Former Prime Minister John Howard is widely loved by the loyal Blue Ribbon conservative base – even those who swell the ranks of the minor parties on the right, having walked away from the Moderate landscape of soft-Wokeism and corporatist ‘greenism’.
These conservatives, once called ‘Howard’s battlers’, are now very much Trumpians enamoured with the cultural success of the new American President.
It is with dismay and surprise that they come across the bitter ramblings of Howard whenever he is asked to weigh in on Donald Trump.
Rooms fall silent when the former Prime Minister says incongruous things such as:
‘I think [Trump’s] refusal to accept the result of the last election and various attempts to overturn that result not compatible with democracy.’
And:
‘Everything we’re witnessing in America tells us is that their political system is far inferior to ours. In a parliamentary system, Donald Trump never would have got to the leadership of the Republicans.’
To be fair to Howard, he is perfectly correct. Donald Trump would never have been appointed as leader of the Liberals, but not for the reasons he assumes.
A figure such as Trump is more powerful than the bureaucracy that hides behind the seat of power.
He is independently wealthy, owes his political peers and the establishment nothing, is not afraid of stories being leaked to the ravenous state-funded press, and does not require the bickering of a focus group to formulate the sort of ‘least worst’ policy Australians have become accustomed to in their ‘superior’ system of government.
While Australian Prime Ministers, the creatures of their party power brokers, are constrained by the sludge of the Canberra swamp – Trump has the necessary independence to enforce the democratic will of the people on the unwilling political class. Howard-like figures find this break from convention dangerous while the public tend to embrace the thrill. America has become the extreme sport of politics with a cheering audience.
The question troubling Howard-esque figures is whether this is democracy or autocracy… I would argue that Trump’s executive orders are more democratic than the legislation voted on by the Lower and Upper Houses of the Australian Parliament – not because the Westminster system is undemocratic, but because the politicians within it have sold out to undemocratic interests. They pass the laws they want, not what the people want.
The tyranny of democracy is famously described as the majority abusing the rights of the minority, but in Australia, the will of the majority is being deliberately ignored by a handful of people who remain elected thanks to their ingenious decision to run identical policies.
Vote blue, vote red – it doesn’t matter. You get fringe activism.
Democracy has no answer for this betrayal except to enable the rise of minor parties, but that has been made more difficult thanks to ‘adjustments’ within preference voting. Unsurprisingly, the major parties never told anyone the real reason they did this. Australia’s edited Westminster system makes a Nigel Farage figure, and the emergence of his Reform challenge to the political duopoly, extremely difficult. This is especially true in the presence of a voting populace that has been scared by messaging from the Coalition-friendly press. ‘Oh… if you vote for the minors, you’ll get Labor!’ That is protectionism, not reality. You get Labor no matter who you vote for.
Australia’s system of government is only ‘better’ than America’s, as Howard claims, if the politicians within the system take their sacred role seriously.
For the best part of a hundred years, Australian politicians have been more concerned with presenting themselves to the world as ‘serious statesmen’ worthy of standing on the world stage, rather than the best possible leaders for Australia. Maybe they have always felt a little bit inferior, representing a vast, mostly uninhabited island at the bottom of the map full of crocodiles and larrikins. This might explain their desperation to push multiculturalism, forcing Australia into the mould of a busy metropolis that makes them appear more important. What they got instead was a soulless mess.
What is often missed by the statesmen of the West, who belong to a bygone era, is that people don’t like Trump because he is brash, simplistic in expression, or ruthless with humour – they like him because he does what the people asked at the election. He is the supreme enforcer of the democratic will instead of the pacifist who, once in power, spends four years backtracking on every promise and begging the electorate to give them another go while the country slides further into disrepair.
The endless political decline of the ‘least worst’ election victor gave us Wokeism and an unravelling of our cultural serenity.
The European Union nods in approval, the United Nations shakes our hand – but at what cost to the average Australian? What is better about our country now, than in the 60s and 70s?
The sheer force of will emanating from Donald Trump has changed the whole world.
Whether the Howard-style leaders want to admit it, or if they appreciate it, Trump has changed the course of human history and done more than any traditional ‘polite’ statesman to restore the conservative order of Western Enlightenment which our austere political class claims to hold dear.
Perhaps that is what they hate most – that he succeeded where they failed.
It was under the traditional and business-like Liberal Party and their kin across the West that the Enlightenment fell critically ill to the point of almost being suffocated in its sick bed.
Leaders of the Howard variety can retire to history feeling as if they ‘behaved well’, but what they did not do is keep the West safe from its ideological enemies.
Following two assassination attempts, Donald Trump believes he was sent by God to save America. He is derided for this by those in the comfy seats of Parliament and yet Churchill, possibly the most revered of any Western statesman, thought he was born to save Europe. And he did. Twice.
This is Donald Trump’s second presidency and second chance. He is not wasting it. If the Liberal Party is given a second chance I wonder, what will they do?
