Charlie Kirk, a Christian nationalist organiser assassinated last week at a university in the United States, was an accomplished practitioner of political intimidation. The primary strategy of his far-right group Turning Point USA, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/turning-point-usa-case-study-hard-right-2024">in the estimation of the Southern Poverty Law Centre</a>, is “to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order”.
Kirk called for a “soft civil war” to deport 10 million migrants from US cities as part of a broader plan for a far-right takeover of the country’s institutions. Two years ago, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-buy-weapons-buy-ammo-if-you-go-public-place-bring-gun-you">he told followers of his eponymous show</a>: “You have a government that hates you. You have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons—I keep on saying that. Buy weapons, buy ammo. If you go into a public place, bring a gun with you”.
It is a testament to the contemporary political power of the far right and its billionaire backers—to its grip over sections of the media, and its increasing role in, or potential to form government across, the Western world—that this odious specimen has garnered thoughts and prayers from across the political spectrum while the children of Gaza, starved and murdered daily, get nothing but more death and destruction.
Indeed, and unsurprisingly, the lamentations have come thick and fast from the establishment figures who have backed Israel’s genocide most forcefully. “We must all be free to debate openly and freely without fear”, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer wrote on X in the wake of Kirk’s murder. This from a man whose government is charging hundreds with terrorism offences for voicing support for Palestine solidarity activists.
The ground game of Kirk’s organising operations was on the campuses. While the political right endlessly moaned about an epidemic of “cancel culture” making conservatives unsafe within the university system, Kirk astutely took advantage of the prevailing atmosphere of free expression to build hundreds of chapters of his far-right organisation at those very institutions. 
In doing so, he cultivated an image as a champion of free speech. But, like most on the political right, his advocacy in this area was deeply dishonest and cynical. While trading on his purported bona fides as a “free speech warrior”, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/professor-watchlist-is-seen-as-threat-to-academic-freedom.html">Kirk established public watchlists</a> targeting progressive academics and schoolteachers as part of his organisation’s broader project to intimidate and to drive the political left and progressive liberals from the country’s education system.
As part of its attempted march through the institutions, Turning Point funded the Reverend John Amanchukwu, a Bible-bashing conspiracist, on a cross-country tour to intimidate school administrators into removing library books that don’t align with reactionary Christian fundamentalism. PEN America has documented nearly <a href="https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025">16,000 book bans in public schools</a> across the country since 2021, primarily because of right-wing harassment of school boards. So much for defending the free exchange of ideas.
As the political establishment manufactured the fake “campus antisemitism crisis” in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks in Israel, throwing the entire weight of university and political institutions against the Palestine solidarity movement, scarcely a word was uttered against Kirk’s agitation. Yet, unlike the Palestine solidarity movement, Kirk’s politics were utterly antisemitic—so much so that even the conservative movement <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/us/politics/charlie-kirk-rnc-antisemitism.html">was getting queasy about him</a>. As New York Times columnists <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/us/charlie-kirk-views-guns-gender-climate.html">Ashley Ahn and Maxine Joselow note</a>:
“Kirk ... accused Jewish philanthropists of fomenting anti-whiteness by supporting liberal antiracism causes like the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country’, he said on his show in 2023. Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges—it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it’.”
Yet, as with other bigots and conspiracy-mongers, the Zionist movement overlooked such crudities because of this protagonist’s fervent support for the Jewish ethnostate, its genocidal war and, presumably, the coming Armageddon—something that Kirk believed children should read all about. 
Open political intimidation has become part and parcel of government under the reign of President Trump and the MAGA movement, in which Kirk was a leading figure. So it should come as no surprise that Kirk’s followers’ response to his assassination at the hands of a lone gunman has been to preach all-out war against the left and to launch what could end up being the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/charlie-kirks-allies-warn-americans-mourn-him-properly-or-else-2025-09-13/">largest doxing operation in modern history</a> against anyone who disparages (or states the facts about) the Turning Point founder. 
Such political intolerance and intimidation are entirely in keeping with his and the broader far right’s program and history. That contemporary progressive politics is just as populated with petty snitches motivated by a self-righteous and self-pitying sense of moral superiority doesn’t negate this reality.
Speaking in 2007 after the death of another professional bigot, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, British essayist Christopher Hitchens quipped: “I think it’s a pity that there isn’t a hell for him to go to”. Had Kirk gone the way of the pastor and keeled over from his own bodily breakdown, perhaps we could leave it at that. But Charlie Kirk has been martyred. In a way, this death is quintessentially American; he will now join the ranks of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, among others. The assassin, by inserting himself into history and cutting short Kirk’s life, has likely made him a more powerful and enduring figure. 
There is only speculation about motives. But it would be ironic if the killer were driven by anti-fascism: a lone man with a gun delivering vigilante justice is the epitome of the machismo that dominates the far-right imagination. If this individualised viciousness has been appropriated in the service of “progress”, it shows only how desolate the left field has become in America.
In the real world, this sort of political violence does nothing to challenge the machinery of American capitalism or to weaken its most fascistic backers. On the contrary, it gives the state a pretext for further repression and the forces of reaction a martyr to rally around. At a moment when <a href="https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker">his presidency was flailing in disapproval</a>, Trump and his movement will not likely let the opportunity pass.

