
Nick Cater: We are recording this just over a week between before the midterms, so maybe by the time some people listen to this, things might have changed, but I think the broad pattern is established, right? And just staying with America at the moment, there seems to be a hardening, too, of lines. People talk about California now as a one-party state, and it's hard to imagine how the Republicans could gain any sort of foothold back in California as things now look, and yet that was, of course, the state in which Ronald Reagan was governor.
Henry Olsen: Fundamentally what happened is that the Republican Party coalition of 1980 was the old Republican coalition, starting from the economically privileged through down. Reagan brought in a lot of working-class whites. California did not have large numbers of minorities in 1980. It is now a majority-minority state.
So Hispanics, until very recently, were overwhelmingly Democrat. And one of the things about that's been happening is Hispanic working-class voters have been moving towards the Republicans as their white fellow citizens moved about six to ten years ago. And that may give Republicans a chance because Hispanics are the overwhelming minority in California politics.
But right now, what you have is very few white working-class voters, and the sort of college voter that is attracted to California is much more democratic than the college voter around Atlanta or around Cincinnati, and the combination of those things means it is a one-party area. Conversely, the South. Much of the South was one-party Democratic as recently as 30 years ago, and it is now one-party Republican. These things are having equal and opposite reactions.
Nick Cater: It challenges both sides of politics, of course. Let's talk about the left, or the Democrats in your case. It seems to me that the problem for the Democrats right now is that they have gone to a very woke agenda which has strong adherents, but not enough of them to win a majority across the country. At some point, they have to gain the support of other, more working-class voters, or voters from different ethnic groups.
Henry Olsen: I think a centre-left party in a two-party system has a wide range of adherents from the far-left to the moderate centre. And that is nowhere more true than it is in the United States, because we don't have even a small green party as in Canada a new democratic, social democratic party to siphon off the more left-wing voters.
So the Joe Biden coalition had everybody from the farthest-left reasonable actors in American politics to people who voted for them purely transactionally because they didn't like Donald Trump. Combining and maintaining that coalition means putting your foot firmly on the centre side. Because those are the voters who are least attached to you.
Biden’s success hinges on juggling his coalition of left-wing activists and disgruntled centrists.
But the problem is the Democratic activist is more and more firmly on the hard-left side, and that means what you need to do to win the general election loses you primaries, because we don't select our candidates by small groups of members influenced by party elites. Our candidates are selected by mass elections, voter primaries, basically general elections, but only for people who choose to affiliate with one party.
So you can't make that decision at a party level. It's the voters who decide, and the Democratic activists want a more left-wing party, and this is fundamentally unsolvable and it makes the Democratic situation harder that of than any other party in the Western world, save perhaps [UK] Labour, where they also have an effective two-party system, even though there is a small Green party they can siphon off of, and they too have to have Corbynistas to moderates in the same party and it's very hard to balance.
Nick Cater: Your logic sounds perfectly reasonable. You've got a party that goes from left to right, let's say, the only place to lead it is from the middle. But here's the problem, Henry. On so many of the issues which animate us today, It's hard to find a middle. Where do you find a middle between, say, pro-gay marriage and anti-gay marriage, an issue which is now dealt with in your country as it is here, but where do you find the middle between pro-abortion and pro-life, and where's the middle between extreme action on climate change because the planet's about to ignite, or steady as she goes? There is no middle position on those issues for the leadership to find, is there?
Henry Olsen: It depends how you define it. Certainly on the activist side, there's no middle ground between pro-life and pro-choice or pro-abortion rights. The two sides have no middle in which they can meet. But there is a middle in public opinion. In the United States, the middle of public opinion on abortion is basically to have it legal in the first trimester and have it illegal afterwards. On climate change, it's to do some subsidies of things but don't affect our standard of living all that much. On questions of wokeness, or racial tensions, it’s let's deal with some of the legitimate problems of the past, but let's not throw out the American baby with the revisionist bathwater.
And so what makes it hard on the left is that the hard advocates of the left usually share all of these views in tandem and are uniquely unwilling to compromise. You go into a climate activist meeting and say, well, you know, “We actually need to go slow to bring the people along with you,” and you will hear, “10 years to save the planet.” They won't accept what the middle will give them. The same in the United States is often true on questions of racial tensions. It's no, actually we need to say that whites have inherent supremacy because of our history and that they continue to suppress minorities. This doesn't even appeal to large numbers of minorities who don't see themselves as suppressed, but the woke activists won't hear of it, and that makes the left's position extremely difficult..
Nick Cater: Here's your problem, isn't it? Because politics is all about compromise. As Thomas Sowell said, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Henry Olsen: I would amend that to say Democratic politics is about that. And then one has to ask: if everything is a right and everything is a crisis, how consistent is that with genuine Parliamentary or Representative democracy?
