What The Hell America!

In February, coming into the election, polls predicted the ruling Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese — loathed by the Right, disliked by many independents, and despised by the Left for its sell-outs — would win a diabolical primary vote of 25 percent. It was widely believed that the Liberals (with their coalition partners, the rural-based National Party) might close the twenty-seat gap in Australia’s 151-seat House of Representatives, enough to win a plurality. It’s an outcome that may have forced independents to consider the Liberals as a party of government, consigning Albanese’s Labor to a miserable one-term failure. Or it might have forced Labor to form a minority government with support from the Greens and independents, before stumbling to a smashing defeat next time.

Then the campaign began. Peter Dutton, who had played the role of attack dog in previous Liberal governments, had spent the previous two years simultaneously trying to refashion himself as a statesman. These efforts were intended to win both Labor suburban seats and some former Liberal seats that had been taken by left-liberal independents known as “Teals,” both for their color and the political mix of blue and green they represent.

But then, in November 2024, Donald Trump won his stunning victory, and Liberal strategy turned on a five-cent piece as they rolled out a version of Donald Trump–style populism. Except calling it a “version” is generous. It was a flat pack self-assemble home Trump kit, straight from the box.

Dutton promised to crack down on illegal immigrants, especially those expressing dangerous ideas, during the country’s mass pro-Palestine movement. He appointed a high-profile MAGA-lite senator, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, as shadow minister for a promised facsimile of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Dutton also promised a winnowing of the federal Education Department, large-scale layoffs of federal civil servants, and a ban on them from working from home.

This was bewildering to many observers and the population at large. The passions of American politics — with its powerful myths of freedom from government — do not map onto Australia, a country whose political culture was largely formed by its labor movement and a commitment to government as a social agent. There is no mainstream purchase for the US conservative notion that the public service is parasitic and creates no value. And there is no substantial, obsessive suspicion of “woke” education.

And so on. Not one blow landed, except on Dutton himself. Indeed, his working-from-home directive proved so unpopular that Dutton had to rescind it in the campaign’s second week.

Nor did the party seem to understand how to operate the DIY Trump package it had assembled. The Liberal Party disendorsed a marginal seat candidate for suggesting that women soldiers should not be frontline troops in combat, an opinion well within the range of standard social conservatism. The replacement turned out to be an equally unvetted conspiracy theorist. Elsewhere a candidate with a good chance to take a Teal seat campaigned as a “renter” and was revealed to own two apartments, including one in the capital, Canberra, with views of Parliament House.

On it went, indistinguishable from parody. By week three, despite lacking any trace of leftism, by merely standing still Labor projected an air of the party of responsible government. The polls had reversed. Labor was now in the lead, polling 52 to 48 percent two-party preferred, on track to retain its majority government.

The rapid and near-total collapse of Dutton’s campaign has been all the more striking given that the Liberal Party has historically been the model of political focus and efficiency. This was in part a result of its foundation, which can be traced back to 1909, when anti-Labor political forces united in a single urban party. The Liberal Party’s progenitors progressed under numerous names — the Nationalist Party of Australia, the United Australia Party — and drew in groups from Labor’s right that split off during World War I and the Great Depression.

In 1944, Robert Menzies — prime minister from 1939 to 1941 — led the refoundation of these forces as the Liberal Party of Australia, under a thoroughly nationalist, bourgeois-progressive platform. It combined state-led nation building, local civic democracy, and an equal role for women’s groups in candidate selection with a commitment to White Australia racism and virulent anti-Communism.

Australia — then bound within the British imperial economic system — was an agrarian exporter with local, highly protected second-tier industrial production, state control of wages, and substantial public ownership. Initiative and productivity were valued; the promethean drive to vast wealth was not. So the Liberal Party drew in many leading people who, in the United States, would have been Democrats. They did not fetishize capitalism or the market but saw the party’s mission as to modestly modernize Australia while guarding a social consensus grounded in the dominant Anglo-Celtic monoculture. This project was also shaped by the structure of the Australian political economy, which controlled finance capital inflows from London and maintained state monopsonies on primary products (the government bought the entire wheat and wool crop annually, to stabilize prices). This model maintained consent via wage controls and won support for such from manufacturing capital in exchange for protection from imported goods. Menzies’s Liberal Party included everyone from Swedish-influenced social democrats to rural conservatives and “free marketeers” who wanted a stunning 25 percent reduction in tariffs. It was, as it ceaselessly told itself, a “broad church.”