Ben Hillier

The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

The 15 July 1939 edition of the Mirror, a Perth weekly broadsheet, hit newsstands about six years and four months after the Nazi dictatorship was formally established in faraway Germany, and a month and a half before the beginning of World War Two. This seemingly obscure bit of information is relevant only because the edition <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/75869223">carried a report about a mid-week address</a> by Prime Minister Robert Menzies at Anzac House in the city’s CBD. Inside, the prime minister declared:
“History will label Hitler as one of the really great men of the century. As far as the German people are concerned, Hitler has proved himself a great man and a tireless worker. He dragged his nation from bankruptcy and revolution.”
The first thing that strikes a reader today is not that Menzies found something to like in Nazism, even if he wasn’t himself a fascist. His sympathies are well known, at least by people familiar with the history of the Liberal Party. It’s that his Führer fawning was so gratuitous, and so public, so close to the outbreak of the war. 
If you’ve grown up believing that WWII was about defeating Nazism—that the conflagration ought to be read as the twentieth century’s great parable of good vs. evil, favourably resolved by democratic virtue mobilised as a military arsenal—Menzies’ words would be difficult to reconcile. The inconvenient truth, however, is that much of the establishment, in what today is broadly called the West, admired the Italian and German governments of the time. Among conservative politicians, Britain’s royal family, industrialists and the “respectable” middle classes, fascism was fashionable.
This is illustrated, in part, by the Mirror’s report, which described the PM’s pro-Hitler comments as “perfectly sound reasoning”. It is also shown by another article in the same edition of the paper, describing a reception at the Palace Hotel attended by “most of Perth’s business executives and industrial chiefs”. The event occurred several days after Menzies’ Anzac House address, and there is no indication that his Nazi nuzzling was cause for consternation. Indeed, it seems to have passed without comment by Western Australia’s luminaries. The prime minister, readers are informed, “Showed fine command of words and never hesitated, mixing subtle humour with politics in a pleasing manner”.
Bear in mind, again, that this was July 1939: six years after the establishment of the Dachau concentration camp; four years after the Nuremberg Laws, which, to protect the “purity of German blood”, outlawed marriage or sex between Jews and “German nationals”; sixteen months after the annexation of Austria; eight months after Kristallnacht, the grotesque nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom carried out by Nazi paramilitaries; and five months after Hitler’s <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/extract-from-hitler-speech.html">well-publicised 30 January speech to Reichstag delegates at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House</a>, in which he warned that, if another world war were declared, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. 
To be fair to the capitalist establishment of the time, it wasn’t the Nazis’ virulent antisemitism that was the main attraction. They were sympathetic primarily because Hitler’s government had waged war on the left, banning the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the trade unions. While Dachau is today known primarily for being part of the Nazi network of Jewish extermination centres, it was established in Munich to house political prisoners. Heinrich Himmler, then the city’s chief of police, was open about this, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150906190330/http:/www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/images/photo02.jpg">telling the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten</a> (Munich Latest News) in March 1933 ahead of the camp’s opening:
“All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner [a returned soldiers’ organisation associated with the Social Democrats] and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here ... [T]hese people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.”
This was widely known. As early as July 1933, the Argus in Melbourne was <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/4752129">repeating German secret police claims</a> that they were fighting off daily communist plots to overthrow the Nazi regime. The leftists were described as “terror groups”.
“The police allege that hardly a day passes without their unearthing new Communist ‘cells’, notably in the Ruhr Valley, where storm troops at Bochen discovered an organisation of between 4,000 and 5,000 members”, one report noted. The correspondent said that there had been arrests around the country before mentioning, almost in passing, “18,000 Communist prisoners in Prussia”.
The Nazis’ war on the left, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/01/nazism-political-communist-socialist-victims-world-war-two-history">in which up to 1 million civilians were murdered</a>, was a war on a common enemy of the Western ruling classes, which were trying to combat socialist and left-wing movements in their own societies. Capitalists and establishment politicians had a natural ideological affinity with fascism, which led them to ignore, downplay, tolerate or even celebrate Hitler’s crimes against democracy and against Jewish people, who were disproportionately represented in the communist movement. Indeed, Hitler painted his antisemitism in anti-communist colours: Bolshevism was Jewish, and Jews were Bolsheviks. 
The people who run the world today try to bury the fact that their old brethren and political heroes were ideologically aligned with fascism. Moreover, they bury the fact that the systematic eradication of left-wing political opposition to Nazism, which they supported, opened the terrain for the extermination of 6 million Jews. Instead, they make out that the antisemitic fascist-sympathising statesmen of the time were responsible for snuffing out Nazism. 
We are now told that it is illegitimate to draw parallels with the Holocaust because it was uniquely evil. Yet it is arguable that drawing parallels is precisely the way to honour the call “never again”—because as soon as one does, it invites an investigation of who exactly was complicit, of what the preconditions were for such shocking barbarity, and of how such conditions might again materialise. 
What about Palestine today? To be sure, there are obvious differences. Western politicians do not generally hold up Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as an example of how to run a country; few state leaders appear to want to emulate his domestic policies. And, as Israel’s supporters frequently point out, the project in Gaza does not involve gas chambers. If Netanyahu’s goal was to exterminate all Palestinians in the territories Israel controls, he could have carried it out. That he hasn’t is considered enough proof that there is no genocide, let alone another Holocaust. 
Yet there are clear echoes today of some of the political dynamics of the 1930s. 
As noted above, the Nazis did not entirely distinguish between their barbarity against the left and Jews—hence they were fighting “Judaeo-Bolshevism”. Similarly, Israel’s war against “Palestinian terrorism” cannot be separated from the country’s broader role as Western imperialism’s regional enforcer. 
The ruling classes of the 1930s watched on, often with admiration, as the Nazis smashed their common enemy: the political left, in which Jews were the vanguard. The Western establishment today does more than watch on—it supplies Israel as it smashes all vestiges of resistance to Western domination of the Middle East. And like European Jewry in the early twentieth century, the Palestinians have been the vanguard in, and their cause has often been a catalyst for, the anti-imperialist struggle in the region. That is precisely why the carnage in Gaza has been allowed to go on for so long: there is a coincidence of interests between the ethno-nationalist Israeli regime and Western ruling classes. 
It is why there is no end to the declarations that there can be no peace unless Hamas is eradicated—by which they mean not simply that particular organisation, but any organisation that refuses to accept and make peace with the Zionist state and Western imperialism. It is why German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in June said of Israel’s criminal attack on Iran: “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us”. It is why Israel’s earlier terrorist attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon made Netanyahu such a celebrated figure: overnight, in Western eyes, he went from being a man without a plan to the guy who might have the final solution to the niggling problem of regional anti-imperialism. 
As in the 1930s, the rhetoric today among sections of establishment opinion is increasingly fascistic. That’s true in Israel, the government of which is propped up by fascists, and in the heartlands of Western imperialism, where the far right either leads or has a genuine chance of leading governments in France, Italy, Germany, the United States, Britain and elsewhere.
Insofar as the far right is making ground, the left is again often labelled the primary enemy within—even if “communism” now includes the cosmopolitan capitalism of such radical organisations as the Democratic Party in the US. There are no concentration camps (although the US is skating close). Still, the repression brought to bear on left-wing activism and Palestine solidarity activism is now significant. It began to ramp up during the war on terror, when there was endless talk of an Islamo-leftist alliance against Western civilisation, which sounded much like the old Judeo-Bolshevism canard.
Another political echo: just as Nazi sympathisers in the West were broadly hostile to Jews and Jewish immigration, so too are many of Israel’s friends in the West hostile to Arab/Muslim/Palestinian immigration. Take then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s comment last year that welcoming refugees fleeing Gaza was “very bad for cohesion and harmony”. He sounded eerily similar to Australia’s representative to the 1938 Evian Conference, Colonel Thomas W. White, who said: “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration”. (The Evian Conference was an international summit to discuss the growing number of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.) 
The Australian press did carry critical commentary about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, particularly after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Some politicians spoke out, too. But prevailing establishment attitudes can be divined from press responses to Hitler’s odious and ominous diatribe the following year, threatening “the annihilation of the Jewish race”. A front-page headline in Melbourne’s Argus on 1 February read “reassuring on the whole”. The associated article reported:
“The [London] Daily Telegraph says that it is not too optimistic to read into the speech a promise of better things to come, while the Daily Express points out that the speech shows that the Fuhrer does not intend to embark upon any adventures at the moment.”
Again, this optimism was because the Jewish question hardly figured in Western calculations. The key concern was the possibility of Germany going too far and upsetting the existing imperialist applecart. So when the war came, it was not about a clash of ideologies, let alone about saving European Jewry; German expansionism—regrettably, in the view of the establishment—came to threaten the interests of the other European imperialists. Viewed from the top of society, the war was just another power struggle among the ruling classes.
Returning to the 1939 Mirror article, we find another notable thing: unlike the Palace Hotel reception attended by the upper classes, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Menzies at Anzac House. The correspondent noted that some in the audience reacted badly to the PM’s pro-Hitler talk:
“In the back of the hall a good-looking young woman jumped up waving aloft a placard. Another let fly at Mr. Menzies a battery of words that were finally drowned in cat-calls and cheers ... Then a voice close to the microphone whispered to the speaker: ‘Would you like her thrown out?’ Mr. Menzies hesitated, then decided that, if he was going to finish his speech, the interjectors would have to be given their walking orders. 
“So the police had a busy few minutes, and the ranks of the interjectors were lessened by a dozen or so. But Mr. Menzies saw the humorous side of it before the meeting closed. ‘I would like’, he said, ‘to thank all those present—and those who are no longer present’. And even the opposition gave him a good hand for that.”
An uncivilised “hullabaloo” disrupted proceedings. But all officialdom united—even the “opposition”—to have the cops take care of them. Again, we find echoes in today’s political atmosphere and the treatment of anti-fascist and anti-genocide activists. How, then, do holocausts and genocides happen? With the complicity of the capitalist establishment and the maligning, marginalising and worse, of the left.

How do holocausts happen?

Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western imperialism’s key military alliance, describe recently announced increases in European arms spending as a collective effort to “safeguard our freedom and democracy”. Some commentators have been even more emphatic in advocating stepped-up European armament. Writing in the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e0bd86f9-fd4a-4802-8199-44daaa97d13a">Financial Times</a> earlier this year, Bronwen Maddox, director of the London-based think tank Chatham House, called military spending “the essential public benefit above all”, placing it above expenditures on hospitals, pensions, education and other social services.
While such “public good” narratives dominate official chatter, another motive lies behind the rhetoric: consolidating Europe as the 21st century’s third global power alongside the United States and China. Three developments illustrate the scale and nature of the economic and military shift now under way.
First is the sharp increase in arms spending over the last decade. In 2024, European NATO members collectively spent nearly US$500 billion on “defence”—a 72 percent increase since 2014, adjusted for inflation. Over the past decade, military budgets more than tripled in Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania, and more than doubled in twelve other European NATO members. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, nearly doubled its military spending in real terms.
Second is the ReArm Europe Plan (as though Europe is currently disarmed), announced by the European Council in March. ReArm authorises European Union member states to increase borrowing to boost military spending by €800 billion over the next five years. It marks a significant policy shift, overriding the debt and deficit limits set by the 2012 European Fiscal Compact—a treaty requiring governments to keep deficits below 3 percent of GDP—and directing the European Investment Bank to prioritise lending to arms manufacturers.
Third is <a href="https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_236705.htm">the Hague Declaration</a> coming out of last month’s NATO summit, which goes further again. NATO is the closest thing Europe has to a unified continental military command. On average, its members spend just over 2 percent of GDP on defence. While the March ReArm Europe Plan allowed for extra spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP, the NATO summit in June committed members to allocating 5 percent of GDP annually to the military, including security-related infrastructure. It also requires annual progress reports demonstrating “a credible, incremental path” towards this goal.
The aim is to increase Europe’s economic and military power through substantial investments in military-industrial capacity and weapons production. As Andrius Kubilius, European commissioner for defence and space, stated in a media release accompanying the announcement, “This is not just about military strength—it is about our readiness, strategic autonomy, and the future of Europe as a global player”.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for increased European military spending. In 2018, he suggested that it should rise to 4 percent of GDP. At the time, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-tells-nato-leaders-to-increase-defense-spend-to-4-percent-idUSKBN1K12BW/">according to Reuters reporters in Brussels</a>, NATO allies “shrugged off the demand”.
However, the astonishing surge of China’s industrial, technological and military capacities has left US strategists increasingly rattled about Washington’s declining relative power in the western Pacific. European leaders now appear to have recognised an opportunity as the US threatens to reduce its military commitments on the continent. In May, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared his ambition for the Bundeswehr to become the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. French President Emmanuel Macron, a long-time advocate of “strategic autonomy”—that is, less reliance on the US military—affirmed that the EU must become “a space power once again”.
New York Times correspondents <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/world/europe/macron-starmer-merz-trump-eu.html">Michael Shear and Jim Tankersley now report</a> that Britain, France and Germany, “are building parallel diplomatic and defense institutions for a future without the United States as the primary guarantor of economic and military security” in the region. The three countries, which have long been the dominant imperialist states in Western Europe, look to be entering an era of military coordination that is perhaps unprecedented.
The claims that current tensions signal a historic rift between the US and Europe is not particularly convincing, however. Those old enough to remember transatlantic discord over the Iraq invasion in 2002-03, which in part was a US attack on European interests, might recall a State Department spokesperson ridiculing Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg as “chocolate makers” after they held “a little bitty summit” to moot plans for an alternative military command to NATO. Or the time US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed Paris and Berlin as irrelevant “old Europe” has-beens. There was even a directive to congressional cafes to rename “French fries” and “French toast” to “Freedom fries” and “Freedom toast”. (Childish, petty politics predate Trump.)
Today, the European powers will likely uphold and reinforce the broader Western imperial bloc by augmenting their own capacities and allowing Washington to refocus its energies. “The ‘triangle alliance’, as Britain, France and Germany are sometimes now called, are already partners through NATO and the Group of 7—forums that include the United States”, Shear and Tankersley note. “Officials for the three European countries are careful to say that the institutions they are building are meant to supplement those alliances, not replace them.”
Of course, there are no guarantees in this shifting geopolitical landscape. And the leaders of imperialist states rarely say publicly what they are thinking and saying privately. So time will tell how things pan out. 
Yet some outcomes seem certain—most notably, who will ultimately bear the cost of this military build-up. The exemption of military spending from the European Fiscal Compact is particularly significant. Along with the deficit limit, the agreement requires EU members to maintain public debt below 60 percent of GDP. Though only loosely enforced, the compact has long been cited to justify cuts to working-class payments, pensions and public services.
Fiscal restraint, long demanded of governments, has now been relaxed—but exclusively for funds directed to arms manufacturers and related contractors. For everyone else, ever more “restraint” is on the cards. Maddox quoted an unnamed senior European minister speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February: “For 30 years, we have been taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare. Now, we will have to reverse that”. 
In a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989">Financial Times column</a> the following month, Janan Ganesh, a prominent British conservative commentator, asserted that, compared to rearmament, “all other priorities are secondary” and argued for Europe to become “a more militarised, less welfarist continent”. He added, “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt”.
With European military outlays expected to more than double in the next decade, some governments are relying on increased borrowing or creative accounting to meet their targets. However, borrowing will be only a stopgap if the 5 percent mark is to be met. Many governments hold debt-to-GDP ratios <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w/2-22042025-bp">well above the average</a> (80 percent), and well above the level demanded by the Fiscal Compact. Greece (154 percent), Italy (135 percent), France (113 percent), Belgium (105 percent) and the UK (95 percent, albeit no longer part of the union) have already come under pressure to reduce spending to pay creditors. So even with fiscal rules being relaxed, the spectre of significant cuts to living standards looms.
Berlin has one of the more “balanced” budgets and therefore more fiscal room than most governments. It is embarking on a €400 billion borrowing binge to increase military spending from €95 billion in 2025 to €162 billion in 2029. Yet this month, the government announced that it will cut unemployment entitlements by between one and two billion euros, alongside reductions in rent support payments. “It should be called basic security and no longer citizens’ money”, <a href="https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-government-announces-unemployment-benefit-cuts">Chancellor Merz told Markus Preiss</a>, a presenter on one of the country’s public broadcasters, last week. 
In France, Prime Minister François Bayrou has announced sweeping spending cuts—including public sector lay-offs, eliminating public holidays and freezing tax brackets and welfare payments next year—to reduce the budget by nearly €44 billion. He described the country’s debt as a “mortal danger” that threatens to “crush” France. Yet he insists that military spending is “sacrosanct”. Last Sunday, President Macron announced a €6.5 billion increase to the defence budget.
While a few countries may have little interest in meeting a 5 percent military spending target—Spain has flatly refused to entertain the idea—the major European powers are moving decisively toward rearming and retooling their economies for geopolitical competition. If they succeed, the continent will increasingly come to resemble the United States: a society in which the military-industrial complex becomes economically overweight and increasingly politically influential.
That makes European rearmament a global problem. So too the attacks on European welfare. If some of the wealthiest countries in the world begin treating social welfare as secondary—to be sacrificed in favour of militarisation—it could signal a global shift. Workers worldwide have often pointed to Europe as evidence that governments have the resources to provide for citizens. If the message coming from European capitals is that this can no longer be the case, ruling classes everywhere will point to the new European model as the future, and paint social welfare as the legacy of a bygone era. Workers and the poor will face the prospect not only of being left to fend for themselves in an increasingly dog-eat-dog world, but of being enlisted to kill each other in a 21st-century-style imperialist Hunger Games.

