Philippa Kaur

US President Donald Trump’s net approval in analyst Nate Silver’s aggregate of US national polls slid two points in the last week to -9.4, after his ratings had been stable since late July. Currently, 53.1% disapprove of his performance, compared to 43.7% who approve.

Trump’s net approval was worse last Wednesday at -10.0 before recovering. This is only slightly better than his worst net approval of this term, -10.3 on July 22.

In Silver’s historic approval data, Trump’s ratings are worse than any other president after Harry Truman – they only top his own ratings at this stage of his first term.

Trump’s ratings may have slid over his administration’s controversial attempts to cancel the late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel. Analyst G. Elliott Morris cited a YouGov poll this week in which 68% of Americans said it was unacceptable for the government to pressure broadcasters to remove shows it disagrees with, compared to just 12% who said it was acceptable.

An alternative explanation for the slide in Trump’s ratings is inflation. Silver tracks Trump’s ratings on four issues: immigration, the economy, trade and inflation. Trump’s net approval on immigration (-5.3), the economy (-15.6) and trade (-17.3) have held up in the last month, but his net approval on inflation (-30.0) has dropped six points since the end of August.

The benchmark US S&P 500 stock index peaked last Monday at nearly 6,700 points, an increase of 2.8% in the last month.

I believe Trump’s ratings are unlikely to become very poor unless something goes badly wrong with either the stock market or the broader US economy.

US and UK elections and polls

Last Tuesday, Democrats held Arizona’s seventh House district in a US special election, with a substantial swing in their favour.

Other US state and local elections will happen on November 4, covered here in The Poll Bludger.

There will also be a deputy Labour leadership election in the United Kingdom in late October. The far-right Reform party is leading Labour by about ten points in national polls and would probably win a majority in the House of Commons on current voting intentions, given the UK’s first-past-the-post system.

Victorian polls are contradictory

A Victorian state Redbridge poll for The Herald Sun, conducted September 3–11 from a sample of 2,005 voters, gave Labor a 52–48% lead over the Coalition, a 0.5-point gain for Labor since July.

Primary votes were 37% Coalition (down one point), 32% Labor (down one), 13% Greens (down one) and 18% for all others (up three). The next Victorian election is in November 2026.

A Victorian state DemosAU poll, conducted September 2–9 from a sample of 1,327 voters, however, gave the Coalition a 51–49% lead. Primary votes were 38% Coalition, 26% Labor, 15% Greens and 21% for all others.

Liberal Brad Battin led Labor incumbent Jacinta Allan by 37–32% as preferred premier. Respondents thought Victoria was headed in the wrong direction by a wide margine, 58–25%. A quarter of respondents thought crime was the most important issue, while 24% said cost of living was.

Federal Labor led the Coalition in Victoria by a 55–45% margin. Primary votes were 32% Labor, 29% Coalition, 13% Greens, 12% One Nation and 14% for all others. One Nation’s vote in this poll is six points above its 2025 election result.

NSW Resolve poll has big Labor lead

A NSW state Resolve poll for The Sydney Morning Herald, conducted with the federal August and September Resolve polls from a sample of over 1,000 voters, gave Labor 38% of the primary vote (steady since July), the Coalition 28% (down four), the Greens 10% (down three), independents 11% (up three) and others 12% (up two).

Resolve doesn’t usually give a two-party estimate for its state polls, but The Poll Bludger estimated a Labor lead by 59–41%. Labor incumbent Chris Minns led Liberal Mark Speakman as preferred premier by 37–16% (compared to 35–16% in July).

This poll was released shortly after Labor gained the seat of Kiama that had been held by convicted sex offender Gareth Ward at a September 13 byelection.

Labor’s Katelin McInerney defeated the Liberals’ Serena Copley at the byelection by a 60.2–39.8% margin. (Ward had beaten McInerney by 50.8–49.2% as an independent at the March 2023 election).

The next NSW election is in March 2027.