Nick Cater: Can we accommodate people who take that absolute view within a Democratic system or will in the end it start to fall apart?
Henry Olsen: Well, the more one adopts uncompromising views, the more difficult it is to actually have a functioning, stable democracy. The Spanish Civil War is a perfect example of that, that on the one hand you had Spain, that was roughly divided 50-50, and an ascendant left wing that would make no compromise on reordering every aspect of society. And Francisco Franco was the result. One can find similar examples on the right in European history—of a right that would not compromise that produced revolution as well.
So in a democratic system—note though, that this, these reactions required the ending of democracy for a period of time through force. Absent that, what will happen is a side that continues to be intransigent will eventually drive the middle to the other side if the other side is open to forming a majority and is not equally intransigent
Nick Cater: We’ve talked about the left. Now, the right—where are the challenges on the right?
Henry Olsen: There’s two challenges I would see on the right. One is cultural issues. Its own intransigence. I can speak about the United States. There are people on the United States right, that want to talk about old-style Christian religion as the foundation of the moral basis for the United States. There's no majority for that. The middle of America is not as non-religious as many other Western countries, but the centre of opinion in America is similar to where it is even in Western Europe, which is identifying as Christian but not going to church very often. So what you need to do is find a way to talk to people who may agree with you on various issues about protecting the family, about pornography, about teaching six-year-olds about gender identity and so forth, but won't do it if it is cloaked in theology.
So that's an American example. Obviously that has no bearing on the Australian division, but the intransigence of the cultural right can be a barrier. Then you have the question of economics, which is that if you're going to have a more working-class constituency, you're going to have people who need intervention, targeted in limited ways. It's going to be harder if you're going to have more union members to make business management versus union a mobilising issue. In the United States, we have—you talk about your budget deficit. Hello. We've been running it for longer, and it's much more deep.
And so on the right you have economic, hardcore neo-libertarians who say what we need to do is slash spending on our old-age programs. There's no working-class majority for that. You have to compromise. Now, I am arguing for various aspects of compromise, but if the Old Right remains intransigent in the old positions, they will be unappetising to the people who they could recruit and that, in a two-party system, ramps up tensions between one side that won't compromise on politically salient issues, another side that won't compromise on politically salient issues, and a middle that increasingly gets frustrated and grows in size.
In multi-party systems, what it means is the creation of new parties, because in multi-party systems with proportional representation, you can obtain those. So you have the Sweden Democrats, which used to be a fringe ultranationalist party that now is the largest non-socialist party in Sweden. Why? It's because originally, their voters were looking at the centre-right, and then the centre-right drove them away in the migration crisis, and they found a party that actually echoed their concerns, which was strong welfare state, strong national identity and strong private sector, all in this non-ideological but coherent combination. But in a two-party system, it's harder to find that.
Nick Cater: Looking at the last election here in May 2022, the conservative Coalition, Liberal and National parties lost roughly 660,000 votes, which is a lot. That's about 6% of the voters in the primary vote. They can't win government from that position. They've got to get them back. But the problem is, when you look at where those votes went to, some went to independent parties on the left, the Greens Party and the party that's not a party, but a group of independents, the teals, and other votes went to parties you'd think to be on the right—the United Australia Party, One Nation, Liberal Democrats, and a number of independents. Here's the dilemma for them, Henry. They've got to get those 660,000 people back, and hopefully some more. But how can you adjust your party in such a way that it appeals to both constituencies?
Henry Olsen: You can't. Not in the fullest sense. The Liberal Party is going to have to choose, and my argument is that every conservative centre-right party that has been faced with this before—and there are parties that have been faced with this before—when they choose to try and focus on winning back their old upscale adherents, they're unsuccessful. And the reason they're unsuccessful is that they can't go far enough to the centre on the politically salient issues that are driving those upscale voters away and keep their party unified, because the core of every centre-right party are people who are economically liberal-to-moderate and culturally conservative-to-moderate.
The more you make it a party that embraces globalism, the knowledge economy, innovation and cultural liberalism, the more you both split your leadership from its own base and drive away the potential working-class voters you get, while still not being strong enough on those issues to attract 100% of the people who you lost to begin with. This is the crisis of Malcolm Turnbull in the 2016 election and the Liberal Party saw it couldn't go in that direction, but it has still not solved that question.
Nick Cater: Has this Great Realignment got to such a degree that we can now expect parties of the centre-right to win over more traditional, conservative, blue-collar voters—enough of them to form a new coalition that can actually win government?
Henry Olsen: Yes, I believe it has. What you'll need to find is you'll need to focus—there will still be a fair number of people who are economically upscale. In the 2019 British election, upscale voters still voted for the Tories. They didn't abandon them. It was just that they got fewer of them than they did before, and they more than made up for it from the bottom.
