Donald Trump’s second presidency illustrates the big gap between the political cultures of Australia and the US, something Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are well aware of. Artwork: Frank Ling
Donald Trump’s first 100 days of his second term in the Oval Office end on April 30. Three days later, Australia goes to the polls. A reliably dull Australian federal election, of small targets and technocratic squabbling, delivered against the backdrop of the most consequential US presidency of the modern era, is a good time to compare us and them.
While the US maintains competing arsenals in an ongoing culture war, Australian politicians are ducking culture in favour of hip-pocket economics. Americans have a capacity for ideological combat, Australians shy away from it. Why this difference?
Different points of origin and design
There are design features that deepen American culture wars and tend to alleviate ours. Trump is guaranteed four years as President. He has the political freedom to experiment. He can go big and take risks on cultural issues. And he has. Peter Dutton, on the other hand, if he strays on to this territory, risks being rolled by his own side. So, he hasn’t.
The late, great Clive James told us to remember that Australia wasn’t settled by prisoners but by prison officers. We crave authority because, at our point of origin, we were so distant from it.
Ten thousand miles didn’t loosen the settlers’ demands for British imperial protection; they were the reason for those demands. Distance from authority gave us a lasting taste for it.
Born against that same protector, Americans in 1776 connected their freedom to its defeat. This initial burst of revolutionary fervour has no analogue in the Australian experience. Indeed, in the US, political authority has faced recurrent challenge. In Australia, we like to be told what to do. Our larrikinism is quaint, mostly exaggerated and collapsed when public health officials locked us down in 2020-21.
I often encounter inner-city Melburnians sentimental for this government overreach, who think it underreach. Some still wear masks as acts of Covid nostalgia. Our safety is the principle demand we make of government. In 2022, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, safe was the Australian word of the year. For Americans, the allure of independence from government runs very deep. Here, it is shallow.
The ABC’s Q+A routinely fills its audience with men and women clamorous for government welfare. Anthony Albanese promises to deliver it more effectively than Dutton, and vice-versa. Premiers who ran the hardest Covid lockdowns all won re-election. We like government in our lives.
Protection, of the people by the state, has been the common campaign theme of Labor and the Coalition. Freedom, liberty, independence – the vocabulary of the American revolution – is mostly missing from our discourse. Like the US, we deify equality. Here, though, it means equal access to government protection.
’Trump is guaranteed four years as President. He has the political freedom to experiment. He can go big and take risks on cultural issues. And he has.’ Picture: AFP
If we have learned to crave authority, the US is still held together by a constitution distrustful of it. There, political scientist Samuel Huntington said: “The dominant political creed constitutes a standing challenge to the power of government and the legitimacy of political institutions. Political authority is vulnerable in America as it is nowhere else.”
Australia has had it easy; America has had it tough
Contemporary American populism has specific causes and no Australian analogue. While our property market is essentially one long upward curve, in the wake of the global financial crisis nearly 10 million Americans lost their homes. We complain that 20-somethings must save a bit longer to get a mortgage. There, the fallout from the subprime mortgage collapse, catalysed by ongoing deindustrialisation, spawned a suicide epidemic.
Our luck (to live atop so much coal and iron ore) denied Pauline Hanson a larger following.It has meant Clive Palmer is not much more than a caricature of Trump. But the crises of 21st-century America created the most important populist movement in US history. MAGA explicitly fights on cultural issues.
Our federal election is being fought within a liberal paradigm: classical on one side, social on the other. When a few brave souls have raised issues of culture (think Dutton on the Aboriginal flag) or populism (think Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s call to Make Australia Great Again) they have quickly been shut down.
This is a fight over Medicare cards and cheap power. Cost of living rather than the purpose of living. What makes a good life vs how to make life easier.
We are in thrall to a social progressivism – think rainbow flags and welcomes to country – but hoping economic liberalism will protect our superannuation. We have had no resort to a populist alternative to this Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics. Compulsory voting means the middle ground will be returned to power on May 3. And, boy, don’t we feel smug that our voting system keeps the populists at bay.