Labor holds large lead in federal Morgan poll

A national Morgan poll, conducted August 25 to September 21 from a sample of 5,084 voters, gave Labor a 55.5–44.5% lead by headline respondent preferences, a one-point gain for the Coalition since the August Morgan poll.

Primary votes were 34% Labor (steady), 30% Coalition (steady), 12% Greens (steady), 9.5% One Nation (up 0.5) and 14.5% for all others (down 0.5). By 2025 election preference flows, Labor led by an unchanged 55.5–44.5%.

The Coalition has taken the lead in Queensland, leading by 51.5–48.5%, but Labor is well ahead in all other states. Queensland was the only state the Coalition won at the 2025 federal election (by 50.6–49.4%).

Labor had a commanding 69–31% lead among those aged 18–34, a 59–41% lead with those aged 35–49 and a 50.5–49.5% lead with those aged 50–64. The Coalition had a 56–44% lead with those aged 65 and older.

Newspoll aggregate data for July to September

On September 21, the Australian released aggregate data
for the three Newspolls taken from July 14 to September 11. The overall sample size was 3,811 people, and Labor led by 57–43% across all three polls.

The Poll Bludger reported that Labor led by 60–40% in New South Wales, 58–42% in Victoria, 51–49% in Queensland, 54–46% in Western Australia and 55–45% in South Australia. Morgan had Labor ahead by 56.5–43.5% in NSW, with the election result there at 55.3–44.7% to Labor.

Labor led with university-educated people by a 60–40% margin. Labor also led by 57–43% among those with a TAFE/technical education, but only by 53–47% among those with no tertiary education.

Additional federal Resolve questions

I covered the national Resolve poll for Nine newspapers that gave Labor a 55–45% lead over the Coalition.

In additional questions, 52% of respondents thought it was important for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to meet Trump, although 58% had a negative view of Trump.

By 58–18%, voters also supported or accepted the adoption of nuclear-powered submarines by Australia (compared to 57–20% in November 2021).

There was a 29–29% tie on whether Australia should recognise Palestine as a state this month. On the Israel-Gaza war, 39% wanted an immediate end without preconditions, 22% only supported ending the war if Hamas is removed from power and 13% only when the remaining hostages are returned to Israel.

Liberals abandon Bradfield legal challenge

Last Thursday, the Liberals abandoned their legal challenge to teal Nicolette Boele’s 26-vote win in Bradfield at the May federal election.

The electoral commission had declared Boele the winner in June and she was seated pending the outcome of legal challenges. She will now serve a full term as the member for Bradfield. More

United States President Donald Trump is well advanced in his systematic campaign to undermine the American media and eviscerate its function of holding him and others in power to account.

Since the late 18th century this function has often been called the fourth estate. It’s the idea the media is a watchdog over the other three estates which, in modern democracies, are parliament, the executive government and the judiciary.

In the US, Trump has had considerable success in weakening the other three.

His Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress, and they have shown no sign of wishing to restrain him.

He has stacked the executive government with cronies and ideological fellow travellers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr (and his anti-vaccination agenda) as secretary of health, a brief stint by Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.

He has secured the support of the Republican Party to stack the Supreme Court with politically aligned judges who have routinely struck down lower court decisions against Trump, most notably in the matter of deporting migrants to countries other than their homelands.

Pulling funding, applying pressure

The fourth estate’s turn started in March, when Trump stripped federal funding from Voice of America, a public broadcasting service with a global reach, because it was “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

These cuts also hit two other projections of American soft power, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.

In July, he cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a move that ended all federal support for National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting service and their member stations.

Now he has turned to the private sector media. He does not have the power to cut their funding, so he is taking a different approach: financial shake-downs and threats to the foundations of their business.

In October 2024, even before he was elected, Trump sued the Paramount company for US$10 billion (about A$15 billion). He alleged an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign had been “deceptively edited” by the CBS television network, a Paramount subsidiary.