Europe’s imperial power play

The ALP and the Coalition have spent roughly equal time governing Australia in the last four decades. Several elections in that period have been politically meaningful. Yet, looking at society’s wealthiest people and the companies they run, election outcomes have been largely irrelevant to their fortunes.
No matter how you measure it—the income share of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, the share of national income going to company profits, billionaire wealth as a share of the total economy—the fat cats have gotten fatter decade after decade, regardless of which party was in power.
In 1984, just after the Hawke Labor government took office, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population took home about one-quarter of all domestic income. Corporate revenues were about 21 percent of the annual gross domestic product (the total value of all the goods and services produced in Australia), and the wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 3.5 percent of GDP. 
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/np6GS-the-rich-have-gotten-richer-for-50-years.png" alt="" /></figure>
Reviewing Business Review Weekly estimates of ruling class accumulated wealth after almost a decade of federal Labor government in 1992, Matthew Eaton and Frank Stilwell wrote in the Journal of Australian Political Economy:
“Overall, the BRW data provides a striking picture of the private wealth amassed by corporate cowboys, paper entrepreneurs, wealthy families and the ‘captains of industry’ in the last decade ... [I]t shows the powerful tendency towards increased wealth concentration.”
That was just the start of it. By 2004, after twelve years of the ALP and eight years of the Coalition (give or take), the wealthiest 10 percent were taking home about one-third of all domestic income—a 30 percent increase in their share. The wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 8.4 percent of GDP—more than double their share in 1984.
After another twelve years of the Coalition and eight of the ALP (give or take), the wealth of the richest 200 Australians in 2024 was 27.3 percent of gross domestic product—more than triple the 2004 figure and eight times more than in 1984. Corporate revenues climbed perpetually as well. If you take 1975 as the starting point, they have gone from 15 percent of GDP to 27 percent—an 80 percent increase.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Billionaire-pigs-at-the-trough.png" alt="" /></figure>
According to the <a href="https://www.afr.com/rich-list/australia-s-10-richest-people-revealed-20240521-p5jfe4">Australian Financial Review</a>
(which took over publishing the rich list in 2017), the fortunes of the Rich 200 grew by more than 10 percent to $624.9 billion in the last twelve months of Labor in office. Even when accounting for inflation, the growth in the wealth of these people in just one year is more than the wealth the top 200 families of the early 1980s had accumulated in their entire lives.
To put the $624.9 billion figure in a different light: <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/monthly-employee-earnings-indicator/latest-release">the total wages earned by all 14.5 million people in the labour force across Australia</a> in the last six months is less than what the top 200 are worth.
It’s not just the super-wealthy and big corporations raking it in under the two-party system of Labor-Liberal governments. The upper-middle classes have also thrived.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/australia-s-property-casino.png" alt="" /></figure>
In the 21st century, residential property speculation has become one of the most reliable paths to riches among the wealthy layers below the billionaire class (although some billionaires, such as Harry Triguboff, Australia’s second richest person last year, have certainly built property empires as well).
Both the ALP and the Liberal Party have turned housing into a casino in which investors, on average, never lose. Real property prices have more than doubled since 2000. The biggest beneficiaries? The wealthiest 20 percent of the country, who “earned” three-quarters of the gains in investment property values between 2002 and 2022.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/nutso-property-boom-mainly-benefits-the-wealthy.png" alt="" /></figure>
So while the smashing defeat of Peter Dutton’s right-wing Coalition is a tremendous political victory, the ultra-wealthy who have increasingly accumulated the country’s wealth will not lose much sleep over the election result.
They know that, whoever is in office, the big winners will continue to be those with the biggest bank accounts.

The biggest winner of the federal election? Capitalists

As Wall Street plummeted, shedding more than US$6 trillion in the days after Donald Trump’s 2 April “reciprocal” tariff announcements, the president posted on social media: “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
But equity markets refused to settle from their wild paroxysms. The treasury market, which underwrites the US government and the global financial system, also showed signs of stress. 
Yesterday, Trump relented, blaming investors who were “getting a little bit yippy; a little bit afraid”. At least for now, an all-out global trade war has been averted. Trump took on the world and the financial markets and came off second best. But this will not be the end of the matter. “Nothing’s over”, he insisted. 
Internationally, Trump’s crash-or-crash-through strategy is to extract as many concessions as possible for US capitalism. Poor country, rich country, ally or adversary—all states have been put on notice. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/">speaking on the CBS News program </a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/"></a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/">Face the Nation</a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/"></a> on 6 April, outlined what the administration believes to be the stakes:
“You’ve got to realise this is a national security issue. I mean, we don't make medicine in this country any more. We don't make ships. We don't have enough steel and aluminium to fight a battle, right? All our semiconductors are made overseas ... [T]he point is, you need to reset the power of the United States of America and reset it against all our allies and our enemies alike.”
“Why would he treat even our allies like this?”, ask so many US commentators. Maybe it’s because, as <a href="https://nymag.com/article/tom-wolfe-ultimate-power-seeing-em-jump.html">Tom Wolfe noted long ago</a>, the ultimate power is just seeing them jump. 
The primary target, though, remains China, which faces a 125 percent tariff until further notice. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, US administrations have had one overarching national security priority: to prevent a peer-competitor state from emerging. They failed. 
China has developed the most extensive and efficient industrial economy the world has ever seen. It extended its global trade network despite the first Trump administration’s and the subsequent Biden administration’s attempts to undermine it. It has rapidly modernised its military, become a leader in high-tech engineering and AI applications and transformed into a state with global reach and interests—a diplomatic powerhouse.
Trump believes he has the remedy. Yet this week’s gyrations are not simply a matter of geopolitics and trade.
Domestically, the tariffs are an attack on the working class—raising prices and taxing consumption to give the government the budgetary space to proceed with corporate tax cuts. While blaming foreign countries for purportedly destroying the US economy and the lives of millions of workers, Trump is gutting the Department of Labor and attacking agencies that protect workers’ rights. 
He is attempting to purge <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-asks-us-supreme-court-let-him-remove-democratic-members-labor-boards-now-2025-04-09/">National Labor Relations Board</a> members viewed as sympathetic to unions. (The NLRB enforces labour laws protecting the right to join a union and organise in the workplace.) Last month, the president issued an executive order to <a href="https://chcoc.gov/content/guidance-executive-order-exclusions-federal-labor-management-programs">end collective bargaining rights</a> for up to 1 million federal workers.
All this is part of a broader wave of “deregulation” designed to empower US capitalists and weaken the working class’s capacity to defend itself—a prerequisite for both corporate profitability at home and force projection abroad.
Indeed, Trump is waging war on anyone perceived to be an obstacle to his reactionary, ultranationalist agenda. From student anti-war activists to liberal law firms, from national security staff deemed disloyal to the president to universities and schools teaching the real history of America, from anti-discrimination laws to the union movement—Trump is taking a wrecking ball to US civil society and purging the state of all opposition to his program.
Some of this is purely ideological—like the anti-science irrationalism at the heart of the administration. Yet the international and domestic agendas dovetail with the far-right promise of national renewal: the veneration of hierarchy, be it the US at the top of the world, men as patriarchs in the family or bosses as rulers in the workplace; the valorisation of military service, both as individual submission to the state and as a contribution to the projection of national power; the perverse attacks on “communism” in the federal government and the school system, which identify the enemy abroad and depict a culturally corrupting fifth column within; the war on perceived weakness, understood as anything short of hyper-masculine blue-collar value creator at home or soldier of fortune at the front.
“Imperialism ... introduce[s] everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom”, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin wrote more than 100 years ago. “Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of hostilities.”
Well, we are seeing the intensification of hostilities. The last week was a staring competition between the world’s major powers. Trump may have blinked, but any temporary easing of international tensions might result only in him refocusing on the domestic war and shoring up support for the next confrontation.

