After Trump, a fairer world?
At noon on 20 January 2029, Donald Trump will no longer be president of the United States. What happens then?
“Change the government and you change the country,” said
Paul Keating, Australia’s outgoing Labor prime minister, in 1996. For a
medium-sized place like Australia, that’s true enough. But if you change the
American president, you’re likely to change the world.
Electing George W Bush in 2000, rather than Al Gore, set the
world up for the destructive but pointless war in Afghanistan and the invasion
of Iraq. Where Gore would have prioritised global warming and led the world
towards far better control of the climate, Bush backed
fossil fuels.
The Democrat disarray and the ego of the clearly unwell and
unelectable Joe Biden gave the 2024 election away. This was not a ringing
endorsement of Trump; it happened because the Democrats had departed the field.
President or king?
Trump and his (former) acolyte, Steve Bannon, have often
flirted with the fantasy of a third presidential term. The problem with this is
Article 22 of the constitution: “No person shall be elected to the office of
the President more than twice”. That article, proposed in 1947 and ratified in
1951, followed the unprecedented four election victories of Franklin Roosevelt.
It was intended to prevent a quasi-imperial presidency.
Trump has often
said he would love a third term; maybe (who knows?) a fourth as well. It’s
a measure of the magical thinking surrounding this presidency. Changing the constitution
requires the support of two-thirds majority of both houses of the congress for
a constitutional convention, and then the ratification of two-thirds of the
states. It’s a deliberately high bar.
Achieving such support would be near-impossible even for a
popular president. Trump is not quite as unpopular as Richard Nixon was in 1974
(he had 24% approval when he resigned) but if the present trend continues,
Trump will be at Nixonian levels within about 18 months.
Unfortunately for the Republicans (and, if they can
capitalise on it, fortunately for the Democrats) Trump’s hold over his party
remains relatively solid. Despite some cavilling by congress members in
marginal districts, he still owns the party’s base; and so, he owns the party.
But the Republican MAGA base is not big enough to win a
national election. Polling shows between 15% and 20% of all American adults can
be regarded as MAGA supporters. And in just six weeks from the time of writing,
every seat in the House and 35 of the 100 Senate seats will be up for grabs.
“Historically, the single biggest factor shaping midterm
elections has always been a president’s job-approval ratings,” wrote
commentator Ed Kilgore in New York magazine. “And Donald Trump’s have
been in a yearlong funk punctuated by occasional slides …
“Just as consistent as Trump’s low job-approval numbers has
been the nature of his current coalition of support. To a remarkable extent,
he’s hanging on to self-identified MAGA-movement members and not much of anyone
else.”
When Trump restarted his bombing campaign against Iran,
smashing global oil trading and pushing up prices in the US, support for the
Democrats in congress jumped. The most recent polling average shows Democrat
support at 50% and rising, but the Republicans on 41% and sinking.
All forecasts necessarily rely on what we know at the
moment. Much could happen between now and the next elections, but trends appear
to be set. Unless there are remarkable new events, it’s hard to see how the
Republicans in the US, the Conservatives in Britain or the Liberals in
Australia could do well in the elections to come.
Voters throughout the democratic world are hungry for
change. In Britain, Labour was elected with a massive majority but the
uninspiring Keir Starmer squandered that support. He was incapable of
undertaking the difficult but essential reform that the country had voted for.
His downfall was as swift as it was inevitable.
So far, though, the agenda has been welcomed.
The raw political calculus shows how much the country wanted
a leader who is prepared to do things. Burnham embodied the hope that national
leadership could change people’s lives for the better and not, as has been more
usual, for the worse.
But although these recent results show Labour rising and
Farage’s Reform UK Party in retreat, the populist right-winger, despite being
dogged by financial scandal, remains on top.
But there’s more to Nigel Farage’s apparent popularity than
the polling reveals. That support looks soft: many voters, with the election
still three years away, have not made considered judgements about who they will
really support. Farage is so closely associated with his party – without him,
it would barely exist – that his dire personal approval ratings contradict
Reform’s headline result. Could someone this unpopular ever rise to high government
office?
In
Australia, ditto
The hard-right and populist One Nation has almost replicated
the performance of Reform UK, surpassing the centre-right Liberal/National
coalition. If these figures were repeated in an election, Labor would retain
government with a greatly reduced majority and One Nation would become the
official opposition – with all the perks and advantages that position entails.
A multi-level progression analysis
by the polling firm DemosAU projects that in the 150-seat House of
Representatives Labor would hold 68 seats (down 26), the Liberals and Nationals
13 (down 30), the Greens 3 (up 2), independents 6 (down 6) and One Nation 60
(up 60).
