Elections in Canada and Australia rarely make the news in the United States, but this year’s battles for Ottawa and Canberra have taken on a new significance. They are widely seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency.
And the verdict is decidedly negative. Canadian Liberal Mark Carney’s late rally carried him to victory last weekend, and Labor’s Anthony Albanese will likely pull off the same trick today in Australia. The left’s success in two of America’s closest allies does not seem to faze Trump much, but it reveals a problem for the conservative nationalists who are some of his most loyal supporters. They aspire to be a major force in global politics, but to do so, they need to build off their early successes and develop a shared destiny.
The conservative nationalist movement is young. A decade ago, it hardly existed. Starting with the vote for Brexit and then Trump’s first presidential victory, though, a loosely aligned group of political movements—mostly in Europe and the Americas—started to cohere around a powerful critique of the pieties espoused by their ruling elites.
That elite, which runs many key institutions and centers of power, embraced a set of attitudes and impulses that supported their place in life. The multinational firms they captained connected Western consumers to factories springing up around the developing world, and they plowed some of the profits into activist groups that furthered their left-wing social causes. They also adopted an ever-changing vocabulary and set of morals to distinguish the au courant views from the ones not worth hearing.
The common-sense backlash was powerful. Encouraging foreigners to come to your country, flout the rules and customs that made it a desirable destination, and nurse grievances is a recipe for balkanization and civil strife—not a sign of enlightened consciousness. Undertaking massive experiments on the fundamental building blocks of society—in many cases without democratic debate—is equally corrosive. Voters saw all this, and politicians who seized on these themes have benefited.
Conservative nationalists around the world largely agree that their countries need broader, more unifying sources of cohesion than left-wing identity politics can offer while still celebrating their distinctiveness in a way that discomfits the Davos set. Many of them hoped that, by reversing the left’s pernicious influence and by otherwise agreeing to leave each other alone, they could reorient global affairs in a healthier direction.
Having gained power in many places, the conservative nationalists are finding that critiquing the old establishment is easier than creating a new one. Identifying societal problems is relatively straightforward; solving them is grinding, hard work. Countries cannot run solely on liberal tears.
Take economics, for example. Most conservative nationalists are skeptical of government bureaucrats and their attempts to push businesses and workers toward their enlightened goal of the week. There is, however, not much consensus on what else to do. The European right has struggled to find a way out of Europe’s stagnation, but the Indian right and others, like Javier Millei, have focused on making their societies richer and stronger.
This problem is more apparent now that Trump presides over the country as the center of the international order. He believes the United States has been too generous to friends and foes alike, and he wants to rebalance that American-led order accordingly. Leaders should prioritize their country’s interests (that’s why voters entrust them with enormous power), but when allies think that they can only gain by hurting each other, they often make that prediction come true.
That is largely why the left won in Canada and has the lead in Australia. Pierre Poilievre’s casual evisceration of lefty pieties had thrilled conservatives of all stripes, but when Trump started referring to Canada as the 51st state, Poilievre fired back with Canada First. Australia’s Peter Dutton is trying to dodge the label that he is “Temu Trump.” Both lost their leads more because voters rallied around the left-leaning candidate than because they soured on the conservative.
Trump does not see these elections as a setback. In March, he said, “I think it’s easier to deal actually with a Liberal” in charge in Canada. He is not a big fan of ideologies and abstractions, and he assumes that foreigners will define their interests as narrowly as he does and guard them with equal zeal, regardless of what they think about wokeness. So far, that has not affected him much, but every presidency has rough patches and, at some point, needs friends.
When Western Europe started tilting toward communism at the beginning of the Cold War, Americans confronted an even starker dilemma than they do now. At the time, they discovered that rewarding countries that aligned with them against their enemies was a very effective strategy. It’s time to dust off that old playbook.
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