‘We know God isn’t done with America.’

If you got my email on Monday, you would know how I feel about the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

After four or five hours of watching television, flicking between Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, the commentary all tends to blur.  But there was one line from the night that for me stood out.  In so many ways, it sums up America (or at least it sums up the views of many of the 72 million Americans who voted for Trump).  After it was clear Trump had won, one of the Fox News hosts, I think it was Brian Kilmeade, said, ‘We know God isn’t done with America’.

If you’re like me, you’ll be immersed in U.S. politics for the next few days – or the next few years.  I’ll now keep the digital subscription to The New York Times, which I originally intended to have only for the duration of the campaign, for a bit longer.  Before I talk about the possible lessons from Trump’s victory for Peter Dutton and the Coalition, some of the commentary about the election that’s already appeared from writers in the U.S. is relevant to Australia.

In The New York Times, Bret Stephens made the point constantly heard last night.  In hindsight, it was always going to be difficult for Kamala Harris, as the Vice President to an unpopular President, to win an election when 75% of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.  Inflation was a huge issue.  But there was more to it than that.  The election was decided on the economy.  And on culture.

The dismissiveness with which liberals [ie Democrats] treated these concerns [about the economy] was part of something else: dismissiveness towards the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.  Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams?  You’re a transphobe.

Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive DEI seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic?  You’re racist.

Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from 1984?  That’s doubleplusungood.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom.  But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.  It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think.

Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

(The power of Stephens’ argument is diminished somewhat by an admission he makes at the end of his article.  ‘I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring – in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large.’)

He might have voted for Harris, but Stephens would be considered a traditional conservative.  Joel Kotkin is a social democrat whose affinity with the Democrats’ (rapidly diminishing) trade union and working class base.  In Spiked he wrote:

Even since the rise of Barack Obama, Democrats have seen themselves destined to rule.  With his presidential victory in 2008, they created a seemingly unbridgeable political empire.  With the support of big cities, young progressives, universities, the media and an ever-expanding government workforce [the Democrats] imagined they could stay in power indefinitely…

Harris’s defeat last night is not a temporary setback but the harbinger of an ongoing imperial crisis.  Simply put, the empire, dominated by the rich and those feeding off government largesse, whose ranks have burgeoned under Biden simply has no comprehension of the economic fears, or concerns over crime and the border, that are felt in large parts of the country.

One of the biggest disconnects between the elites and the people is on climate issues, which have achieved an almost theological hold on progressives, particularly in Harris’s California base.  Yet the fact remains that only a tiny number of Americans prioritise climate change over bread-and-butter issues.

Of course, investors in economically inefficient solar and wind energy, favour ever more public subsidies, even if renewable causes energy prices to soar and other industries to decline.  The Democrats’ inner circles have no sense of how workers in impacted industries, like logistics, manufacturing or agriculture, feel about these things (to the Democratic elites, there are only three industries that matter – finance, tech, and media, even if most Americans work elsewhere).

Donald Trump’s resounding election win won’t have killed off the Democratic empire entirely.  But it has given it a richly deserved whack.

It looks like Peter Dutton understands the cultural dimension of Trump’s victory and potential parallels with Australia.  This morning he said:

I think when I see a government that is more interested in pronouns than they are in people, it starts to become a real problem. If you can’t pay your mortgage and you can’t pay your electricity bill, and there’s uncertainty at work, or you own a small business and numbers are down by 30 per cent, and you hear the government talking about the Voice and all of these sorts of issues, well, you get angry and you respond.

What Dutton said is all true, but when it comes to the Voice, there’s more to it.  The problem isn’t only that Labor  wanted to talk about the Voice and was distracted by it when to most Australians, there are more pressing issues to worry about.  The problem is that Labor (and the country’s elites) didn’t just talk about dividing the country by race – they wanted Australians to vote to amend the Constitution to make it happen.  Labor and the country’s elites have a vision of the nation that is fundamentally at odds with most Australians.

While there are many similarities between American and Australian politics, our compulsory voting and parliamentary system and economic and cultural differences make it difficult to exactly transpose the lessons of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election onto the 2025 Australian Federal election.  But with that caveat, following yesterday’s results in America, here are a few things to consider.

Identity Politics has no democratic mandate.

When identity politics is put to a vote, it loses.  This radical theory that divides people by their gender and sexuality is the creation of a minority and has been imposed by a minority on the majority.  In October 2023, when Australians had the chance to vote on whether to enshrine identity politics in the Constitution, the proposal was rejected in a landslide.  In November 2024, Americans likewise rejected identity politics and its policy consequences.

Last night on the two left-wing news channels CNN and MSNBC, numerous Democratic commentators complained that Trump received, for example, 21% of the vote from Black men, 55% of the vote from Hispanic men, and 38% of the vote from Hispanic women and that these voters were not responding to Harris’s appeal to ‘minorities’.  On CNN, a Republican-leaning commentator replied, ‘Maybe people in these groups are starting to vote as Americans’.

Conservative political parties don’t need to shift left to get the votes of young people.

