Democrat delirium
The PM’s decision to hitch himself to the hysterical leftist wagon may prove misguided. By Nick Cater.
The Prime Minister would have been wiser not to stick his head in the rabbit hole of US politics at a time when his natural friends, the Democrats, appear to have lost theirs. Starved of presidential leadership and frustrated at their failure to use a House majority to achieve anything remotely useful, the Democrats have drifted into political fantasy.
The bookies don’t always get these things right, but it would take a brave punter to back the Democrats at $8.50 to keep control of congress or $10 to win a majority in the Senate.
There will be two explanations for the expected losses. The first follows a simple democratic rule that politicians cannot depart for long from the will of the majority without coming a cropper at an election.
The second explanation is the one to which Anthony Albanese gave credence when he commented on the assault of the husband of house Speaker Nancy Pelosi in an interview with The Australian last week.
The assailant who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer on October 28 is reported to be an aggressive and creepy Canadian with a history of mental illness and drug abuse emboldened by an inexplicable failure of security.
According to Albanese, however, the attack is a symptom of the increased polarisation and extremism of political discourse across the West. It was a reminder of the fragility of democracy in the face of growing authoritarianism.
Albanese would have been well advised not to adopt the narrative of the US progressive left, for whom every day is January 6, the day on which they believe the US narrowly avoided becoming a dictatorship under the megalomaniacal MAGA in chief. The rise of a totalitarian leader by means of a populist revolt was becoming an all-consuming fear for the left even before Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The totalitarian regime that keeps them awake at night is not that in China or Russia but the one they fear could be one election away at home.
A president with a practical proposal to address his fellow Americans’ concerns would have delivered a keynote speech last week of the kind Ronald Reagan delivered on the eve of the 1982 midterm elections at a time of rising inflation.
Like Reagan, he would have told his fellow Americans he can come to Washington to try to solve problems, not to sweep them under the rug. He would put the blame for inflation not on Putin but Washington. He would pledge to curb it by reducing government spending so individuals would be free to pursue the American dream.
By contrast, Biden’s keynote speech last week inspired pessimism, not hope. Reagan made 21 references to inflation while Biden made none. Something far more important at stake this week, he said. The very survival of American liberty itself.
“Make no mistake, democracy is on the ballot for us all,” he said. Americans must choose between the rule of law and “the dark forces that thirst for power ahead of the principles that have long guided us”. The dark forces were “the extreme MAGA element of the Republican Party” that had “emboldened violence and intimidation of voters and election officials”.
Biden’s elevation of the contest between Democrats and Republicans to a fight to defend democracy began in September after a summer spent in the company of left-wing historians.
At his now-notorious Philadelphia speech in September, Biden claimed Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”.
“There is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country,” he said.
Michael Beschloss, one of the historians with whom Biden is said to be close, pushed the threat-to-democracy narrative into crazy talk last week. A Republican victory would be the start of “a brutal authoritarian system”, Beschloss told MSNBC. Warming to his theme he forecast that “a historian 50 years from now … will say, what was at stake was whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed”.
At a time when inflation in the US has hit 8.5 per cent and Bloomberg economists put the chances of a recession within a year at 100 per cent, ideologically unhinged rhetoric such as this is unlikely to save a single Democrat seat in either house. Quite the opposite. There is every chance it will hasten the onset of the progressive Democrats’ worst nightmare, the return of an emboldened Trump hellbent on revenge.
If the politics of demonisation aren’t working for the Democrats, they are unlikely to work here, which is why it is strange Albanese should enter that world in his interview last week.
It was even stranger that he should choose to elevate his former opponent, Scott Morrison, by attacking him for staying out of US politics 21 months ago. His criticism of Morrison was convoluted: he had failed to condemn a former president who himself failed to sufficiently condemn the rioters on Capitol Hill.
Morrison must have been bemused as he sat quietly on the backbenches, surviving on a diet of humble pie. Unlike Trump, he is not planning a political comeback.
The circus of US politics is alluring for Australians on both the left and the right, a diversion from our own less animated debate on the right as well as the left. Yet the wilder the US political freak show becomes, the fewer lessons it offers Australians. For Australian conservatives, the vicarious pleasure of watching the Washington establishment sweat buckets at the possibility of Trump’s return is best enjoyed in private. His tactics for winning the culture war in a presidential system are unsuited to local Australian conditions.
Reagan’s economic leadership offered a template for reform in our own economy and his instinctive grasp of popular feeling made him a role model for all who aspired to master the art of politics.
Biden’s conspiratorial and divisive rallying cry to a nation running out of patience should be politely ignored.