And that's what I think the Liberal Party should be, is a party that is focusing on the working-class voters in places like Lyons in Tasmania, rather than focusing on trying to win back their former adherents in upper-scale vote places like Curtin in Western Australia. And if you actually look at it, you say, yeah, there are lots of seats on a one-for-one basis that you can replace.
Say, we get back a couple of the seats from the teals and from Labor, but maybe still lose two-thirds of those. But you can more than make up for that in the outer suburbs and the borders of the rural areas in places that aren’t two-to-one Labor and places that, you know, like Eden-Monaro or Dobell, that were nearly 50-50 before the last election. They moved into a strong two-party Labor position this time, but you can win those back with a focus on their issues. And that would more than make up for the loss of some of the crown jewels of the Liberal Party.
The Coalition may be able to balance the loss of affluent seats to the teals by assembling a new coalition of working-class voters
Nick Cater: But have we moved into a new era? And I ask you that on the basis that the votes split at the last election basically one third, one third, one third. One third for Labor, one third for the Coalition, one third for none of the above. Greens, independents, teals, One Nation, whatever. Are we approaching a position that would be more common in a European country, where the only way you have government is in a series of ad hoc coalitions with whoever can get a majority?
Henry Olsen: If neither party adapts to this, that is what you're facing. If neither party adapts to this to create a new majority, what you'll see is more of that one third, one third, one third, and then Labor will necessarily have to govern in coalition with Greens or with teals, but that will create their own splits. It's harder for the Liberals to win in that situation—because you said one third, one third, one third. But in a sense, it’s one third, one third, one sixth, one sixth. Teals and parties of the left are about half of that non-major party vote and parties of the right, but they're concentrated in one party, the Greens, whereas the parties on the right that are protest parties are split so that they can't win seats in the House. In the Senate, you can create those coalitions, but you can't create it in the House. As long as that pertains, that movement will slightly benefit Labor in the short term.
But then you'll have the question, if Labor wins 70 seats and the Greens have six or seven, keep the four they have and pick up a couple more from inner urban areas, probably from Labor, what's the price of that coalition? It drives them to the left economically and it drives them to the left socially. That creates a pressure for the next election. So yes, but unlike in Europe where once a party is established in a PR system, it can kind of stay, the two-party system that with preferences Australia pushes you to, it's much harder to see that being a permanent state; permanent meaning when we look back, there's this 30-year era of coalition governments and more of a temporary coalition state, as the ultimate return to some type of party dominance and party competition.
Nick Cater: Another way to look at the divide here is in terms of age. It is always a case of course that you would get a larger number of young people voting for parties of the left. That's been well observed in history, but that has now become deep and entrenched in this country to the extent where if you take voters under 35, under 30—among women under 35 in this country in the last election, the Coalition came third, behind Labor and the Greens.
And even with men, they struggle. Is that something again, that the Liberal Party now has to content itself with? Is it now the party of the Baby Boomers?
Henry Olsen: People do change as they age, and parties change as they adapt to existing trends. Just because somebody at the age of 24 when they're unmarried are voting for one party, doesn't mean they will make that same choice when they're married or have a partner and children when they're 44.
If you looked at American politics over the last 50-60 years, you were constantly seeing the young are voting for the Democrats and by the time they're in middle age, that age cohort is split or trending to the Republicans. It's been a pretty regular trend. But look, one of the things that we're seeing in a lot of different places is college educated women are moving to the left or far left. That may be permanent. But what we also tend to be seeing is less educated men tend to be moving to the right. And that may also be permanent. So we may have a gender difference in how this breaks out. I'd say the data are too—it'd be too difficult to speculate about what's going to happen 15 years from now, but there are some tendencies in that direction.
Nick Cater: You tentatively offer some suggestions to Australia about the kind of policy areas that the Coalition should explore if it wants to get back in the game as a party of government. Where should they look?
Henry Olsen: They need to offer something specific on climate, but one that does not compromise the future of working-class Australia. And what I think that means is focusing on nuclear power as Australia's generating to generate electricity to the extent feasible. I know there's academic debate about this. Looking at expanding battery storage capability, putting research money into that, but being resolutely in favour of resource exploration, extraction and exportation.
That is the secret sauce of Australian economic boom, that you are the resource provider for the free world increasingly. And that also gives you a place to export that's not China. If America is going to start bringing back manufacturing jobs from China, somebody's going to need to send those resources, for the steel that we need. And that can be Australia. But absolutely doing that. There will be some people attracted to Labor and the teals who will find that attractive enough to say okay, they're good enough. Most of those people won't, because they're more motivated by climate extremism or climate activism.
