A Very American Arrogance
Ignorance, Arrogance, And A Global Realignment
"I don’t feel this is the country I grew up in any more."
This quote, reported in Malcolm Turnbull's book, was the way the current Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded to the news that Australia had voted for legal gay marriage in the 2017 plebiscite. That quote also could be a fair descriptor for his current mood, because he is overseeing a fairly radical realignment in Australian politics. This week, he gave a speech in which he talked about how climate change won't be solved in inner city coffee shops, a dismissive attack on the Greens. The other news was a new poll, which had a 3% swing against his government on primary votes (41% at the last election, 38% in the poll), while Labor stayed at the same 33% level. Nothing too concerning, you'd think? Well, there is one nugget in this poll that should be terrifying Morrison.
High income voters - those making six figures or more - went from voting for the Coalition by 20% - 49%-29% at the last election - to 43%-33%, a 10% lead. That swing - substantially larger than the swing nationally - means one thing, and that Morrison's government is bleeding voters in the (white) suburbs, while gaining them in areas where they already have seats, like regional Queensland. It'll help them guarantee they hold Braddon, in Tasmania, and maybe even pick them up Lyons, which they would have won last time probably if not for the problem of the Liberal candidate imploding. It means that Morrison's deputy, Josh Frydenberg, is in some trouble in his Kooyong constituency, and the attempts to win back Warringah, the socially liberal bastion on Sydney Harbour that Tony Abbott lost to an independent in 2019.
If all of this sounds very familiar, it should - because you can just change out all the names and places, and this story is true of the US. And yet, nobody fucking cares.
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"I don’t feel this is the country I grew up in any more."
The thing about that sentence is that it is true. Australia, and Canada, and the UK, and the US, are all very different from the country that most people grew up in. The US didn't legalize homosexuality in all 50 states until 2003, the idea of legal gay marriage was a fringe idea for most of the lifetimes of current politicians, and these politicians - especially those on the right - understandably feel like something is slipping away from them.
Talk to any voter in Ancestrally Democratic areas, and the same sentiment would be expressed again and again. This is what Make America Great Again tapped into - a cultural nostalgia for days past, for a country that makes more sense to cultural conservatives. It makes sense to people who do not understand people like me to want something that is more comforting, and that impulse is why Democrats will not be able to be as competitive as they used to be in rural, white areas. Even when they win those areas, like they did in 2019 Kentucky, they do so by excelling in the urban and suburban areas and doing not quite as badly as their current situation in rural areas.
This is the logic that rightly justifies arguments that Democrats should shift their focus from Iowa and Ohio and Missouri to Alaska and Montana and Kansas, and yet, there are people who try and believe that the shifts with educated, well-off white social liberals were just about Trump. They weren't, because if they were, they'd be just happening in the United States. And yet, they aren't. This is happening everywhere, and yet, that very American arrogance lives on.
If this is a Global Fucking Realignment, you'd expect some things, right? You'd expect to see similar swings to the global right in areas of less educational attainment, higher reliance on coal and natural resource extraction, and where anti-immigrant sentiments are the highest. You'd expect to see totemic left-wing heartland seats flip right for the first time ever (or first time in a long time). You'd expect all the things that Trump accelerated in the US to be happening everywhere else too, right? Well, good - they're happening everywhere else too. Huge swings in regional Queensland, big gains in northern Tasmania, the Red Wall breaking in the UK, the Canadian Liberals losing rural Atlantic Canadian seats, and suffering bigger swings in those areas than in the more urban areas. If you want more proof, you can look at the fact that the UK Tories are favoured in Hartlepool next month, the classic sort of seat that Labour should be able to hold if their weakness in 2019 was just about Corbyn's weaknesses - but, of course, they're not going to win it.
So, if the rightward shift of cultural conservatives is a global phenomenon, then why do so many cling to the fiction that the swing leftward is about Trump, when for every Hartlepool or Braddon there's a Putney or Kooyong? Oh yes, it's that very American arrogance, the desire to make everything that happens in the US the function of decisions taken and actions made in the US. "It's a Global Fucking Realignment" might have the benefit of being true, but it also suffers from the distinct disadvantage of being disempowering - if these things are, to some degree, pre-ordained, then there's less to analyze, and less variables to control. It's more fun to think about the possibilities of a world where anything can happen than the very real world where very little is actually within the realistic realm of possibility.
The US is not going to buck the trends of a Global Fucking Realignment, because that's not how this works. If they do, it would be because of a Charlie Baker-style revival in the GOP, which won't happen, but as the evidence of Australia shows, when you pivot back to social liberalism as the right, you bleed back in rural and regional areas. And yet, everyone seems to think a more favourable Republican year is coming next year, despite the fact that they know Trumpian low-propensity whites won't show up again.
This very American arrogance is why there is so much happening in other places that could explain American elections, and yet people have no interest in it. They have no interest in learning things that actually could explain what might happen in the future, or why what has happened happened. There is no interest in these events because there is no belief that those events matter for understanding the US, despite the fact that the US is just the same as any other country. An analysis which believes that the realignment is real suggests that Democrats will start to go on a winning streak, as they start to hit their floors in rural and exurban areas while being nowhere close to their ceilings with well-off white social liberals. History, mostly of irrelevant events that no longer are operative, suggests I'm wrong. But that history is only another manifestation of a pernicious form of arrogance, the same way that the history said Democrats would lose in Georgia. That arrogance will lead many astray, but fortunately I will miss it, because it is, after all, A Very American Arrogance.