In February 2025, after he had been sworn in as president, Trump upped the ante to US$20 billion (A$30 billion).

The case was considered by lawyers to have no legal merit, but at that time, Paramount was anxious to merge with Skydance Media, and this was subject to regulatory approval from the Trump administration.

So Paramount was vulnerable to, how shall we say? Blackmail? Extortion? Subornation?

A busy, dangerous July

On July 2, Paramount settled with Trump for US$16 million (A$24 million), which ostensibly is to go towards funding his presidential library.

On July 17 Paramount’s CBS network announced its longtime Late Show would be cancelled from May 2026 after its presenter Stephen Colbert, an outspoken critic of Trump, condemned the corporate cave-in. The Trump administration approved the merger shortly after.

Subsequently the House of Representatives Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees announced an investigation into whether the $16 million settlement constituted a bribe.

Also in July, Trump sued Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for defamation arising from an article linking Trump to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He claimed the now-familiar amount of US$10 billion (A$15 billion) in damages.

Legal experts in the US say Trump has next to no chance of winning. In the US, public figures who sue for defamation have to prove that the publisher was motivated by malice, which means they published either knowing the material to be untrue, or not caring whether it was true or not.

This case is never likely to end up in court, nor is it likely that Trump will see a red cent of Murdoch’s money. The two men need each other too much. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War, they are in a MAD relationship: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Coming to heel, one by one

Rupert Murdoch was a guest at Windsor Castle at the recent banquet given for Trump by King Charles.

Considering Murdoch’s bitter history with the Royal Family, it is difficult to imagine Buckingham Palace inviting him without Trump’s urging. It may have been a sign of rapprochement between the two men.

Meanwhile Trump has set his sights on The New York Times, suing it for defamation and claiming US$15 billion (A$27 billion).

Referring to the Times’ endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he said it had become a “mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party”.

Despite lawsuit threats, the New York Times hasn’t capitulated to Trump – yet.
Mary Altaffer/AP

This case faces the same difficulties as his suit against the Wall Street Journal. The question is whether the Times will stand its ground or whether, like Paramount, it caves.

Among the big three US newspapers, the Times is the only one so far not to have been intimidated by Trump. The other two, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, refused to endorse a candidate at the election on instructions from their owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong respectively, both of whose wider business interests are vulnerable to Trumpian retribution.

Read more:
Two of the US’s biggest newspapers have refused to endorse a presidential candidate. This is how democracy dies

The Post’s decision was condemned as “spineless” by its celebrated former editor Marty Baron.

Now Disney is in the firing line. It owns another of the big four US television networks, ABC. On September 17, it pulled its late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Kimmel had responded to White House accusations that leftists were responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, saying:

we hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.

In what had all the hallmarks of a preemptive buckle, ABC and two of its affiliate networks took Kimmel off air indefinitely after Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said his agency might “take action” against the network because of Kimmel’s comments.

Kimmel is returning to TV, but the damage is already done.

Read more:
Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is the latest sign we’re witnessing the end of US democracy

Over at cable network MSNBC, its senior political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired after he had uttered on air the blindingly obvious statement that Kirk’s own radical rhetoric may have contributed to the shooting that killed him.

This cable network is no longer part of the main NBC network, so it can’t be said that NBC itself has yet come to heel.

Within 24 hours of Brendan Carr’s veiled threat, Trump stripped the veil away and made the threat explicit. Trump said of the national networks:

All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed, they’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat party. I would think maybe their licence should be taken away.

Whether cancelling a licence would breach the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, is a question that might ultimately come before the Supreme Court. Given the present ideological proclivities of that court, the outcome would be by no means certain.

So Trump now has two out of three national newspapers, and two out of the big four national television networks, on the run.

Only one national newspaper and two national networks to go, and one of those is Murdoch’s Fox News, Trump’s most reliable cheerleader. More

Protests are becoming a routine part of public life in the United States. Since 2017, the number of nonviolent demonstrations has almost tripled, according to researchers with the nonprofit Crowd Counting Consortium.