But what it will do is send a clear signal to working-class voters that you don't have to worry about your future with us. They could change their minds tomorrow and raise the price of petrol. They could change their mind tomorrow and stop resource extraction. They could decide to do this because they won't commit to your future. We'll commit to your future. So that's the first thing.
The second thing that the new Coalition needs to do when it focuses on questions of classic issues of economic regulation is cut taxes from the bottom up, not from the top down. You've seen some of that in the Morrison government. You did not see that in the Turnbull government. I think you need to see it more. That instead of focusing on income tax rates, as was done in the stage three tax cuts, is that you should increase the band at which the zero per cent tax rate applies. That's one that will help everybody. Everyone will get a tax cut, it won't be disproportionately geared towards the top.
I think when you're talking about corporate tax cuts, you should be talking about rate cuts on small- and medium-sized businesses and independent entrepreneurs, as opposed to large corporations. And I think when you talk about deregulation, you need to focus on getting rid of barriers to advancement or employment in places where working-class voters find themselves, which is focusing more on industries that disproportionately employ working class people or where they're likelier to be independent small business operators, as opposed to looking at big-scale, financial deregulation or Labour market deregulation.
And then on the question of culture, what you need to do is make it clear that you’re patriotic. Yes, Australia has its history. None of our history is perfect, and to an extent we need to look back, but what makes Australia Australia is that everyone is equal. This is a classless society, and you need to maintain that, so no special voice for anyone while recognising past injustices, and put a heavy weight on policies that favour families as opposed to those that favour single, childless individuals. There’s nothing wrong with choosing not to be a parent. That's a free liberal country. That's your choice. But the fact is that if we don't have children, we don't have a future. And putting policies in place that protect parents’ authority over their children and make it easier to have children, if that's the choice you make in life, is where the Coalition should be.
Each of those positions will attract people who are not currently voting for the Coalition. They will annoy and anger people in the knowledge media classes, but they weren't going to be Coalition voters anyway. And sometimes having that angry overreaction is in your political interest.
Nick Cater: Finally, I've just got to get to your thoughts on the current state of politics in the United States. We’re recording this just before the midterms. I'm going to ask you to make some predictions nonetheless. How do you see the midterms playing out?
Henry Olsen: Midterms will be good for Republicans, I expect. I publish my predictions in the Washington Post the day before the midterms, so my final answer will be delivered then. But I expect Republicans to take control of both chambers of Congress and for the gains in each to be in excess of what the common wisdom is on the day that we are recording this, about eight days before our midterm.
Democrats are fighting an uphill battle to retain control of Congress.
Nick Cater: Assuming the Republicans do get a majority, perhaps in both Houses, have they got the good sense, have they got the ability to use that wisely?
Henry Olsen: I think that's the unanswered question. There will be elements that will be pushing them to use it unwisely. There'll be elements that will be pushing them to use it wisely. And leadership is—the proof is in the pudding. I don't know how Kevin McCarthy, who's going to be the next Speaker of the House, will act. He’s been a leader in politics all of his life, but he's never had a majority. He was the leader of the Republicans in the California state legislature when they were in the minority, and he's not been in one of the top two positions when the Republicans were in the majority. The real important decisions were made by the Speaker or by the Majority Leader, and this is the first time he'll have responsibility.
Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, is a seasoned leader. He will not want to push things that will be dead on arrival in a Senate where the minority can still prevent any move in legislation through the filibuster. But if the House wants to be more extreme, all he can do is not act on what Republicans send him, and I suspect that he and McCarthy will try and reach a behind-the-scenes understanding so that hotheads in the House Republican conference don't create problems that will be scotched in the Republican Senate.
Nick Cater: Three quick questions. Number one, will Joe Biden seek a second term?
Henry Olsen: You never want to make predictions so far in advance when there's so much uncertainty. I lean towards saying he won't. And I think if the Democrats do as poorly as I think they will do, I think the internal pressure of the party will ramp up on him to make it clearer that he will say no. He clearly wants to. But it's also clear that age is catching up with him and it's also clear that the left, that was never in love with him, will blame him rather than themselves for a midterm debacle. And it may be that the combination of these things will make him decide to do something he doesn't want to do.
Nick Cater: Will Donald Trump have another shot at seeking a second term?
Henry Olsen: Donald Trump will almost certainly declare shortly after the midterm. My guess is that he dances on the victory celebration by announcing too close to the Republican victory because that's what The Donald does. That gives him a shot. I think he starts as the favourite. I don't think he is guaranteed of it, but as we speak, the only Republican who could defeat him is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and so a lot rides on whether he decides to challenge him.
Nick Cater: Henry. Thanks once again for your incredible knowledge of politics around the world and how you apply that to draw some conclusions about greater trends. It's most valuable to have you here. It's been far too long between visits and I hope you'll be here again soon.
Henry Olsen: Well, thank you for having me, and I hope so, too.