The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda

The National Defence Strategic Review, released in 2023 by the federal government, notes “only a remote possibility of any power contemplating an invasion” of Australia. This is the federal government’s official position, formulated by, among others, Army Major General Richard Vagg and Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, a former head of the armed forces. 
It is astounding, then, that the Greens have launched <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">a policy to develop Australia’s military-industrial base</a>, which would allocate $4 billion to “sovereign manufacturing capabilities” of drones and missiles, purportedly to “defend” Australia. When not even the military can outline a plausible scenario in which a foreign invasion threatens this continent, why are the Greens suddenly positioning themselves as defenders of the realm against an undefined enemy? 
Australian governments have a history of lying and fearmongering about national security threats. But they usually at least provide scenarios or statements capable of being critically evaluated, such as, “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”. The Greens don’t offer even this level of phantom to critique.
Last year’s National Defence Strategy, which outlines the Defence Department’s evaluation of “security risks”, didn’t even mention the possibility of an invasion of Australia. But it did discuss the need for a military “more capable of the impactful projection” of power and for “a sovereign defence industrial base” to manufacture weapons and drones, among other things, to aid this “force projection” (otherwise known as invasion and interference operations in the Pacific and Southeast Asia). 
The Greens’ brains trust says its proposed military-industrial base reinvigoration will be used “for strictly defensive purposes only”—presumably unlike the similar-sounding military-industrial base the war hawks at Defence have proposed. Are the Greens really so naïve as to think that increased domestic military production capacity will not be used for force projection—the bread and butter of Australian statecraft since Federation? What will their next policy announcement be? A program to rebuild Australia’s derelict pubs “for purposes strictly related to sobriety”?
“We see this as the first step ... we don’t pretend this is the beginning and the end of the significant reorganisation required for Australia’s defence force”, Greens spokesperson David Shoebridge <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">told ABC defence correspondent Andrew Greene</a> on the weekend. Greene noted that the party has never before released “a formally costed policy to fund new military programs”.
Responding to the announcement, Euan Graham, a director at the hawkish and pro-US Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Sky News that the Greens’ “willingness to talk about increased defence spending and production” is a sign of “positive change” in the party.
Of course, it would be unfair to describe the Greens as a bunch of warmongers. The new policy, announced last Saturday, also calls to “decouple” the Australian armed forces from the US military and comes as the party <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/end-aukus">urges the federal government to withdraw from the AUKUS pact</a>, a military and technology-sharing partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom through which Australia will obtain a suite of nuclear submarines. 
The Greens propose funding social programs from the savings gained by scrapping the pact—some $70 billion over ten years. Further, the party’s policies would likely reduce Australia’s military spending by perhaps half a trillion dollars over several decades. 
Scrapping AUKUS is a supportable policy. But it is not particularly progressive, nor all that controversial. Even former foreign minister Bob Carr, and former PMs Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull have rubbished the pact. Indeed, sections of the old Labor right were the first to criticise it. Yet the key issue in all this is not the precise locations from which Australia’s military sources its weaponry or the price it pays to obtain its hardware. 
The Greens’ shift comes as we enter <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-5-europes-military-spending" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a period of global rearmament</a> in which two superpowers, China and the United States, are preparing for a confrontation. President Trump demands greater military spending by European members of the Western imperialist alliance and is shifting the US posture towards a range of states. 
In many cases, this has given militarism a new colour. Countries that fear losing Washington’s backing bow to Trump’s demands while selling the rearmament programs as some newfound independence. <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-6-adam-tooze-and-the-liberal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">It’s progressive liberalism’s imperial revenge</a>: build the military to resist the far-right ogres in the White House and in the Kremlin. 
The Greens have tapped into this sentiment to sell their own policy shift. In this context, they are floating with the tide when every left-wing organisation ought to be swimming against the current. 
First, they float along with the liberal conceit that decoupling rearmament programs from “Donald Trump’s military” (as the Greens press release refers to US imperialism) is progressive or “independent”—as though the Australian ruling class is qualitatively different from others around the world. 
Second, they float along with the China panic by proposing a significant boost to “defensive” military-industrial capacity when, in reality, Australia’s military force posture and structure are being aggressively reconfigured for a confrontation with China. 
The Greens say they oppose military operations that “threaten our neighbours”. But the AUKUS pact, the renewed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the United States, and Australia joining NATO as an “Indo-Pacific partner” are manifestations, rather than causes, of the underlying dynamic toward war in the western Pacific. While objectionable, these mini pacts are not the main thing. Nor is Donald Trump, the widespread distaste for whom the Greens are leveraging to build support for their military policy. 
Australia’s steadfast political alliance with the United States is far more important than its technical and logistical incorporation into US military planning. The alliance is foundational to Australia’s foreign affairs, not simply its defence policy. As such, the Greens’ talk about developing an “independent foreign policy” is risible when the party proposes little more than haggling around military procurement. So is the talk about “not threatening our neighbours”, which is a fantasy when Australia is a strategic base for and an unbending ally of US imperialism. <a href="https://greens.org.au/magazine/closepinegap-13-years-later">Former Senator Scott Ludlam understood this</a>. It’s not clear that David Shoebridge does—what’s his position on closing Pine Gap?
Without a commitment to breaking the US alliance in all its forms, expelling all US military forces from Australia, and dismantling all US intelligence-gathering installations, “peace”, “non-alignment”, “neighbourly respect” or other feel-good phrases are nothing but foreign policy bromides. Yet the Greens’ position is not to tear up the ANZUS treaty, considered the foundational document of the alliance, but to “renegotiate Australia’s position” within it.
Yet even a commitment to breaking the US alliance is not enough. Given the global dynamic, left-wing parties cannot settle for “detachment”. We have to fight against all manifestations of military aggression, whether they emanate from the new far-right aligned with Donald Trump or from the liberal alternatives. This is particularly true in imperialist countries such as Australia, which has joined criminal invasions or interfered in the domestic affairs of several countries in the region and beyond.
All this is too much for the Greens. Being tolerated as a “reasonable” party capable of forming government means accepting a range of capitalist non-negotiables, such as the state’s need for a competent military. “Self-defence” is the immediate argument to legitimise the new defence policy. But the party is probably also signalling that it should be considered a potential partner in the event of a hung parliament in the upcoming election.
To resist the new militarism and to prevent more war, we have to call bullshit on the rhetoric of “self-defence” used by governments to justify rocketing arms spending. And we have to build an international alliance of working-class and oppressed people—not an alliance of states and their rulers. On this front, the Greens’ new defence policy points in the wrong direction.