And more people are joining than ever. The Black Lives Matter marches in 2020, after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, have been described as the largest nonviolent mobilization in U.S. history. The No Kings protests against Trump administration policies on June 14, 2025, were not far behind, with between 2 million and 4.8 million Americans protesting nationwide

What explains this surge of protest activity?

My research shows that polarization – the extent to which people dislike members of the opposing party – is a key driver. Today political polarization, as reflected by the ratings Americans give to the political parties, continues to be at its highest level since political scientists began using the measure in 1964.

I am an expert on political behavior, and my work analyzes how polarization shapes public life. In a recent article published in the journal Social Forces, I analyzed surveys conducted between 2014 and 2021 that asked Americans whether they had joined protests connected to Black Lives Matter, the climate movement or the tea party, the small-government movement that was active in the early 2010s.

These surveys, which include over 14,000 respondents, make it possible to see what separates people who protest from those who stay home.

The data points to a clear pattern: Anger at the other side motivates protest. People who rated the opposing party more negatively at one point in time were much more likely to take part in demonstrations in the years that followed.

Dislike for the other side spurs action

Importantly, I found that partisan animosity was a strong motivator for taking part in protests, even after taking people’s feelings about the issues into account. In the surveys, respondents were asked detailed questions about their views on the movements’ topics: for example, whether white Americans enjoyed advantages that Black Americans did not, or how serious a problem they thought climate change was and whether it was caused by human activity.

This allowed me to calculate how much protest activity was due to partisan anger and how much was simply a result of policy concerns. The results surprised me.

For the two higher-profile movements – Black Lives Matter and the tea party – partisan animosity mattered for protest a little more than half as much as people’s feelings about racial inequality or government spending, respectively. For climate protests, the effect of partisan anger was even greater. How people felt toward the “other side” mattered 2½ times more for their decision to protest than did concern about climate change.

This finding matters because it shows that polarization is not just about what people think. It also changes how they participate in politics.

What’s known as “affective polarization,” or the tendency for partisans to dislike and distrust each other, has already been shown to affect how people view U.S. political parties and their willingness to be friends across party lines. My study showed that this kind of division also increases people’s real-world engagement with politics.

When partisans feel threatened or angry at the opposing side, they don’t just complain about it. They organize, hit the streets and march.

More division, more marches

The polarized nature of protest also helps explain why some of today’s protests address multiple issues. The No Kings protests in June 2025, for instance, challenged a number of actions, including funding cuts to social programs, ICE deportations and the deployment of troops in Los Angeles.

But the “King” in question was always clear: President Donald Trump. Protesters may not have shared identical or extreme views on every issue, but they were united by their opposition to Trump.

Protest has long been an infrequent activity, but that’s changing. In the 2020 American National Election Study, nearly 1 in 10 Americans said they had joined a protest in the past year, the highest figure recorded on that survey since the question was first asked in 1976.

That level of participation makes protest one of the most visible ways Americans now engage in politics. As polarization remains high, there is every reason to expect it will continue – starting with another nationwide No Kings protest planned for Oct. 18, 2025. More

A modern-day political inquisition is unfolding in “digital town squares” across the United States. The slain far-right activist Charlie Kirk has become a focal point for a coordinated campaign of silencing critics that chillingly echoes one of the darkest chapters in American history.

Individuals who have publicly criticised Kirk or made perceived insensitive comments regarding his death are being threatened, fired or doxed.

Teachers and professors have been fired or disciplined, one for posting that Kirk was racist, misogynistic and a neo-Nazi, another for calling Kirk a “hate-spreading Nazi”.

Journalists have also lost their jobs after making comments about Kirk’s assassination, as has the late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel.

A website called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” had been posting the names, locations and employers of people saying critical things about Kirk before it was reportedly taken down. Vice President JD Vance has pushed for this public response, urging supporters to “call them out … hell, call their employer”.