Trump proved it.  He got 43% of the vote of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29.  Sure, that’s not 50% – but it’s not 10%. Younger voters crave authenticity and they can spot a fake a mile away.  Whatever he is, Trump isn’t fake.  In some states, such as Michigan and North Carolina, the Trump/Harris vote in that age group was 50/50.  According to exit polling from The Washington Post, voters aged 18  to 29 supported Harris over Trump by 11% (54% to 43%).  In 2020, Biden won that age group by 24%.  Other exit polls showed that nearly 50% of men aged 18 to 24 voted for Trump.

In Australia at the Voice referendum, the Labor Party was relying on the vast majority of young people to vote Yes.  One academic predicted a 90% Yes vote from young people.  In the end, the Yes vote from those 18-24 years of age was 59%.  Significantly, 55% of males aged 18 to 24 voted No.

The mainstream media continues to decline in importance.

The mainstream media in the United States is widely perceived to be biased, and Americans are losing trust in it.  Voters, particularly younger voters, will go to social media and alternative news sites to get information, which is why both the Biden government in the U.S. and the Albanese government in Australia are so eager to control and censor ‘misinformation’ on social media websites.  Neither Biden nor Albanese have shown any interest in censoring ‘misinformation’ in the mainstream media.  The mainstream press disparaged Trump’s three hour conversation with Joe Rogan – but it’s been watched 46 million times.  The presidential debate between Trump and Harris had an audience of 67 million.

Harris’s campaign received nearly $1 billion in donations, three times the amount raised by Trump, but massive financial advantage appears to have made no difference to the result.  In Australia in 2013 the Yes campaign in the Voice referendum received five times more in donations than the No campaign.

During the Voice referendum, 28% of young Australians used social media as their primary source of news about the campaign, followed by 21% who had their family and friends as their main source of information.  Just 4% said the mainstream media was their most important source of news.

I’ll finish now, but before I do, I’ll take advantage of my New York Times subscription.  This is from a piece in today’s paper, ‘How Trump Connected With So Many Americans’.  It’s one of the best and most perceptive pieces I’ve read on Trump.  It’s by Shawn McCreesh, who covered the Trump campaign, and you can sense the tone of almost grudging respect for the President-elect.  It’s worth quoting at length.

The forces that propelled Donald J. Trump to victory will be endlessly analysed.  Many Americans woke up on Wednesday morning shocked that he could win again.  But there is no doubt about one thing:  Mr Trump was a ferociously effective campaigner.

To watch him up close on this third run for president was to see him blend comedy, fury, optimism, darkness and cynicism like never before.  He was an expert communicator [Reagan was called ‘the Great Communicator’], able to transmute legal and mortal peril to build upon his self mythology.  He won new supporters and kept old ones in thrall.

At dozens of events, I watched as he connected with all sorts of people in all sorts of places.

Suburban mothers in Washington, D.C.  Military personnel in Detroit.  Evangelicals in South Florida.  Bitcoiners in Nashville.  College football fans in Alabama.  Firemen in Lower Manhattan.

At rallies in Charlotte and Atlanta and Bozeman and Virginia Beach and the Bronx and beyond, I had countless conversations with people who were quick to dismiss or rationalise whatever controversy happened to be swirling around him at any moment.  People saw in him whatever they wanted to see.  And they believed that after so many years, they knew him, and that he knew them, too.

‘He gets us,’ a hay and beef cattle farmer told me one afternoon in September in Smithton, Pa.  It seemed a head-spinning assessment, but one I heard constantly and in the most unlikely of places.  How could the man with the silver spoon and the golden triplex above Fifth Avenue understand anything about this woman’s life?  ‘He just knows where we’re coming from,’ she shrugged…

[In Trump’s speeches] his digressions about electrocuted sharks and Hannibal Lecter and whales and windmills were treated as the musings of a madman by a portion of the public, and the news media, that wondered if he was melting down.  But there was a reason he launched into those bits over and over, and it wasn’t because he was cognitively impaired.  It was because people found it funny.  They always laughed.  ‘You need at least the attitude of a comedian when you’re doing this business,’ Mr Trump said in an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan…

In July, I followed Mr Trump to a cryptocurrency convention in downtown Nashville.  There were a great many men wandering around who said they were unsure what to make of him.  Was he as dangerous or deranged as some claimed?  When Mr Trump began to speak, it was awkward.  He didn’t know how to talk to them about blockchain technology – ‘most people have no idea what the hell it is,’ he said that day – but once he got them laughing, they were like putty in his hands…

In the Bronx, in May, residents of the poorest congressional district in the country found it inspiring when he talked about all the success he achieved, and they believed him when he said he wanted some of it to rub off on them, too.

‘Think to the future, not to the past, but learn from the past,’ he told them. ‘Wherever I go, I know that if I could build a skyscraper in Manhattan, I could do anything.’

Hispanic and Black people cheered when he said that, ‘it doesn’t matter whether you’re Black or brown or white, or whatever the hell colour you are, it doesn’t matter.  We are all Americans, and we’re going to pull together as Americans.  We all want better opportunity.’

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John