A criticism of the Greens’ defence policy

Living standards in Australia have been pushed down more than in any comparable country over the last three years, the economy has been in a per capita recession for two years, and households are among the most indebted in the world. 
Working-class households have it worse than the most quoted statistics suggest and have been left with little breathing space after decades of increasing net wealth transfers from employees to bosses.
The findings—drawn from Red Flag’s analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Reserve Bank—paint a diabolical picture. The following charts tell the story. 
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<a href="https://www.datawrapper.de/_/yqbv2/?v=4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Click here for an interactive version of the chart</a>. 
According to OECD data, wages have failed dismally to rise fast enough to compensate for consumer price rises, mortgage rate increases and a higher working-class tax burden. Real household disposable incomes are more than 10 percent lower than in 2021.
While that year’s high came from significant government subsidies and historically low interest rates during the worst phase of the global pandemic, incomes today are lower than before Covid-19 swept the world. In fact, they are not much higher than they were ten years ago. 
“The impact on our living standards has been far greater than anywhere else. There is no argument that the fall is bigger than anything we have seen since 1959 [when the living standards’ index was started]”, economist Chris Richardson told the Australian
newspaper last month.
“Real disposable income” measures the money left after inflation, taxes and mortgage payments are subtracted from wages. Household incomes across the rest of the OECD—sometimes called the club of rich countries—have, on average, increased solidly over the last two years. In the US, incomes are about 25 percent higher than in 2014.
For Australian workers, it’s been a lost decade.
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<a href="https://www.datawrapper.de/_/ttv3o/?v=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Click here for an interactive version of the chart</a>.
The decline in incomes has not been uniform. Households with more savings than debts have been able to increase spending because of higher interest rates. But households with high levels of debt and those with little savings have copped the worst of rising prices and rates. 
Economists, politicians and the media (Red Flag included) usually highlight the gap between wage growth and the consumer price index. However, the Bureau of Statistics has other measures of price inflation, the “cost of living indexes”, which measure the effects of rising prices and interest rates on different sections of the population.
Its employee living cost index has been running far higher than CPI inflation for more than two years, which helps to explain why household incomes have been destroyed so rapidly. While general inflation peaked at 7.8 percent in 2022, workers’ living costs climbed 9.6 percent per annum at their peak in 2023. 
They increased by almost 2 percentage points above CPI inflation over the last year (to the start of October); they were 3.6 percentage points higher over the previous year.
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<a href="https://www.datawrapper.de/_/tALAr/?v=4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Click here for an interactive version of the chart</a>.
The Australian economy has continued to expand, albeit slowly, primarily because of government spending and high immigration. However, economic growth has been slower than population growth, meaning that output and income per person have been declining.
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In fact, growth has gone backwards in eight of the last nine quarters, the most prolonged per capita recession in decades. “Over the past 44 years, when GDP has remained flat over the year, unemployment rises on average around 1.1 percentage points”, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2024/dec/05/australia-gdp-figures-economy-september-quarter-abs">Guardian
columnist Greg Jericho points out today</a>.
The unemployment rate is currently 4.1 percent, up from 3.5 percent two years ago. It has been lower in just two of the past 50 years: 2008 and 1974. Which makes it all the more astounding that living standards have gone backwards so much. If people start losing their jobs in greater numbers, the economic pain will only be magnified.
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<a href="https://www.datawrapper.de/_/ME4AS/?v=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Click here for an interactive version of the chart</a>.
The more immediate issues noted above should be framed within two longer-term trends. First is the incredible build-up of household debt over several decades. 
The ratio of household debt to annual income is 128 percent higher than 30 years ago. This primarily reflects out-of-this-world increases in property prices, which have climbed much faster than wages over the same period.
Australian households are among the most indebted in the world. But only one-third of households, primarily working class and middle class, are paying a mortgage. They bear most of the debt burden.
In contrast to the US, the UK and the Euro area, where debt levels have declined in the last decade, Australian working households have taken on increasing liabilities to secure a place to live. And with the interest rate on most housing loans changing in line with the Reserve Bank’s “cash rate” (its benchmark interest rate for lending between financial institutions), small movements on such large debts translate into significant changes in mortgage holders’ monthly interest payments.
No wonder the living cost index has climbed much faster than inflation.
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<a href="https://www.datawrapper.de/_/2hJVe/?v=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Click here for an interactive version of the chart</a>.
A second long-term trend is the declining share of national income going to the working class. According to ABS figures, the share going to workers is 16 percent lower than 50 years ago; the bosses’ share is 65 percent higher.
The shifts have been expressed primarily in rising income and wealth inequality. For example, a recent Australia Institute research report, <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/P1689-Wealth-and-inequality-Updated.pdf">Wealth and inequality in Australia</a>, estimated that the richest 20 percent of Australians own more than 63 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 20 percent own just 0.4 percent.
Wealth inequality measures not just the accumulation of riches in fewer hands but the relative decline of working-class economic resources, which resulted in the lack of a significant financial “buffer” for hard times like recent years. 
Recovery?
While real incomes might finally be starting to rise for some groups, many working-class households could struggle to make up lost ground this side of 2030. It is still unclear when the Reserve Bank will begin cutting interest rates and where they will land once the cutting is complete. 
It’s unclear how high unemployment will go, or when the per capita recession will end. Certainly, the huge debts will not be paid down anytime soon (they grew again in the last quarter). And to cap it off, wage growth is now slowing, which means any gains in real wages and incomes will be smaller.
It’s also not clear whether Australia will continue to avoid an absolute economic contraction, as it has, for the most part, for more than 30 years, unlike pretty much every other economy in the world. If that luck runs out, many people will end up pining for the current hard times, which might look like better times by comparison.

Five charts showing the destruction of workers’ living standards

Malcolm X once said that the most astute capitalists and imperialists know that to get people to run towards a fox, you have to show them a wolf. 
Kamala Harris laid a few traps to draw out the wolf in Donald Trump during the US presidential election debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night (US time). He duly obliged, rambling about “illegal aliens” eating American cats and dogs, about everyone loving what he’s done on abortion and about how Viktor Orban, the far-right ruler of Hungary, really respects him.
More notable, however, was Harris herself parading as the wolf. She repeated a promise to maintain the US military as “the most lethal fighting force in the world”, described Trump as weak on foreign policy and scolded him for being insufficiently deferential to members of the armed forces.
Malcolm X understood that the president of the United States is but the figurehead of a violent system that rules much of the world. So lord knows what he would have made of the Democratic National Convention’s Nebraska delegation donning T-shirts with his likeness as they pledged allegiance to Harris last month. 
In this debate, however—and in the entire period since Hillary Clinton ran similar attack lines in 2016—he probably would have recognised that the fox and the wolf are one in the Democratic Party.
Harris proudly touted Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent endorsement of her campaign. The architect of the invasion of Iraq ought to have been dragged to The Hague and locked in a box for the term of his natural life. Instead, along with “the late great” John McCain, another warmonger, Cheney’s name was uttered as though the ground on which he walked is now hallowed.
The last person to generate liberal excitement on the scale of Harris was Barack Obama, whose gift to the ruling class in 2008 was his ability to provide US imperialism with a mask of reason with which to cover its eight years of catastrophe under George W. Bush and Cheney. Obama’s speeches—delivered in a measured, reverie-inducing baritone—attracted crowds not seen since in US electoral contests.
“A good performer, with an ear for how to make white liberals like him”, Adolph Reed caustically remarked at the time. Obama overwhelmed first Hillary Clinton, and then Republican candidate McCain, before delivering eight years of image rehabilitation for the empire.
Harris promises much more than this. The Democrats under Joe Biden are in imperial expansion mode: building alliances, not just mending them; preparing for confrontation, not coexistence, with China. 
Yet Trump is so odious that the enthralled Democratic base seems to view these as minor details. With a prosecutor’s training, Harris can’t deliver Obama’s oratory. That didn’t prevent the Democratic campaign from smashing fundraising records in August. Young women, in particular, appear to be preparing to storm heaven, or at least ballot booths, for Harris. 
Voter registration surged in the week after she became the presumptive nominee in July. According to data analytics firm TargetSmart, new registrations were up more than 175 percent among young Black women, 150 percent among young Latinas and more than 80 percent among young women in general compared with the same period in 2020. One analyst described the numbers as “astonishing” and without precedent in the last 30 years. 
In the debate’s wash-up, the liberal media is triumphant—a stark contrast to the mood after Biden’s performance in July. Yet Harris’s polling is underperforming Hillary Clinton’s at the same stage of her 2016 campaign against Trump. The partisan polarisation has put a high floor and low ceiling on each candidate’s potential vote in November.
At any rate, the most unfortunate political outcome of 2024 may well be that a new generation of young people runs headlong into the arms of the Democratic fox-wolf just a few cycles after the disappointments and disaster of Obama, and just as the Palestine solidarity movement portended a break from liberal imperialism’s status quo.

