Australia, UK could be sneak preview of elections next year, Texas included

By Pratt on Texas listener Steven “in Swisher County.”

I watched with interest the December 12 election in Britain for a whole host of reasons.  Part of it is my interest in Britain; while not a full-fledged Anglophile, I still look at the history and politics of the place.  Part of it is my broader interest in the Outside World, and yet another is paired with that interest in other countries and how they do business, to include how they conduct themselves as societies both within and without government.  After the dust settled, and the political map of Britain was redrawn – at least until December 2024 – you could see something very peculiar, and the notice did not escape me, nor the commentators on the Australian news feeds that I tended to gravitate towards.

The observation is this: in Britain, the map was Tory blue in England and much of Wales.  You have the Scottish National Party essentially taking over Scotland, and different parties of different stripes in Northern Ireland, but for the most part, the island of Great Britain was Tory blue.  The red dots representing Labour were either in London, other cities such as Manchester, and the university towns.  Labour used to represent the industrial heartlands of the north of England, but in this election, they were sent packing.  Clearly, those same populations feel abandoned by Labour, and they voted accordingly.  A transformation occurred in this election that has actually been in work for some time: Labour abandoned its traditional voters and has become a party representing urban elites and intellectuals with very little grounding in on-the-ground realities, economic or otherwise.

But this also happened in Australia earlier this year.  The Australian Labor Party was exposed the same way.  Australia’s politics of course are different – that country isn’t enraptured over the issue of leaving a supranational entity like the European Union.  Nonetheless, the Liberal Party/National Party coalition held on to power, and like its British analogue, it represents the interests of urban elites and intellectuals.

In the case of both the UK and Australia, you can also point out that their Right leaning parties were in power, and both had undergone leadership changes shortly before their respective elections.  Last year, the Liberal Party underwent what the locals call a “spill” and dumped Prime Minister Turnbull in favor of Scott Morrison about eight months before the election.  In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May saw the writing on the wall and left Number 10 while she could, and the Tories settled on Boris Johnson to carry out their mandate.  Both faced media establishments, ensconced in urban bubbles filled with conventional wisdom, that assumed that they were easy pickings for Leftists, and in both places the media were proved to be astonishingly wrong.

In both cases you can see that the main issue was one the media and others refused to acknowledge: there is a world of the elites and intellectuals that inhabit the urban centers, and practically everyone else, and in the elections in both Britain and Australia, you can see this divide laid bare.  There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that city folk tend to have more positive views of government as they tend to farm out more responsibilities to cities, to the point where many (though not all) in the cities abandon the civil society, relying increasingly on government to not only provide for law and order and for other services such as education, sanitation and the like, but to also act as more or less a big United Way; a massive charity that will further absolve people of what would otherwise be humanitarian, charitable impulses.  In rural areas, and even the exurban areas, individual responsibility and initiative is still very important, for out in rural areas, you can and often are a long way from anywhere, requiring people to rely upon themselves and their neighbors to a greater extent than you will find in the cities.  It should also be noted that social views are also markedly different: the notion, for example, that there are more than two sexes is an idea that developed in the cities and the acceptance of such is seen as a mark of the highest level of sophistication and nuance.  These experiences tend to color the way people see the world.  There are exceptions, of course, but the election results, I suspect, reflect this increasing divide.

This is seen in the United States, with its own urban-rural divide.  One just needs to take a look at the cities, populated with their own smug, self-impressed, navel-gazing elites and their voting patterns.  The same can be seen there: the cities in the United States are populated with people who are very comfortable with bigger and bigger government doing more and more things, even if those same people would be better off doing some of these things themselves.  They tend to sneer at their rural cousins, who likewise look upon the urbanites and wondering why they can’t just take care of things on their own, and why they can’t just be left alone by government and many others to figure out solutions to their own problems, leaving government to focus only on its original purposes.

So, how does all of this figure in to Texas and its future?  I’d argue that what we are seeing globally, or at least in countries like Britain and Australia, is a change of constituencies.  Labour once represented people who worked in, say, manufacturing, mining, or other industrial trades, as the name implies.  You could argue the same of its Australian cousin.  But both parties, and even the Democratic party in the United States, have rejected these traditional constituencies, in favor of urban elites and an intellectual class that would insist they know best how their cities, states and ultimately the country should be run, and that voters in the hinterlands deserve nothing but scorn, and that in any case they should shut up and let the smart people run things (they do populate the great world cities, don’tcha know).  Almost by default, the countryside is being represented by parties that value more basic things like trying to manage public funds (or at least pretend to care), or getting the basic things right.  You can see this happening in Texas.  It has rapidly expanding urban centers – Houston, the Metroplex, San Antonio/Austin – and these are full of people who are comfortable with every bigger and ever expanding government, which are headed by elites and intellectuals that, again, know best, and behave accordingly.  Conversely, they want a state government – and ultimately a federal one – that caters to them.  And the rural voters, in their view, should just let the smart people run things and benefit from their wisdom.

If Texas does “turn blue” the way it will be done is through the cities, which, if not restrained, will exhibit the same issues with corruption and problems with leadership that refuses to consider the basics first, foremost and always that other American cities do, and they will take aim at the state government to coddle them.  It is important that voters of a conservative bent be vigilant to this tendency and issue, and do their level best to prevent urbanization from turning around to cause problems for Texas that it has in other states (and possibly the country as a whole).  However, the elections that we have seen in Australia and the UK can also point to another positive trend towards that end: that people outside the main urban centers are still grounded in reality and can see the world as it truly is, and vote accordingly (for example, maybe having wide open borders is in fact a bad idea and is more of a hindrance than a help).  The elections in Australia and the UK could, just possibly, provide a sneak preview of U.S. elections next year, and perhaps those in Texas as well.