Yesterday we looked at how News Corp remains a powerful propaganda tool for right-wing extremists and populist leaders in the US, the UK and Australia. The messaging infrastructure that played such a key role in the growing extremism of US Republican voters — from the Tea Party through to Trump, and now as the “resistance” to Biden — remains ready to work again for the right candidate.
But crucially, the economic conditions that underpinned that growing extremism and polarisation also remain. If anything, they are growing worse with surging inflation and rising interest rates. If ordinary workers in the US, the UK and Australia have endured wage stagnation in recent years (especially in the UK and Australia), they now face real wage falls, and substantial ones.
In Australia, households with falling real wages also face rising interest rates that will drive up the cost of mortgages (in the UK and the US, most mortgage holders have fixed-rate loans, sometimes long-term fixed loans). Recall that would-be populist leader Clive Palmer promised to cap interest rates at 3% — something that failed to register during the election campaign but might have greater appeal if rates continue to rise.
There’s a direct link between economic stress and the social phenomena that populists exploit — xenophobia, tribalism, resentment directed at “elites”. The last is a core trope of right-wing populists — a permanent conspiracy theory that powerful elite groups somehow wield power at the expense of ordinary people, and they can only be exorcised by a living embodiment of the people’s will, regardless of whether they’re elected or not.
This tends to have a specific racial and gender component in Western countries. It is white males — whose status as the most privileged in Western societies has come under threat from 30 years of globalisation and anti-discrimination laws — who are the most prone to seeing governments as conspiracies against them. That’s the alienation that News Corp, particularly in the United States, has preyed on and helped grow.
The funding that helped right-wing populists also remains available. Trump, who raised a quarter of a billion dollars off his lies about the 2020 election, still has a massive war chest he appears to be keeping for himself rather than GOP candidates in the November mid-terms. But with donors turning on Trump as the January 6 hearings expose his treachery, others stand to benefit. In Florida, Ron DeSantis, who is up for reelection this year, has amassed a remarkable $100 million, a record for a gubernatorial contest in that state, and has attracted millions from Trump donors conscious of his prospects in a presidential run in 2024.
In the UK, Johnson is now gone, but as recently as last month he was hosting massive Tory fundraisers (featuring Russia-linked oligarchs), with donors undeterred by the sleaze and scandal that characterised his prime ministership. Johnson and conservative co-chair Ben Elliot “supercharged” donations to the Tory Party by dramatically scaling up cash for access — which is now standard in Australia — and using auctions as fundraisers, which enables the source of large gifts to be hidden.
In Australia, thanks to our useless donation laws, we won’t know how much the federal Liberal Party was able to raise despite the Morrison government’s own sleaze and scandals until 2023. But the Liberals have perfected the art of taking cash for access and influence over policymaking, which proves a strong lure for business.
As the examples of Trump and Johnson demonstrate, large businesses are willing to hold their noses and support right-wing populist leaders in the expectation they will deliver for business — something Trump did in spades, but which Johnson had a much more patchy record on. The US businesses that overlooked Trump’s profound unsuitability for the presidency received a massive corporate tax cut and an anti-regulation Supreme Court that will deliver wins for business for decades to come.
The US remains the place most likely to produce another authoritarian populist, if not restore Trump himself. A more urbane, presentable, less obviously lunatic figure, backed by Fox News and a billion dollars in business and right-wing donations, trading on the alienation and disaffection of white males and the religious zealotry of Christian fundamentalists, could do far more damage in a febrile US political system than Trump — badly advised, obviously unhinged to the point where even Fox News wavered in its support — managed.
But if the atmosphere is more of a welcome return to normality in the UK and Australia, the same forces and structures remain in place. And the successors of Johnson and Morrison will know to avoid their mistakes.