The fox and the wolf in the presidential debate

“Hope is making a comeback!” The words are Michelle Obama’s, from night two of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At least among US liberals, it seems undeniable. Guardian
columnist Emma Brockes, watching from New York, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/21/democratic-national-convention-kamala-harris-joe-biden">wrote of being taken</a> by “giddiness” and “hysteria”. The convention, she wrote, “unleashed a psychic energy”. “It was emotional! Friends on the east coast stayed up late watching, and cried. I cried!”
It would be easy to dismiss this as the usual fawning of a member of the media class captivated and ultimately overwhelmed by the spell of political power. Yet it is indicative of a broader phenomenon. The Harris effect reaches well beyond the circles inhabited by Guardian columnists; the new presidential nominee has generated an excitement among sections of the Democratic voter base not seen since Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was contesting the primaries, but with a breadth of support not seen since Barack Obama ran in 2008. 
Various indicators tell the story—polling, volunteer numbers, donations and crowd sizes.
The Washington Post this week noted an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/19/harris-poll-surge-is-driven-heavily-by-women-younger-voters/">18-percentage-point shift towards Democrats</a> among people aged under 40 after the party dumped Biden for Harris. An <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_081424.pdf/">August 8-12 Monmouth University poll</a> found that Democratic enthusiasm about the election jumped from 46 percent in June, before Biden dropped out, to 85 percent after Harris became the presumptive nominee. Enthusiasm among independents increased from 34 percent to 53 percent. The poll also found that 92 percent of Democratic voters are enthusiastic about Harris being their nominee. Pew Research likewise found that <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/08/14/harris-energizes-democrats-in-transformed-presidential-race/">nine in ten Democrats say they are happy</a> that Harris is the candidate.
Contrast this with the last two Democratic presidential candidates. <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/07/07/2016-campaign-strong-interest-widespread-dissatisfaction/">Pew polling in 2016</a> found that only 43 percent of Democratic voters were satisfied with Hillary Clinton being the party’s candidate. In 2020, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/perceptions-of-trump-and-biden/">just 42 percent</a> were happy with the choice of Biden.
Another proxy for gauging “positive enthusiasm” is the proportion of a candidate’s supporters who are voting “for” the candidate as opposed to “against” the other candidate. In 2016, Pew found that less than half of Clinton’s supporters viewed their vote as being “for” her—50 percent said they were voting “against” Trump. In 2020, 56 percent of Biden’s supporters said their main reason for backing him was that he wasn’t Trump. <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/official-polls/fox-news-poll-new-matchup-same-result-trump-bests-harris-one-point">Fox News polling</a> in May found that about half of this year’s Biden supporters were primarily voting “against” Trump. 
By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Harris supporters polled by Fox described their vote as being “for” her, with around one-third voting “against” Trump. That puts Harris somewhere in between the paradigmatic lesser evil candidates (Clinton and Biden) and the more popular Obama, only one-quarter of whose 2008 supporters said their vote was more a vote “against” Republican nominee John McCain.
In terms of volunteers, Harris has also seemingly outperformed. Five days after Biden withdrew from the race, her campaign reported that more than 170,000 people signed up to volunteer. There are signs that the surge has continued: reports of 5,000 sign-ups in Nevada in the first week of August, more than 1,000 sign-ups in Detroit on the second weekend of the month, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/harris-trump-campaign-volunteers-philadelphia/">more than 43,000</a> in Pennsylvania in the last month, and 15,000 in Florida in the three weeks to 15 August, according to two sources. Presumably, there will be an update on national figures at the end of the month or in early September.
Harris’s numbers aren’t as impressive as those of Bernie Sanders’ last campaign, however. In one week, he signed up <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/02/25/bernie-sanders-says-1000000-people-have-signed-campaign-volunteers">1 million volunteers</a> after announcing his presidential bid in early 2019—a year before voting began in the primaries. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s 2015-16 primary campaign reported <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/hillary-clinton-campaign-2016-numbers-217271">89,000 volunteers</a> a month before the first ballots were cast in Iowa.)
While volunteer enthusiasm indicates something, it’s important not to read too much into the numbers. The major parties’ political machines will consistently deliver for the confirmed nominees, no matter who they are. For example, despite Democrats’ misgivings about his candidacy, Biden, <a href="https://join.mobilize.us/blog/2020-election-recap">according to one report</a>, mobilised at least 2.7 million people between April and November in the 2020 campaign.
Nevertheless, from a standing start, the mobilisation for Harris indicates a swell of enthusiasm. Coming out of the national convention, her campaign will likely shift into yet another gear as the entire apparatus of the Democratic machine is turned full tilt to November.
Donations, like volunteers, have also flooded in. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/22/us/elections/kamala-harris-donors.html">According to a New York Times analysis</a> of Federal Election Commission data, more than 1.5 million new donors gave a collective US$183 million to the Harris campaign in the last 11 days of July. “Just 10 percent of Mr. Biden’s donors in July were under 45 years old, compared with 28 percent of Ms. Harris’s donors”, the Times noted. According to the Harris campaign, two-thirds of the donations came from first-time donors and 94 percent were for $200 or less. 
This month, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which can hardly be accused of liberal bias, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/kamala-harris-fundraising-donors-election-2024-724da4f6">related anecdotes</a> capturing the mood of Democrats nationwide. They are only sketches, but are suggestive of a broader shift:
“Heather Ahern Huish was so elated when she read online that President Biden was endorsing Kamala Harris for the White House that the English teacher in rural Maine did something she hadn’t done in years. She made a political contribution, clicking on a Harris Facebook ad and donating $100—about the same amount she spends on groceries each week. ‘I was just so swept up in the moment’, said Ahern Huish, who is 56 and lives with her husband. ‘There was, like, zero hesitation.’ ...
“More than 6,000 people have handed over a $10 donation for an abstract ‘Kamala’ quilting pattern made by a couple in Illinois. The haul from a ‘White Dudes for Harris’ call left its organizers dumbstruck. ‘If you had asked me if I would be someone who raised $4.5 million for a presidential campaign before this, I would have told you, “There is no chance in hell”,’ said one of them ...
“In late July, political strategist-turned-businesswoman Jotaka Eaddy set up one of the regular Zoom calls she hosts for Black women in business, called Win With Black Women. Usually the calls attracted a few hundred people. But this time, Eaddy’s Sunday gathering became a vehicle for Harris fans looking for a way to show their support: More than 44,000 people joined the event with tens of thousands others listening in, according to Eaddy. She raised $1.6 million in roughly two hours.”
Finally, Harris’s crowds indicate a campaign galvanising the Democratic base. <a href="https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/the-real-numbers-tracking-crowd-sizes-at-presidential-rallies/">Harvard Kennedy School’s Crowd Counting Consortium</a>, which tracks public mobilisations across the United States, estimates that the vice president, before this week’s convention, averaged 13,400 attendees at her campaign rallies (of which there had been only six, however)—more than double Donald Trump’s 2024 average of 5,600 attendees. 
By contrast, lesser evil candidates are renowned floppers when it comes to pulling a crowd. Biden’s average this year was 1,300 people. In her time, Clinton wasn’t much better.
“The pictures have told the story over the past six months. Republican Donald Trump is filling convention centres, airport hangars and parks. Clinton, on the other hand, is filling community centres and small colleges, but just barely”, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/11/5/why-donald-trump-draws-crowds-hillary-clinton-doesnt">noted a 2016 Al Jazeera report</a>. Clinton did pull some larger audiences, but reports indicate that they generally, or only, materialised when she double-billed with celebrities or more popular figures—such as an election-eve rally of 40,000, which was also a concert featuring Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, with a guest appearance by Barack Obama.
It’s too early, however, to make meaningful crowd comparisons between Harris and the last two Democrats to have generated significant enthusiasm. Obama <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/big-crowds-for-obamas-red-state-tour-014965">at least twice drew more than 100,000</a> in his first presidential race and drew many “smaller” attendances of 20-40,000. Bernie Sanders’ biggest rallies were in the order of 30,000. But it’s difficult to ascertain the average crowd size for either of those candidates—they both held hundreds of rallies, displaying an endurance that Harris need not match, seeing as there are only a couple of months until polling day. 
At any rate, objective indicators point to a groundswell within the Democratic base; it is overwhelmingly pro-Harris rather than simply anti-Trump. Whether it will last is another question—but there’s no point in making predictions about the outcome of the November poll. As Sanders showed, motivating and captivating a base is not the same as carrying a majority. As well, US politics can turn on a dime. It was just six weeks ago, for example, that Republican candidate Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. In its aftermath, a chorus of commentators predicted with certainty that the billionaire now had a lock on the election. That the shooting is now almost forgotten is illustrative of how quickly the media cycle and the political narrative can turn. 
It should also be noted that Hillary Clinton, at the same point in the 2016 race, held a larger average polling lead that Harris currently enjoys—<a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/national-polls/">6 percentage points</a> compared to <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/">less than 4 percentage points</a> (though this could bounce after the convention). Clinton’s lead blew out to almost 7 percent just three weeks from election day after an Access Hollywood tape, recorded a decade earlier, exposed Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. One NBC News/Wall Street Journal
poll put the former secretary of state ahead by 14 points soon after. At the time, even Republican leaders described Trump as unelectable and were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/07/the-gops-brutal-responses-to-the-new-trump-video-broken-down/">calling on him to withdraw from the race</a>. Yet he still threaded a victory through the Electoral College.
Most progressives will view the Harris surge—and with it, a shift in the national polling—as a positive development. After all, who wants Trump to be again installed in the White House, from where he would resume his attacks on women, trans people, the environment, immigrants, workers and unions? Who wants fascist activists to be emboldened by Trump emerging victorious in November after a campaign of far-right invective and promises to deport millions, crush the left and further enrich billionaires? No-one with a left-wing bone in their body views a potential Trump second term with anything other than horror.
Yet there is something profoundly disturbing about a vice president up to her eyeballs in the Palestinian genocide managing to inspire legions of progressives. There is something unsettling about a Democratic National Convention that <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/22/they-want-to-erase-us-how-dnc-rejected-demand-for-palestinian-speaker">refused even to allow a Palestinian speaker</a> to address delegates about the horror of Gaza, funded by a Democratic government. There is something bizarre about <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-makes-the-democrats-different-from-but-the-same-as-the-republicans">a party run by billionaires</a> parading itself as the hope of the American working class. And there is something just flat-out dishonest about the party of the CIA talking about international “security”.
The Sanders campaign, whatever its limitations, injected the language of class and socialism into the US national debate. It got millions of people talking about how socialism, however broadly defined, sounds like a good thing. At the Democratic National Convention this week, party representatives got everyone talking about how prosecutors are heroes for middle America. 
“I’ll tell you what …”, Joe Biden started on the first night. The applause erupted before he could even begin waffling; before he could elaborate on what the “what” was. It went on. The delegates cheered in unison at whatever demented babble emanated from the stage, like a parody of the Hunger Games opening ceremony scene, when the gathered audience deliriously cheered contestants about to maul each other for the citizens’ amusement. 
Just an hour before Harris’s closing address, the enthusiasm was for a Michigan sheriff thundering about how police funding has increased in his county, and that’s why you should vote for Kamala. Then came former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta talking about how Harris would keep the US military the strongest in the world. Under her, he said, the US would remain interventionist. That is, it would continue invading countries and overthrowing governments that the State Department declares enemies of US imperialism.
For all the danger of Trump, here’s the Democratic rub: this is a party that can get away with anything precisely because its base will allow it. As long as the party comes with a scent of hopium and is decorated with a liberal dose of diversity, there is no left-wing challenge that it cannot overcome. That’s partly why it is the governing party of choice for big business in the US—an insurgent Democratic Party generating enthusiasm is the greatest safeguard to the establishment’s status quo. 
In the past twelve months, in the face of the horrors of Palestine, a new student movement began to emerge, the likes of which had not been seen in generations. A mass anti-war movement developed across the country, bringing together anti-Zionist Jews and Muslims, activists with generations of organising experience and young people moved to resist oppression and injustice for the first time. There was, arguably, even an emerging rupture in the ideological core of US liberalism as young people broke to the left.
These green shoots of an entirely different way of doing politics—one that put humanity first and was led by people on the ground rather than pro-imperialists in comfortable offices—have been poisoned by the DDT of the DNC. 
Outside the convention, a resilient minority continued to raise their voices for Palestine. But a combination of intimidation and co-option—along with an understandably sapped momentum after ten months of resistance to genocide—have taken their toll. In a city of nearly 10 million people, just 5-7,000 could be mobilised. Democratic-run Chicago might have mobilised more police than that.
Inside the convention, the renewed energy of the party of war was palpable. Republicans were warmly welcomed, but Palestinians were personas non grata. “Stray dis­sent­ers have had Palestinian flags taken away; a hijab-wear­ing pro­tester was drowned out by chants of ‘We love Joe’ and hit with a Biden plac­ard after inter­rupt­ing the pres­id­ent’s speech”, <a href="https://ft.pressreader.com/article/281891598603982">observed Eduard Luce in the Financial Times</a>. 
Imagine a Black woman being treated like that at a Republican convention. Now you know what the Democrats are capable of. They can do this and still hypnotise Guardian columnists.
Like the first Obama campaign, the momentum of Harris portends a domestic rehabilitation of US liberalism and the Democratic Party’s credentials, which will only help them sell the next war. That’s just as frightening as the prospect of another four years of Trump.

