The hand-wringing by political ‘centre-left moderates’ about the rise of fascism and the likelihood of another Trump presidency overlooks a key fact: they are a big part of the problem.

There is widespread lamentation about the popularity of Donald Trump and the likelihood of another Trump presidency, from Hillary Clinton’s notorious 2016 reference to the ‘deplorables’ who support Donald Trump to current exhortations to be more politically active in the defence of democracy. More broadly there is rising concern among political ‘moderates’ about fascist governments being elected in diverse parts of the world.

In Australia the ‘centre-left’ is rightly concerned that Peter Dutton’s divisive and mendacious fear-mongering is suddenly gaining traction, despite the Liberals’ disastrous loss of former heartland seats to community independents in the 2022 federal election. ‘Centre-left’ is a term used by ignorant modern commentators to refer to the ALP, and equivalents in other countries.

The people who vote for the far-right are commonly described as stupid because they vote against their own interests, or bigoted, racist, ignorant and so on. Not commonly allowed is that they are being rational in a world that has gone crazy.

The United States has always had extremes of wealth and poverty, but those extremes were moderated after World War II by deliberate policies to share the wealth around less unevenly. This did not suit the wealthy, whose push back culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan set about attacking labour unions, deregulating trade and the financial sector, cutting taxes and running up huge federal ‘deficits’.

Maggie Thatcher did similar things in the UK, and soon the program was taken up around the developed world, particularly in the anglophone nations. This shift was supposedly justified by what became known as the neoliberal ideology, advocating small government and ‘free’ markets, though that ideology has no valid basis in either theory or practice.

The result was a rapid rise in inequality, which is now greater than ever before. Jobs were exported to poorer countries with low wages and few regulations, leaving formerly prosperous tradespeople and skilled workers unemployed or taking a huge pay cut. The financial sector sucked more and more of the wealth up for the already wealthy. In the US virtually all of the new wealth resulting from gains in productivity went to the wealthy, and median incomes have stagnated for decades. In Australia and the UK the trend was similar, though less extreme.

Then came the Global Financial Crisis, which knocked a lot of middle class folks in the US into poverty and increased the poverty of the poor, while the government bailed out the financial sector. It was Democrat President Bill Clinton who had removed key restrictions on the banking sector, so the banks could gamble with other people’s money, and set up the conditions for the crisis.

President Obama might have done more for ordinary folks, but he immediately appointed a Wall Street banker as his Treasury Secretary, so nothing serious would be done about the increasing dominance of the financial sector. The first Trump presidency is a measure of Obama’s failure.

In the US the middle class shrank and the poor got poorer. Desperation grew. People could see the wealthy flaunting the wealth that once was shared more widely. The party that was supposedly the champion of ordinary people was doing nothing, or making things worse.

When Trump appeared on the political scene his message was basically that he was going to smash the system. People whom the system was failing flocked to him. Trump might be an erratic bully, but what did they have to lose? His ‘make America great again’ message was code for restoring their former fortunes.

The stories in the UK and Australia are parallel, though less extreme. The ALP under Hawke and Keating had adopted the full neoliberal program, and it has remained in thrall to those ideas ever since. UK Labour was taken over by Tony Blair with a similar result. Rudd, Gillard and now Albanese merely continued the same policies, and show no evidence of understanding their failure. As more wealth has been channelled into unproductive speculation, economies have become more anaemic.

The only substantial dissent came from Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Had the Democratic Party machine supported Sanders, instead of protecting its own power, Sanders might well have beaten Trump. Sanders was also appealing to the dispossessed and disenfranchised, and he had a program that would actually have redressed some of the abuses of the neoliberal era.

Corbyn in the UK restored Labor to a competitive position, but he was attacked by everyone, including the BBC and the heavyweights of his own party protecting their own power. The Blairites are firmly in charge again.

The US Democrats, UK Labour and Australian Labor are not parties of the Left, nor even centre-left. They pursue neoliberal policies that are right-wing (favouring the wealthy) and, in historical context, extremist. Details are different in other countries, but the global infatuation with so-called free markets has had a similar influence.

Desperate people will vote for desperate remedies, including fascist dictatorships, as history shows. Only when the mainstream infatuation with neoliberalism is broken and we return to policies that care more for everyone will the threat of fascism recede.