This is far-right “cancel culture”, the likes of which the US hasn’t seen since the McCarthy era in the 1950s.

A demonstration in response to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show outside of The Walt Disney Studios in California.
Jae C. Hong/AP

The birth of McCarthyism

The McCarthy era may well have faded in our collective memory, but it’s important to understand how it unfolded and the impact it had on America. As the philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Since the 1950s, “McCarthyism” has become shorthand for the practice of making unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty against political opponents, often through fear-mongering and public humiliation.

Joseph McCarthy.
Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons

The term gets its name from Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican who was the leading architect of a ruthless witch hunt in the US to root out alleged Communists and subversives across American institutions.

The campaign included both public and private persecutions from the late 1940s to early 1950s, involving hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

A hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948.
AP

Millions of federal employees had to fill out loyalty investigation forms during this time, while hundreds of employees were either fired or not hired. Hundreds of Hollywood figures were also blacklisted.

The campaign also involved the parallel targeting of the LGBTQI+ community working in government – known as the Lavender Scare.

And similar to doxing today, witnesses in government hearings were asked to provide the names of communist sympathisers, and investigators gave lists of prospective witnesses to the media. Major corporations told employees who invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify they would be fired.

The greatest toll of McCarthyism was perhaps on public discourse. A deep chill settled over US politics, with people afraid to voice any opinion that could be construed as dissenting.

When the congressional records were finally unsealed in the early 2000s, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said the hearings “are a part of our national past that we can neither afford to forget nor permit to reoccur”.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy chats with his attorney, Roy Cohn, during a Senate subcommittee hearing in 1954.
Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons

Another witch hunt under Trump

Today, however, a similar campaign is being waged by the Trump administration and others on the right, who are stoking fears of the “the enemy within”.

This new campaign to blacklist government critics is following a similar pattern to the McCarthy era, but is spreading much more quickly, thanks to social media, and is arguably targeting far more regular Americans.

Even before Kirk’s killing, there were worrying signs of a McCarthyist revival in the early days of the second Trump administration.

After Trump ordered the dismantling of public Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, civil institutions, universities, corporations and law firms were pressured to do the same. Some were threatened with investigation or freezing of federal funds.

In Texas, a teacher was accused of guiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) squads to suspected non-citizens at a high school. A group called the Canary Mission identified pro-Palestinian green-card holders for deportation. And just this week, the University of California at Berkeley admitted to handing over the names of staff accused of antisemitism.

Supporters of the push to expose those criticising Kirk have framed their actions as protecting the country from “un-American”, woke ideologies. This narrative only deepens polarisation by simplifying everything into a Manichean world view: the “good people” versus the corrupt “leftist elite”.

The fact the political assassination of Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman did not garner the same reaction from the right reveals a gross double standard at play.

Another double standard: attempts to silence anyone criticising Kirk’s divisive ideology, while being permissive of his more odious claims. For example, he once called George Floyd, a Black man killed by police, a “scumbag”.

In the current climate, empathy is not a “made-up, new age term”, as Kirk once said, but appears to be highly selective.

This brings an increased danger, too. When neighbours become enemies and dialogue is shut down, the possibilities for conflict and violence are exacerbated.

Many are openly discussing the parallels with the rise of fascism in Germany, and even the possibility of another civil war.

A sense of decency?

The parallels between McCarthyism and Trumpism are stark and unsettling. In both eras, dissent has been conflated with disloyalty.

How far could this go? Like the McCarthy era, it partly depends on the public reaction to Trump’s tactics.

McCarthy’s influence began to wane when he charged the army with being soft on communism in 1954. The hearings, broadcast to the nation, did not go well. At one point, the army’s lawyer delivered a line that would become infamous:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness […] Have you no sense of decency?

Without concerted, collective societal pushback against this new McCarthyism and a return to democratic norms, we risk a further coarsening of public life.