The end of the lesser evil election?

Australia’s run-for-the-rich economy is hammering young people.
Living standards for those aged 15 to 34 went backwards between 2004 and 2022, according to a <a href="https://www.burnouteconomics.com/p/the-profoundly-sick-australian-household">new analysis of Bureau of Statistics figures</a> by economist Tarric Brooker. That’s despite national wealth per person increasing nearly threefold in the same period.
As if that weren’t shocking enough, the situation has dramatically worsened in the last two years, real consumption spending collapsing by nearly 13 percent among 25 to 29-year-olds. 
“Given the size of the decline, it’s entirely possible that this is the largest sustained drop in real consumer spending for this vital demographic since the Great Depression”, <a href="https://www.burnouteconomics.com/p/burnout-economics-and-aussie-household">Brooker noted last month</a>. 
Consumption is also down by more than 7 percent among 30 to 34-year-olds, 6 percent among 35 to 39-year-olds, and 2.7 percent among 18 to 24-year-olds.
<a href="https://www.commbank.com.au/content/dam/caas/newsroom/dynamic-media/2024/CommBank%20iQ%20report_23%20May%202024.pdf">According to the Commonwealth Bank</a>, spending on essentials such as groceries and utilities has fallen significantly in real terms.
For several years, there have been warnings that, for the first time in living memory, a new generation could end up financially worse off than their parents. That prediction has now come to fruition. 
Real wages are down around 7 percent in four years. The federal Treasury says they won’t fully recover until sometime in the 2030s—and that’s certainly not guaranteed. While that affects all workers, renters—who are disproportionately young people—have been hardest hit because landlords have jacked up rents far faster than the rate of inflation. 
Capital city asking rents for units have climbed by around 50 percent, and asking rents for houses have jumped even more. 
Also, if they can afford a house in the first place, younger people are more likely to have larger mortgages because they have spent less time paying off their debts and have had to buy at the latest stratospheric prices. The increases in interest rates mean that they are also disproportionately hit in the current economy. 
Indeed, the Bureau of Statistics’ <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia/latest-release">selected living costs indexes</a>—which, unlike the regular inflation measure, show the effects of rising interest rates—show that the cost of living has been much higher for working-class households than reported in the press over the last two years.
We are seeing a significant transfer of wealth from renters to landlords and from mortgaged homeowners to banks.
As an example, the Commonwealth Bank last week reported another $10 billion yearly profit. It’s doing so well that Mathew Hodge of investment adviser Morningstar said that the bank’s “excess capital” (its reserve of money) is growing so fast that it now “faces the high-quality problem of what to do with it”.
You read that right—analysts say the bank has more money than it knows what to do with.
Other asset holders are also riding a wave of prosperity. In fact, they are being treated to, in the words of the Financial Review’s Chanticleer column, “a deluge of dividends”—“the capital returns incentivised by Australia’s tax” system.
A bank with too much money. An investor class drowning in dividends. And young people enduring a Depression era-like collapse in living standards. 
Welcome to the Australian economy in 2024.

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