As Donald Trump was threatening to steal the election yesterday evening, former prime minister Kevin Rudd was pinning the blame for the great American unraveling on another old white man: Rupert Murdoch
“In creating two warring states in America, our friend Rupert has had a big role to play in that,” Rudd told an exclusive talk for Crikey subscribers.
An election that should have been a Democratic landslide had turned into an anxious nail-biter. For Rudd, a big part of Trump’s enduring appeal, despite his disastrous management of everything his presidency has touched, lies in America’s descent into a nation of hyper-partisan warring tribes. And he believes a lot of the blame for that lies with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.
Fox has created an “echo chamber of disgruntled far-right populism”. It’s helped harden the profound dislocation of life in a late-capitalist hellscape into anger and resentment against external enemies. And when Trump gives people a target for that rage, they flock to him.
Seven years after News Corp helped kick him out, Rudd gets something about politics which a lot of pundits and pollsters miss — that regular voters aren’t always driven by a careful deliberation of policies, but rather baser, arbitrary emotion.
And there, Rudd says, lies the success of the modern demagogic right. They’ve been able to “mobilise the emotional neuroscience of fear, anxiety and hatred”, creating a politics built around nationalism and pride.
Meanwhile, the left’s attempts to fight this, with Obama-esque platitudes about hope and opportunity are falling flat.
“It’s like entering a street fight in Brooklyn in 1962 with a pocket-knife.”
Rudd is arming up in his own way. He is, in his own words, “still from Queensland and still here to help”. In his sights is News Corp. Hours after speaking to us, his petition calling for a royal commission into the Murdoch empire reached half a million signatures, more than any other in Australian history.
Rudd says its tremendous success is a sign more people outside the media-political bubble are recognising the extent of News Corp’s malevolent influence. And even if it goes nowhere in parliament, that shift in the conversation is important. He foresees growing opposition to News Corp among Labor’s grassroots, as well as the possibility of shareholder action and financial divestment against the company.
Of course, at the end of the day, Rudd needs progressive politicians to fight the crusade too. And as he himself concedes, many are terrified of Murdoch. He should know, having kissed the ring himself before the 2007 election.
Rudd is unapologetic. He said News Corp was a different beast then, one which would, occasionally, give the ALP a fair hearing. Now things are different.
“They’ll seek to destroy you, disembowel you and then defenestrate your remains,” he said.
The silver lining to that is that a current Labor leader simply has nothing to lose. They should fight back, Rudd says. In fact, it’s essential that they do.
The left needs more than just platitudes to beat back the deeply emotional siren call luring the old working class to the reactionary right, he tells us. That means getting a hell of a lot more bold. And boldness begins with knowing your enemy.
At the end of the Rudd/Julia/Rudd era the CPRS (carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) was no more and Julia was using the conservative phrase “Carbon Tax”. In a podcast Turnbull (who I despise) spoke about how the use of phrase by Julia was celebrated within the LNP and they knew they had won.
There was no grand scheme just credits for polluters so the Greens knocked it back.
Two Wet Libs who back Julia have disappeared and replaced in one case by Barnaby, what a great outcome.
Annastacia Palaszczuk has never seen a coalmine project she didn’t like.
Labor couldn’t convince Australians that giving tax credits to rich older Australians who actually hadn’t paid any tax was a bad idea.
Labor want to tweek the LNP energy policy to make it better.
Yes it is all Murdoch’s fault.
I signed the petition cause it was Murdoch but Labor are lost for the ever it seems.
Think you’ve got things a bit confused Mark. The CPRS was Rudd’s attempt in 2008 that didn’t get out of the blocks because Abbott rolled the supportive Turnbull as leader and then killed the bill in the Senate. One of Tony’s first demonstrations of his ability to destroy but create virtually nothing – except for the ‘budget emergency’. Gillard got the Clean Energy Act through in 2011. Its first phase was a fixed price on carbon that would then move to a floating market price. The Gillard Government used the term ‘carbon price’ consistently except that in one interview under pressure Gillard herself used the term carbon tax. She has since said she regretted not fighting the Coalition’s campaign to paint it as a tax
Rudd moved away from the CPRS (my understanding from an interview I saw with Lindsay Tanner that Gillard & Swan confronted him and stated that some unions would roll him if he didn’t step away from it). Gillard then found Rudd mentally unstable and was forced to roll him putting the unions back in full control.
The Clean Energy Act had a fixed price on carbon but an enormous amount of exemptions that made it worthless.
That’s why we have a Labor party that is worthless and unable to lay a glove of the incompetent corrupt Gov. It has no base values apart from those garnered from their current focus group and gaining power, they are unable to prosecute any meaningful message.
What you’ve written.
10+
Yes, but BrianD is right, you have conflated two separate policies and events.
Pretty amazing how quickly they were able to link Jeffrey Epstein to Kevin in relation to those donations. Seems like Rupert might have leant on some pretty important us connections to dig up that tidbit.
Rudd is right in saying that people don’t vote on the basis of careful consideration of policy but on more visceral emotions. The left have been wrong about that for decades, and I’ve been saying it for ages. Post-facto rationalisations are myriad, but they are just that, those hopelessly deluded explanations we give ourselves to justify bad or stupid behaviour.
Nobody could have consciously voted ScoMo’s govt in, but we did. Visceral gut reactions against the untrustworthy Shorten, and seriously corrupted media hounding of Labor policy led by News Corpse, allowed people to draw a veil over their baser instincts.
The only qualifier I would add to Rudd’s theory is that this bifurcation of society really kicked along with the rise of the internet. It is impossible to say how much was Rupert and how much was the internet, but the msm doesn’t have the same sway that it once did. The really rabid conspiracies that could only flourish with the internet are far beyond even Rupert’s distorted world view.
Rudd’s a brave man now he has nothing to lose.
Some of us have been in the trenches for over 30 years and didn’t notice him there when we needed assistance.
And nothing is different since 2007 when grovelling to Rupert did not seem a bad thing to our aspiring PM
Hi Pete
Who did you see in the trenches that made a difference, for my edification
I did get a bit of a gag response when I read the bit about Rupert and News Corp being a different animal when Kevin was Leader.
His petition is important but it should not be aimed at Murdoch primarily, Rupert is just a brand that does it well.
The infusion of marketing into media in general has been going on for a long time. We need a ramped up Factcheck,real oversiight into the integrity and direction of media in general.
Infomercial,newsmercial is unacceptable, the public have a right to expect honest appraisal without vested interests meddling in the information we are given,..”the truth” is not acceptable.
All advertising/propaganda, media, needs proper screening by an independent board with legislation that keeps the government of the day and their vested interest backers grubby hands out of it.