Thu 5 Nov 2026 12.24 AEDT
Photo: The White House/Flickr
Yesterday, Americans delivered a verdict few saw coming at this scale. Democrats took the House and the Senate. They flipped Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, Maine and South Carolina, and took the governor’s mansions in Texas and Ohio.
The post-mortems began within hours. JD Vance wrote that “the reason we lost is the war.” Donald Trump blamed his candidates, and said that had he been on the ballot, Republicans would have won.
Both men are desperate to distract from the true cause.
Reality.
That is, the reality of what it is to live inside Trump’s vision for America (and himself).
The far right wins by promising to destroy the powers that crush ordinary people and rob them of agency. As I wrote in Raw Power, Hanson’s appeal in our focus groups has almost nothing to do with policy and everything to do with the potent fury she projects.
But then the far right governs, as it did in Poland, Hungary, and Serbia, and it governs to a pattern as reliable as any law of physics.
First, they hollow out imperfect institutions that were nevertheless bulwarks against the worst excesses of the powerful.
Dazzling cruelty spectacles are intertwined with promises of private splendour to compensate for public squalor. These comprise critical misdirection for the concerted, frenzied orgy of corruption.
Then comes war (your own or someone else’s) as the politics of dominance goes looking new sources of wealth and spheres of influence.
And through all of it, prices keep rising, because none of this is conducive to genuine productivity. Cronies capture contracts, and capital flows to rent rather than output.
It can be easy to succumb to despondency in the face of this wealth and power concentration.
I have written about the global far right’s information operation, and asked Australians to call it what it is: foreign interference. It is well funded, networked and more sophisticated than anything progressives have yet built.
Critically, however, Texas tells us something about its limits. Elon Musk spent at least US$212 million trying to buy a Senate seat for Republican, Ken Paxton, in a race that was the most expensive in American history.
But Democrat, James Talarico raised enough to be heard.
He ran on the observation that megadonors have been “buying politicians in both political parties”. And then every Musk-funded ad proved his point.
Musk failed to learn this lesson previously in Wisconsin last year, where his candidate lost a US$81 million Supreme Court race by nine points.
You need enough money. But you simply do not need as much as the other side.
At some point, every extra billionaire dollar runs into the law of diminishing returns, because what it is being spent to drown out is lived experience. Money can buy attention, but it doesn’t buy the voter a cheaper tank of petrol.
Quality research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts you can trust.
Reality is also shifting what serious people are permitted to say.
Two weeks ago, Paul Krugman, about as mainstream as liberal economics gets, wrote that “we need to nationalize or at least take control of Starlink”, after Musk restricted Ukraine’s access to a network its soldiers depend on.
When Krugman writes that sentence, it can feel like the Overton window has shifted everywhere, but then our politicians and commentators remind us that Australia can sometimes be a laggard.
On Tuesday, the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.85 per cent, the fifth rise this year and the highest since 2008. Michele Bullock named “excess demand” as the key issue, in the same breath as a “massive supply shock” from oil prices and the war in the Middle East. The bank now expects unemployment to climb to 5.1 per cent.
Bernie Fraser, a former governor of the bank, warned in October that these rises “won’t do much to solve the inflation problem”, which is “not home-based, for the most part”, and that “they are causing a lot of pain and agony for working people”.
As certain politicians and commentators seize on the opportunity to sink the boot into the government for its profligacy, there is a degree of misdirection here too.
They hope we won’t notice the simplistic binary of ‘good private’ versus ‘bad public’ spending; that we won’t distinguish between what is extractive and what is productive in our economy.
They hope we won’t talk about the inflationary impact of the data centre buildout: that we are running a wartime-scale industrial project for private benefit while households absorb actual wartime inflation.
None of this was caused by a nurse in Penrith with a mortgage doing delivery driving on the side. But she is the one being asked to pay for it.
If we accept that inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and we need to take money out, why is the default assumption that the money must come out of working households, through mortgage repayments, rents and a lengthening unemployment queue?
There are other places it could come from, where its removal would barely be felt. Extreme wealth. The loopholes that let multinationals shift profits offshore. The gas we export with barely a resource tax paid.
A Labor government holds every one of those levers. But its response to Tuesday was to promise spending cuts in December and to make the budget “as tight as it can be”.
This is where progressives might want to learn from the American lesson.
Reality beat the far right in the United States, just as it did in Poland in 2023 and Hungary this year, but only after it had hurt a great many people. Migrants in detention or deported, activists killed, and small businesses bankrupted by tariffs and spiralling fuel prices.
The task for Australian progressives is to make that reality visible before the harms of a far right takeover become lived experience here too.
This must be done in conjunction with fixes to those material problems that the government has the capacity to address.
In our groups, there are people of colour who tell us they will risk racial profiling to vote for Hanson, so desperate are they to break the system. They are good, smart people in a bad information environment, and the only systemic explanation they have for why they are going backwards is a false one: immigration.
The true explanation exists. It is the fifty-year neo-liberal project that concentrates wealth upward by design, that privatised what we owned and then told us there was no money for what we need. It has a name, and ordinary people deserve to hear it said plainly, alongside a program to reverse it.