The lifeblood of democracy is dialogue; its safeguard is dissent. To abandon these tenets is to pave the road towards authoritarianism. More

An unusual feature of Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK was the spectacle of the Royal Marines, the Coldstream Guards and the Royal Air Force “beating retreat” as the president and King Charles looked on.

This is a traditional military ceremony that started in the 17th century and marked the closing of camp gates and the lowering of flags. It is, by all accounts, the kind of British “soft power” that excites the president and consolidates “the special relationship” between allies.

But one cannot help wondering if what this ceremony marked was in fact the final retreat of the US and UK from their self-defined role as defenders of an international order based on liberal and democratic values.

How are we otherwise to reconcile the fact that a “populist” American president, supposedly elected on an anti-elitist message, so visibly revelled in facing an audience composed almost exclusively of the elites of a monarchical system (on Wednesday) and the tech-business community (on Thursday)?

Trump may have had the unprecedented honour of a second state visit. But what does it say about “the special relationship” between common people (if not heads of state) when the visit was arranged to land in a week the House of Commons was not sitting, meaning he would not be able to address the national parliament?

Perhaps it says something about the retreat of American Republican virtues and the rise of an “imperial presidency” (just as King George III in Hamilton the musical predicted). Trump would not want to be reminded that it was President Obama who had the recent honour of speaking to the British people through their elected representatives in Westminster Hall.

Meanwhile, how do we reconcile the sense that Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows how to handle President Trump with Starmer’s apparent inability to prevent the political retreat of his own government?

The answer to that is that the prime minister may be a better diplomat than he is a politician. He understands that flattery makes Trump the man happy, but he seems less certain about how to deal with Trumpism the idea.

Trump and Starmer behind the scenes.
Number 10/Flickr, CC BY

Trumpism has inspired so-called “new right” movements throughout the western world. In the UK, it defeated Starmer’s preferred brand of progressive internationalism when Nigel Farage pushed for and won a vote to leave the European Union in 2016.

In the wake of this state visit, the government will claim success by pointing to the £150 billion of investment apparently secured through tech deals. It is not, however, clear what role the US state, or indeed the state visit, had in securing (as opposed to announcing) that.

In the meantime, Starmer’s Labour is still reluctant to push back against new right thinking by pointing to the cost Brexit has had on government tax revenues.

A similar concern is being voiced on the cost of the new right’s approach to immigration in the US. The president proudly defended his administration’s actions on immigration and even recommended the UK deploy the military to manage migration. But armed raids on Hyundai factories in the US have left another key ally, South Korea, questioning its longstanding commitment to invest there.

This state visit has coincided with the United Nations Commission of Inquiry finding that Israel has engaged in four of the five genocidal acts as defined under international law since the beginning of its war with Hamas in 2023.

One cannot expect policy – and certainly not policy differences – to make their way into banquet speeches. But the expectation that Trump will simply ignore UK pleas to pressure Israel into stopping its offensive makes the Windsor scenes difficult viewing for many.

Middle East policy differences were on display at the Chequers press conference and the UK government will seek to mollify its critics by following through on its intention to imminently recognise Palestine as a sovereign state. But without US support, the UK cannot expect this to make an immediate difference to the humanitarian situation.

Notes of discord

There was an additional musical theme to the speeches at the state banquet during Trump’s visit. The president described the US and UK as “two notes in the same chord”.

That may be the case, but there are many discordant notes sounded when the president’s words are mixed with the political soundtrack beyond Windsor castle and Chequers. Outside these sheltered surroundings, the mood music is changing.

The images of militaries marching in royal gardens resonate with the recent ceremonial displays of hard power in Washington and Beijing. Putin standing alongside Xi no doubt disappointed Trump, who reportedly tried to ally with Russia to balance the power of China. He was explicit on that at Chequers. Trump feels “let down” by Putin.