The Liberal Party’s current disaster arises from its evolution from Menzies’s broad church into something that more closely resembles the TV series Broadchurch — namely, a decaying town full of nutters and lethal secrets, falling off the side of a cliff.

The roots of this devolution go back to the late 1960s, when the Labor Party broadened its appeals to the growing strata of young professionals, supplanting the Liberals as their representative. Concomitantly the Labor Party gradually grew away from social democracy — with both a quasi-communist left and an anti-communist right — and toward centrism. As time went on, fewer genuinely liberal reformers found the Liberal Party attractive.

In the 1980s, the Liberal Party’s genuinely liberal remnant played key roles in advancing world-leading work-discrimination and sexual-harassment laws, in conjunction with the Hawke-Keating Labor government, which ruled from 1983 to 1996. This infuriated the Liberal Party’s right — albeit still moderates by US standards  — which set about destroying the bases of such liberalism, essentially removing one-third of the party’s political “tripod,” thus introducing a permanent wobble.

During the Liberals Party’s thirteen-year stint in opposition, the once-insurgent Labor Party made itself into the natural party of government. As part of this, Labor broke the old imperial-Laborist economic-cultural compact. Under PM Bob Hawke, Labor destroyed Australia’s tariff wall and increased inequality by way of the Statement of Accord, while simultaneously undermining residual Anglo-Celtic loyalties and introducing a paired celebration of wealth and support for progressive causes.

In 1994, the Liberal Party’s crossover into fully-fledged conservatism came to fruition. John Howard, former treasurer and hitherto the most economistic of politicians, adopted the then-newish crusade against “political correctness” and switched his party’s attack to the cultural front. Tutored in this by politician-intellectual Peter Coleman, a former editor of the onetime-CIA-sponsored magazine Quadrant, the war on “PC” was the first of the Liberals’ US imports. Howard, however, successfully translated this American playbook into Australian dialect.

As the writer Judith Brett has noted, Howard took the old labor movement notion of “the fair go” — a basic notion of reward for effort, guarded by state institutions — and refashioned it into a largely cultural issue. Which is to say, Howard spoke to and encouraged mainstream resentment against the fresh demands of feminism, anti-racism, the nascent LGBTQ movement, and the like. By disciplining unions and abandoning its historic commitment to redistributive economics, Labor enabled this strategy. Naturally conservatives cast Labor’s residual commitment to cultural, legal, and symbolic progressivism as middle-class impositions, bought at the expense of “battlers.”

Meanwhile Labor had adopted a boosterish aspiration to “excellence,” a personal passion of then PM Paul Keating, about which there was much party skepticism. Howard took his chance. Australians, he said, had a right to feel more “comfortable and relaxed” about their lives — again something no US politician is likely to say. Trump’s “You’ll be tired of winning” is analogous, perhaps, but the difference is telling.

Howard’s success — he ruled from 1996 to 2007 — remade the Liberal Party in his image, continuing Labor’s neoliberalization of the economy and commencing the unmaking of his party after. In 2007, following a union-led backlash against his WorkChoices legislation, Howard lost government and his own seat to a high-profile female public broadcasting journalist. But by that time, the Liberal Party had lost its real relation to any national collective purpose, substituting for it a series of spin campaigns, increasingly relying on polling and strategy firms to create sharp slogans and stark visuals to wrong-foot a sluggish Labor.

The Liberals had also lost their organic political relationship to capital, whose various representative bodies now no longer needed to think in terms of national economic composition and collective direction. Separate economic sectors came into direct contradiction with one another — particularly mining and extraction versus manufacturing and industry. Dependent on their donations, the Liberal Party increasingly became a client of contending forces rather than their political representative, preserving its unity and an electoral base by synthesizing contending subinterests.