Albanese and Dutton. ‘Australians this campaign season can, of course, bask in the quietude of our politics. We are an accident of history that has done really rather well.’ Picture: NewsWIre
Not so the US
Our chief ally seems to have entered a new regime where the two old parties have been displaced by a populism that now controls the political discourse, if not the global economy. Tariff mayhem illustrates just how far the old parties have been superseded.
The Democrats appear helplessly diminished, the Republican Party a wholly owned subsidiary of the MAGA movement.
Trump has a deep story; Dutton doesn’t
Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent time with Trump supporters and heard their “deep story”: “All their lives they had been working hard, waiting in line for their turn at an American dream that felt forever out of reach. Yet all of a sudden, with the aid of liberal government and media, ‘line cutters’ – women, racial minorities, immigrants – were being waved ahead, gaining access to jobs or social status before it was their turn.
“To add insult to injury, the line cutters and their liberal allies then turned around to heap scorn on the rural conservatives they had left behind, ridiculing their folkways, beliefs and values. This left them feeling like ‘strangers in their own land’.”
In her most recent book, Hochschild asks us to think about Trump not as a dictator but as the Robin Hood of “stolen pride”. This pride has an economic component but it is not rooted in economics. It speaks to a cultural dislocation that has no obvious remedy in trade and finance.
What is Australia’s deep story? We speak of “Stolen Generations” and of being heirs to the men and women who travelled here millennia ago. Our election campaign reflects none of this. The 2024 US election, in contrast, was deeply ideological – a conflict of deep stories – made deeper still by an inflation crisis.
Americans have political choices
While Albanese and Dutton wave their Medicare cards at us, Americans are presented with genuine alternatives. We bemoan American polarisation but forget that this offers voters choices. What polarisation has given Trump, it can take away.
American voters can and do punish presidents who go on ideological crusades. The progressive exuberance of Bill Clinton’s first two years (1993-95) was checked by a Republican wave in 1994.
In 2004, George W. Bush offered a bracing vision of a world without tyranny. His occupation of Iraq soon went pear-shaped. The Democrats checked him in the 2006 mid-terms, winning new majorities.
Barack Obama was elected with about as much left-wing fervour as any president since Franklin Roosevelt. But his 2008 win was negated two years later when the GOP gave him a shellacking (his word) in the mid-terms.
Trump’s wild ride since January 20 – tariffs, the betrayal of allies and embrace of foes, anti-DEI mandates; that is, his waging of a culture war – can’t escape this precedent. There is a powerful self-correcting mechanism in American politics.
In Australia, we debate an enervating middle and are then obliged to validate the system that produces it by compulsory voting. Cultural overreach rarely encounters sustained resistance in Australia. The Indigenous voice was an exception that proved this rule.
Ceremonial progressivism, with its acknowledgments of country and rainbow flags, was reinforced, not weakened, by its 60-40 defeat in October 2023. For many on the Australian left, losing was validation of their belief that the nation is deeply racist.
In Australia, left-wing orthodoxy maintains its cultural power irrespective of political results. There is no conservative institutional opponent strong enough to face it down. We suffer less from a culture war and more from a cultural defeat, of right by left. Dutton is fighting on Albanese’s battlefield, not vice-versa. Australia is not alone in this.
From 2010 to 2024, Britain was under a nominally Conservative government. It chose to facilitate a form of hyperliberalism, from decolonised curriculums to mass immigration, that would have astounded Tories of previous eras. As with the voice, when ordinary people were given the right to veto this cultural turn, in the 2016 Brexit referendum, they took it.
But the culture has kept turning leftward. The supposedly great engines of British cultural production, its universities, make ours look right-wing.
In the US, the culture war is just that: a conflict between two broad camps, each contending for institutional power. In Australia and Britain, there are illusory moments of conservative renewal – voice and Brexit – but precious few institutions to catalyse them. In America, there are.
Its two parties are divided on the big cultural questions. Ask a Republican and a Democrat whether diversity, equity and inclusion are good or bad things and you will hear opposing positions.
Australian Liberals and British Conservatives have a much harder time fighting on this turf. In the years of supposed conservative ascendancy in Australia, from 2013 to 2022, land acknowledgments got longer, diversity and inclusion more deeply entrenched.