The progressive side of UK foreign policy thinking hopes this now means Trump will be more committed to Ukraine and the liberal principle of national self-determination. But perhaps the wider implication of these discordant notes is that “the special relationship” is being reimagined as a focal point in an international order of competing power blocks. This state visit may indeed come to symbolise the retreat of the liberal international order. More

In the past few weeks, the United States military has been involved in multiple fatal strikes on boats in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.

The first airstrike was on September 5 and killed 11 people. The second occurred this week, killing three people. No efforts were made to apprehend the vessels or identify the people before the strikes.

President Donald Trump has claimed the boats and the people on them were trafficking illegal drugs bound for the US, dubbing them “narcoterrorists”.

The White House has provided little detail about the attacks in general, and no evidence the boats were trafficking drugs. It’s possible they weren’t.

Here’s what’s going on in the region and what might happen next.

Why is this happening now?

During the 2024 presidential election campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to crack down on immigration from Latin America.

He often drew a connection between crime and immigration, especially from Haiti and Venezuela (though some of the cases of gang crime he cited have since been questioned or debunked).

Once in office, Trump declared a number of gangs as terrorist organisations, including one Venezuelan group, Tren de Aragua.

The Trump government has claimed that Venezuelans deported from the US were members of Tren de Aragua, often without much substantial evidence.

Trump has also entertained the idea of using the US military to target criminal groups.

This is now reality, through a large military buildup deploying multiple warships, submarines and fighter jets to the Caribbean.

A tumultuous history

This is the latest chapter in a long and sometimes hostile relationship between Venezuela and the US.

Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, affording the country political and economic influence within the region. This has made Venezuela a valued ally, and sometimes a competitor, to the United States.

But for the past two decades or so, relations have been more antagonistic.

When left-wing populist President Hugo Chavez was in power in Venezuela in 2002, the US was accused of giving tacit approval to a coup attempt against him.

America has also imposed economic sanctions against the country since 2005. These particularly ramped up under Trump’s first administration against Chavez’s successor and current president, Nicolas Maduro.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has denounced the two US attacks.
Miguel Gutierrez/EPA

While less popular than his predecessor, Maduro remains extremely powerful. US attempts to destabilise his government, including one in 2019, have been unsuccessful.

Although many in Venezuela would welcome a change of government, any US intervention in the region is likely to be immensely unpopular. It provides a nationalist rallying point for Maduro: a way to boost his local support.

What do we know about the gang?

Trump claims both boats were operated by the Tren de Aragua gang.

The group started in Venezuelan prisons before spreading across other Latin American countries, primarily through people fleeing Maduro’s authoritarian regime.

Estimates of the size of the gang are contested and hard to measure, but best guesses put it at around 5,000 members.

Tren de Aragua members have been identified in 16 US states, but there has been little conclusive evidence of large-scale criminal or terrorist activity. In New York, Tren de Aragua has primarily been associated with retail theft.

Why is the US bombing boats?

Destroying individual boats is unlikely to have an impact on drug trafficking into the US. Most fentanyl, for example, is trafficked into the US over land borders by US citizens.

However, bombing the boats does reinforce the idea of an existential threat to the United States that can only be defeated with violence. The same sense of threat is used to justify the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to brutal prisons in El Salvador.

The Venezuelan government is of less concern to Trump. Indeed, the White House has authorised increased imports of Venezuelan oil in recent weeks.

Others within the US government are more committed to regime change in Venezuela. For Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the military operations are a direct effort to destabilise what he sees as an illegitimate Venezuelan regime.

Is it legal?

These airstrikes are the first unilateral US military action in Latin America since the invasion of Panama in 1989.

However, the military operations fit within a much longer history of overt and covert intervention in the region.

Scholars have said the decision to attack the boats was likely illegal under the law of the sea.

The US government justifies the attack in the broadest terms: Venezuelan gangs traffic drugs that can kill American citizens, therefore any violence is warranted to prevent this. This is an argument not about legality, but urgent security.