In the suburbs, the Liberals’ branch structure — once a social institutional centerpiece of middle-class life — withered and fell prey to right-wing “movementists,” especially political evangelical Christians. The party regained power in 2013 and retained government only due to the torpor and spiritual corruption of Labor. Liberal policies and initiatives swung wildly across the spectrum, from moralizing austerity to generous parental leave and proposals to nationalize large parts of the fossil fuel sector. At the same time, the party’s culture-war front became similarly unhinged, ranging from creepy imperial nostalgia under Tony Abbott — who knighted Prince Philip in 2014 (don’t ask) — to Malcolm Turnbull’s “What a time to be alive!” US-branded tech-booster ersatz enthusiasm. Suffice to say, Australians did not identify with these proclivities.

The Liberal Party center had now become dominated by grim political lifers, called to little but the main chance. Party branches were increasingly in the hands of the religious right and excluded from real power. To run a party like that requires a pipeline of talent. While Labor could still draw on higher-quality individuals inspired by its tradition — and the chance to eventually make vastly more money than they could as schoolteachers — there is very little reason for any talented, purposeful progressive-conservative to join the Liberal Party. There is, after all, little to conserve and not much to progress.

Australia was once a country where the excesses of capitalism were sharply constrained in the middle classes by notions of higher loyalty, embodied in nation, Empire, and Commonwealth. Now it’s a country whose disastrous pro-speculation rules have put property trading at the center of both economic and cultural life. A once-social-liberal nation that, it could be argued, aspired to nineteenth-century British Hegelian notions of positive freedom and civil life has become a hyperindividualist, propertarian Thunderdome of winners and losers, where success is determined solely by possession of real estate.

Resource extraction and agribusiness are the primary earners of export income, despite employing less than 2 percent of the population. Manufacturing has vanished from the cities, and the demolition of economic protections has allowed the domestic market to be swamped with overseas products (much of which, it must be said, was an inevitable outcome of the internet revolution).

This was future Howard’s Liberals wanted. Now there’s nothing left to do, and the Liberal Party has become hollowed out and denuded of basic competence. Devoid of purpose, Liberal staffing has fallen prey to “lowest common denominator nepotism”; that is, it’s a place to park your stupidest kid, where their screw-ups will make no difference. This, combined with gradual occupation of the party by members of the “right international” — formed by the paranoid discourse of US reaction, which still has little mainstream purchase in Australia — has delivered the party an electoral disaster. Business groups and other forces have not reached in to reconstruct the party. They don’t need to.

The election of the Albanese government marked the moment when the Australian Labor Party made its final conversion into a party for the management of capital. Having reconstructed the industrial relations system in government in 2010, it has more or less made strikes impossible and illegal. It has made no effort to tax corporations fairly or to take real action on the housing crisis.

Labor’s positive social measures are always now done within this ambit, and in effect, the party is best described as one of left-Burkean conservatism. Much of business now prefers Labor because it offers a one-stop shop, running the settings for capital while controlling labor through a union movement closely integrated with the state and party. Labor thus supplies what capital wants and what the Liberals cannot supply: an institutional framework, stable over time, for the maximization of accumulation. It’s also why the major supporters of non-Labor parties are no longer industry sectors, but individuals like Gina Rinehart, multibillionaire heiress daughter of a mining tycoon, educated abroad and formed by obsessive global right ideologies.

The Liberal Party’s barely localized Trumpism, which manages to be both ineffective and half-hearted, is the inevitable result. But anyone who claims they thought the party would become this incompetent is lying. The Liberal collapse is a genuine event within Australia’s Westminster system, greater even than that of the UK Tories; it’s a collapse of the most basic competencies within a party.

That, of course, may produce a rally. A party with absolutely nothing to lose can have a Valkyrie-style internal coup, in which remaining elements with basic competence seize control due to a general consent that something must be done. But such an institutional rally would not solve the party’s deeper problems — or the extraordinary spectacle it presents. A party that once achieved perhaps the most successful hegemonic liberal-conservative synthesis in the Anglosphere is coming apart in less than a generation.

For the Left, it is, it must be said, a bit of hard-earned cheer. It’s a rare boon in these hard times to watch a party that denounced the pro-Palestine Greens as antisemitic suddenly discover that it has accidentally run an ex-Green in the country’s single most Jewish seat. That also happened on Monday; it was a busy day.

But the greater significance of the Dutton-Liberal catastrophe is what it tells us about the deeper movements of capital, power, and culture in contemporary societies. The shadow of this is a question: Why has no alternative leftist program of equality and social reconstruction been able to capture the public imagination amid this howling tempest of a crapstorm?