Dutton has adapted himself to progressive hegemony much more than he has challenged it.
His initial strategy for dealing with the voice referendum (before it went down to defeat) was to offer a tweaked version. His campaign this month is eschewing all talk of culture war. The hard-nosed cop, with experience of left-wing cultural failure on crime and family breakdown, is bickering over the cost of living.
Trump, on the other hand, has seized control of a new front in the culture war and has the institutions to wage it. Dutton would blanche at a debate about the number of genders; Trump, within hours of taking office, reduced them back to two.
Where’s Dutton’s Project 2025?
In America, woke ideology has bastions – the universities, Hollywood – but so do its opponents. There are organisations capable of mobilising against hyperliberalism. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, produced Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for how Trump might govern. There is an intellectual ballast to Trumpism (especially in its second-term reincarnation) that Dutton’s Liberalism lacks.
There is a religious free market and, in comparative terms, abundant communities of faith that have always doubted where atheistic Democrats were moving the country. Evangelical Protestantism and a revived Catholicism (which has tempted US Vice-President JD Vance into its ranks) offer Americans an alternative to the spiritual wastelands of social progressivism.
Trump also has in his corner (at least for now) congress and the US Supreme Court.
In the US there are 23 “trifecta” Republican states – where the GOP controls the governorship, the state legislature upper house and the lower house – to only 15 Democratic. Almost 56 per cent of state legislators are Republican.
Australia lacks this counterbalance. Kevin Rudd came to power in 2007 with wall-to-wall state Labor governments.
For most of his prime ministership, Albanese has surveyed an Australian continent entirely Labor red.
This was not an excuse for Dutton to declare a culture war but to offer a more effective form of technocratic governance.
‘Duttonism’ sounds absurd; Trumpism is attempting a global revolution.
The internalised mantra of Team Dutton is “look what happened to Canadian conservatives when they appeared too pro-Trump”. This election has become a debate between two sides embarrassed by culture wars. The Coalition parties want to avoid being called right-wing nut jobs. Labor is desperate to avoid the voice debacle resurfacing.
The universities are a frontline in the culture war
My own sector, higher education, further exposes how the US and Australia diverge on cultural priorities. Trump has made the American college campus a frontline of his culture war. The current assault on Harvard is even more remarkable when we consider how far Democratic ideology, under Obama and Biden, deepened that university’s leftist monoculture.
In 2023, I found myself dining with one of its many administrators. Her conviction about the truth of gender fluidity, and hatred of its sceptics, had a religious quality. This was not an issue on which people of goodwill might disagree. Rather, it was a way to expose heretics. The Great Awokening, of which she was a disciple, has been met by the Age of Trump.
In Australia, both sides will harm universities with international caps – presented as immigration and rent controls. Their respective university policies contain none of the culture war emphasis of Trump’s attack on Ivy League identity politics. Dutton has said he prefers an education system to an indoctrination system. But his caps would not move the needle on that.
In contrast, Trump and Vance know that, by marching back through the universities, they can decisively shift America’s ideological balance. There was no economic rationale for this assault; America’s top schools are the world’s richest. They are this administration’s nemesis for cultural reasons. They represent the hegemony of a managerial class that excluded much of Trump’s blue-collar base while obliging it to feel guilty for its deplorable white privilege.
Conclusion
Another Harvard staff member, whom I wish I had met, observed that when existing institutions failed to keep up with evolving ideas, turmoil filled the gap. Huntington identified eras when ideas were so powerful they obliged American institutions to catch up to them. The 1770s, 1830s, 1890s and 1960s were each filled with “creedal passions” as ideas remade institutions.
Huntington died in 2008 but left us a way to understand the Trump revolution as a natural and predictable development in American politics: “If the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the 21st century.”
Australians this campaign season can, of course, bask in the quietude of our politics. We are an accident of history that has done really rather well. But the US was conceived as an idea. It has a tumultuous politics that continues to reflect that genesis.
Huntington didn’t close his 1981 book with a counsel of despair: “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie. It is a disappointment. But it can only be a disappointment because it is also a hope.”
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.