Liberals trapped in Trump’s embrace

The world is waiting for the outcome of tomorrow’s rendezvous in Alaska between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the latter’s first visit to the United States since 2015 and his first reception anywhere in the west since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. For the relationship between the two men you can read my thoughts on their 2018 summit in Helsinki, which I think still hold up rather well.

In the meantime, Trumpism continues to wreak havoc in other countries, even Australia. This week’s controversy is over the recognition of Palestine, which seems to have energised the opposition more than anything else the Albanese government has done since its re-election three months ago. It promises to reverse the decision should it ever be returned to government.

But this is not just about different attitudes to the Middle East. It is equally a disagreement about how to deal with the United States, with the opposition hitching itself more tightly to the Trump bandwagon. As David Speers puts it, “The growing divide over how deferential Australia should be towards the United States has become a chasm.”

Six months or so ago, there was some basis on which the Liberal Party could conclude that identifying itself with Trump was a winning strategy. He had just won what the media portrayed (quite wrongly) as a landslide victory, and under the leadership of the very Trumpy Peter Dutton the party had achieved an unaccustomed unity and was travelling well in the polls. Trump in office was still a rosy prospect rather than a lived reality.

But disillusionment came quickly. The Trump administration began to spread economic and social mayhem, and parties that were seen as associated with it suffered accordingly. Dutton’s Liberals went irretrievably downhill and lost in a landslide (a real one, this time); it was a slightly less dramatic version of what happened at the same time in Canada, where the Conservatives had once enjoyed a twenty point lead and still lost badly.

So you would think that this was one strategy that had been given a fair trail and comprehensively failed it. The Liberals chose a new leader, Sussan Ley, the most visibly progressive one they could find, and promised to tack back towards the mainstream. But now here we have the party adopting a distinctively Trumpist position, as if no lesson had been learnt from the election result at all.

Ley can hardly believe that Trump is popular in Australia, and it’s hard to imagine her thinking that combining that with the strongly negative brand of Benjamin Netanyahu would be a vote winner. Perhaps she feels that she needs to give something to her right wing, and that indulging them over Palestine would be less electorally destructive than the obvious alternative of climate change. More likely she simply has no choice: she knows, like Malcolm Turnbull before her, that it’s their party, not hers.

Once upon a time there was a powerful left wing in the Liberal Party whose leading lights were not afraid to voice some scepticism about the American alliance. But the era of John Howard put an end to that; the left either drifted away or learnt to stay quiet, and commitment to the US became an unchallengeable dogma. So now, even as Trump’s America becomes a millstone around the necks of its supposed allies, the Liberals are unable to entertain the thought of breaking loose, regardless of the electoral consequences.

Trump has already cost them one landslide defeat, and the party may not survive another. Yet the death wish of its hard right is undiminished. Bernard Keane in Crikey sums it up well:

[T]he same dynamic that has driven the alliance since 2007 is still in place: right-wingers in both the Nationals and the Liberals recognise no limits or rules in trying to push the Coalition further and further to the margins, while moderates mount little pushback beyond backgrounding the media on their unhappiness.