This helped to transform Western democracies like ours from manufacturing economies to knowledge economies. As a result, there is now a much stronger correlation between income and tertiary education, and this has taken a bite especially in the US. People who have cultural power and the probability of economic power are the class of knowledge.
Trump’s anti-elite rhetoric would once have been that of a Democrat. Credit: AP
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Our main parties were not built for that. They reflect a different political age from labor versus capital. Of course, pocket voters still exist in large numbers, but now they are different: aspirational rather than collectivist, so they vote for things like tax cuts even when they may not immediately enjoy most of the votes. its fruits. The Coalition has understood this for decades, which explains how many Labor MPs have taken it, even though they are not yet in the majority. The workers had to suffer defeat in 2019 with a redistributive agenda to finally grasp it, but it continues to eliminate them.
But these voters, divided between the main parties, are insufficient to hand over the government. Both parties, therefore, try to retain them while appealing to the knowledge class. Consequently, both sides are now built on a contradiction. Labor first clashed when they found themselves embroiled in issues such as climate change and asylum seekers’ policy. The more he sought a position that attracted him to higher education, the more he alienated his suburban base. He has been leaking to the Coalition and the Greens for years.
But the Coalition has also embodied a stark contradiction between those who embrace a globalized free market with all the liberal and multicultural change that this entails, and those attracted by a more nationalist stance. John Howard’s liberal economy and cultural conservatism kept this together, but it has been slowly unfolding ever since. In this year’s election, the tension was finally broken. There is no guarantee that the deposit can be repaired.
Votes in the primaries of our major parties are structurally declining, not because they are simply hopeless, but because our policy has fragmented to the point that there are no more natural majorities in Australia. We now have majorities of dissent, so we can eliminate a government through a coalition of discontent, but any new government becomes vulnerable to the formation of a new dissident majority around it. Our tradition of compulsory preferential voting has camouflaged it, artificially preserving bipartisan rule. If we had a more European-style proportional system, we would have had European-style results for a decade: moving from one minority government to another, each formed by a temporary coalition of rivals. This could be the time when our political rift finally dominated the tape of our electoral system.
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Perhaps Labor, facing a mutilated coalition, will find a minimally decent and competent government to return with a larger majority. But it is equally possible that our political divide will continue at a good pace and that this is one of the last majority governments we have.
The Greens go from four seats to six, then eight, and the Labor government ends its time in a formal coalition with a pair of Green ministers. The Greens, turned into a ruling party, risk becoming the UK Liberal Democrats, facing a protest vote and everything gives way to a new Conservative coalition of Liberals, Nationals, Green Greens, One Nation or any other new party that has arisen. In the meantime.
The unforeseen (or, for example, a recession) will probably decide. Obviously, however, what we have seen this year is not a spectacular accident. It is the culmination of things, of a reconstruction of Australia and of a political system crunching under this tension. The next decade is about how long and strong these crunchy will be.
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