It’s unlikely that this will actually happen: MRP polls are
notoriously inaccurate. But it is nevertheless a scary moment for politics in
Australia. For the first time in many decades, no party would hold a majority
in its own right. The Liberals would have to decide whether to enter a
government with Hanson as prime minister, with a high chance, whatever it
decided, of the party splitting irrevocably.
But Labor is not in the clear either. The prime minister,
Anthony Albanese, should look at Starmer’s fate and consider his own. Although
Albanese’s lowest approval rating is about equal to Starmer’s highest, the
trend is evident.
The message from these figures is clear: voters are seriously
unhappy and want their leaders to do something. Steady-as-she-goes is punished,
and Albanese embodies steady-as-she goes.
A
rising tide does not lift all boats
Overwhelmingly, voters elected Trump in America and Starmer
in Britain because they desperately wanted change. Much of that impulse can be
traced to inequalities in income and, particularly, wealth. Economies have
continued to grow but not everyone benefits.
This chart is sorted according to the shares of wealth held
by the poorest 10% in each nation. Among developed economies, there is
relatively little difference: only in a few northern European countries does
the bottom decile achieve wealth accumulation above 1,000 international dollars
per person. And the further up the scale you go, the more difference there is: of
all 13 countries on this list, the richest in the US, Canada, Germany and
Australia corner the most wealth, leaving – by definition – less for everyone
else.
The long-term trends in three countries tell a much wider,
more nuanced, story. In the United States, Britain and Australia, the richest
10% today hold more than half the nation’s wealth. In Britain, that’s still a
massive improvement from the extraordinary 86% the top 10% had at the end of
the second world war. That egregious inequality fell sharply in the 35 postwar
years of Keynesian economics and the welfare state. Then, as neoliberalism hit
around 1980, that improvement stopped.
In America, the trend is less dramatic but also tells a
story. Generally, the domination by the richest fell until the 1980s and then
rose again.
The Australian experience shows it didn’t have to happen
this way. The rich still dominated economic life but at a much lower level,
with no significant change in 64 years.
The birth and death of the welfare state is dramatically
illustrated in the results from Britain. The share of wealth held by the bottom
half of society soared from 5% in 1950 to 13% in the 1980s before crashing back
down during the Thatcher era. It has never recovered. Australia again remained
flat, with no golden era. And there has never been a welfare state in America.
The failure of governments around the developed world to
improve the relative position of the bottom half of society is clearly visible
in all these charts. Large masses of people feel a strong sense of being left
behind, with the fruits of prosperity going everywhere except to them. And
they’re right to feel that way. Their view of the world is an accurate one.
But
change didn’t happen
Trump in America, Starmer in Britain and Albanese in
Australia were all elected with thumping majorities by voters who hoped change
would be delivered. None of the three delivered. Starmer has gone, Trump is a
dead weight on his own party, and Albanese’s Labor government survives because
the opposition is so inept.
But, as we’ve seen above, Pauline Hanson and One Nation – in
line with other populist movements in Europe and America – are (according to
the polls) within reach of serious political power and, potentially, could form
government.
That conclusion, though, disregards Australia’s preferential
voting system. Labor, currently in government, would benefit from preferences
cast by people whose primary votes go to other parties. When this is analysed
(here, by the Roy Morgan polling organisation) there is little chance of a One
Nation government or of Pauline Hanson becoming prime minister.
Nevertheless, serious risks are emerging for government (and
for a prime minister) widely seen as uninspiring and failing to deliver
life-changing reform. But there is a difference between polling results and
actual votes.
In Australia, the next election is not due until May 2028.
The government is currently sitting on a very large majority with many one-term
members who would be unlikely to survive a new election. Labor has a strong
incentive to run the clock down as far as it can.
Britain’s Labour government is in a similar situation.
Britain’s five-year terms mean the next general election is not due until
August 2029. Even with a popular new leader, the government could expect to
lose a large number of seats, and probably its majority, if it went to the
people now.
The message is this:
electorates around the democratic world are sullen, angry and in search of
solutions that no government is able to provide. At the core of such pervasive
discontent is an economic and social structure that has evolved over many
decades to benefit a few and deprive the rest.
That structure now controls political as well economic life.
It is so firmly entrenched that changing direction – however urgent that has
now become – will take much more than good intentions.
Trump will soon be gone. The system we all live with will
remain. The Iran war, if it lasts that long, will probably be cancelled by his
successor: another failure on the dismal list of America’s lost wars.