Reversal of fortune: How the populist right flamed out in a matter of months

What a difference a few months makes. In January, with Donald Trump about to be sworn in, MAGA Republicanism and its overseas mimics seemed the way of the future. Trump’s second win seemed a historical moment in Western democracy, ushering in an era of populist economics, anti-immigration and the triumph of white male resentment.

Here, Peter Dutton’s Coalition led the polls over a first-term Labor government and a prime minister derided as weak and woke. Resentful young men, we were told, were shifting to the right. And after Trump’s blizzard of executive orders in his first days, we were told that was the gold standard for executive action, and promised that was exactly what we’d get from Dutton.

A few months later, the opposition is a smoking ruin, likely out of power until the 2030s. Dutton is gone. Anthony Albanese commands a monster majority, and followed Canada’s Mark Carney in transforming a dire progressive political position into victory.

How exactly did such a massive reversal happen so quickly?

From the right itself, there are predictable reactions. They argue that the Coalition’s defeat was misleadingly strong — that Labor’s support is “wide but not deep”. This is another version of the whistling in the dark by right-wingers when faced with poor polls during the campaign — that support for Labor was “soft”. But a “soft” vote counts every bit as much as a hard one. Indeed, the whole point of our preferential voting system — which The Australian is now complaining about and which will now become the subject of far-right conspiracy theories — is to allow “soft” voters to express their preferences across a range of candidates.

“Wide but not deep” doesn’t explain much. Every government’s support is wide but not deep — consider how John Howard went from king of the world in 2004, with control of the Senate, to losing government and his own seat three years later.

And inevitably, according to the Sky News menagerie, Dutton lost because he didn’t go MAGA enough.

The problem is, when the party’s Senate leader explicitly said Dutton will copy Trump, when he proposed a Trump-style ban on public servants working from home, when he aped Trump in saying he’d establish a government efficiency minister, when he attacked the Aboriginal flag and Welcome to Country and promised big cuts to migration, when he criticised “hate media”, who do the “not MAGA enough” crowd think he was channelling?

Conversely, Liberals, and Dutton himself, now lament that they allowed their opponents to define Dutton as too much like Trump. But Labor and the “hate media” didn’t have to define Dutton as similar to Trump — he did it himself.

After yesterday’s Liberal leadership result, in which Angus Taylor was defeated and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price didn’t run, the majority of the remaining Liberal MPs clearly get that being linked to Trump is bad news. Many date the decline in their fortunes to Trump’s inauguration, and see the president’s clash with Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a key moment that demonstrated how far adrift from Western values Trump really is.

Crikey reflected on this on election morning, suggesting that the experience with Trump so far is that alienated voters love the idea of someone who will smash the system, but the moment someone starts doing that, the economic chaos causes voters to worry about their retirement, their healthcare, their grocery bills and their jobs.

It’s not the first time this has happened. Right-wing populism, especially that based on white male resentment, threw up not just Trump but Boris Johnson. Johnson, too, rode to power based on promising to overturn things. Like Trump in his first term, Johnson proved wholly incapable of governing effectively when the pandemic required that government be used to achieve the foundational purposes for which it exists — protecting its citizens.

Both men saw existing government systems as rotten structures pervaded by liberals and globalists, needing to be destroyed or avoided. Both men were more interested in scaring voters about an array of threats — usually migrants, progressives, wokery, trans people, or “elites” — than governing well.

Here, Scott Morrison, a middling-at-best marketing manager elevated by his political manoeuvring into a succession of ever-higher jobs for which he was ever less suited, not only couldn’t govern effectively — he preferred scare campaigns and endless announcements without implementation — but couldn’t conceive of governing effectively. That wasn’t what government was for — it was for maintaining himself and his party in power and rewarding their friends.

That’s at the core of the reversal that has occurred in the past five months. Progressives warn after every defeat of a right-wing populist that a genuinely skilled would-be tyrant could emerge and not make the mistakes of their predecessors. This overlooks the conundrum at the heart of right-wing populism: as long as they see government as a tool to allocate benefits to whoever can get control of its machinery, which must either be destroyed because it’s not delivering for them, or seized in order to redirect largesse to them and away from the people them resent, they will never govern in a way that delivers for the majority of voters.

Indeed, they’re unlikely to think governing in the public interest is even the point of government. That’s why Trump and his coterie are the most corrupt administration in a century, and why Johnson was hounded out of politics on the back of innumerable scandals and breaches of basic integrity requirements.

Every time a right-wing populist convinces voters to let them overturn or change the system, the ensuing poor government turns voters off. Unusually, Canadian and Australian voters were able to experience this remotely via the American experience of Trump this year.

The only way to break this cycle is for the populist right to see government as a legitimate mechanism capable of delivering for communities, rather than as a machine for disbursing largesse, or a source of incipient or actual tyranny, or a giant conspiracy. Good luck with that.