Impunity is the larger point, a display of power in itself. After the first strike, Vice President JD Vance declared “I don’t give a shit what you call it”.

Trump and Rubio have both asserted the strikes will continue, without concern for the possibility that they could be considered war crimes.

Without a clear prospect of legal jeopardy, the strikes will remain available as a way to project US power. The strikes will likely stop, or pause, when the government wants to claim that it has achieved some victory. More

Kevin M. Schultz is Chair of the Department of History at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he specialises in 20th- and 21st-century American history. In Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), he explores how the word liberal – and particularly its variant white liberal – became a term of derision across the American political spectrum.

Why, he asks, are so many Americans unwilling to identify as liberals, white or otherwise, even while supporting government programs that fall squarely within the American liberal tradition?

Review: Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History – Kevin M. Schultz (University of Chicago Press)

Why Everyone Hates White Liberals is written by an American academic for an American audience. It tries to assess the current political situation in the United States in the light of history. It asks how American liberals should respond to a situation where they are often viewed with disdain.

The book’s relevance is less obvious for those of us who live outside the US, but it promises to shed light on America’s political volatility and culture warring, which eventually affect us all in one way or another.

This thing called liberalism

Unfortunately, liberalism defies definition. Its roots can be traced to early European modernity, and especially to debates over religious toleration in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its more immediate background was the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, culminating in great revolutions in America and France.

From the beginning of the 19th century, liberalism evolved into something distinct, with its own name, founding figures and institutions. It responded to a changed world marked by population growth, revolutionary turmoil, an expanding sphere of public discussion in Europe and North America, and the beginnings of industrialisation and corporate capitalism.

Schultz skates over this quickly, but he correctly refers to Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant as originating figures in 19th-century France, and to Spain and Sweden as pioneers in the rise of liberal political parties.

Portrait of Madame de Staël – Marie-Éléonore Godefroid.
After François Gérard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s worth adding that, as liberalism took its early forms, it had input from numerous groups. These included religious non-conformists, free-market economists inspired by Adam Smith, utilitarian philosophers, and European thinkers (such as de Staël and Constant) who admired the French Revolution in its early years before the Reign of Terror.

Given its mix of influences, liberalism never became a unified ideology or political theory. It was more a tradition or tendency in politics. It took many directions, frequently questioned itself, discarded old ideas and embraced new ones, and changed emphases in response to emerging circumstances.

Comprehensive histories of liberalism give the impression of a chameleon-like quality. At different times, liberals have accommodated economic policies from unfettered free-market capitalism to a degree of socialism. Confronted with such a rich – or even contradictory – tradition, we might feel at a loss in giving liberalism any recognisable content.

Still, we can find some common themes. At a certain level of abstraction, liberalism favours toleration, individual freedom, acceptance of social pluralism, and cautious optimism about the possibilities for intellectual and social progress. With these core ideas go more specific political principles, including free speech, secular government, and the rule of law. To this we can add values such as individuality, creativity and suspicion of hierarchies of birth.

With that in mind, it’s usually clear enough what is being alleged if someone is accused, in a political context, of being “illiberal”. The accusation suggests intolerance, especially of opposed viewpoints or unusual ways of life, and hostility to individual freedom.

People who advertise themselves as liberals can sometimes be revealed as illiberal in this broad sense. If that sounds paradoxical, the paradox is easily resolved as long as we’re clear about what concepts are in play.

American liberals

After a sketchy introduction to liberalism, Schultz zooms in on the 1930s in the US, when the depression-era presidential rivals Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt each claimed to be a true liberal. As Schultz observes, few Americans before this had thought of themselves as liberals.

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt defined the word liberal for the purposes of US electoral politics.
Vincenzo Laviosa, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Roosevelt succeeded in redefining the words liberal and liberalism for the purposes of American electoral politics. In Roosevelt’s usage, they meant openness to new kinds of government intervention to address social problems. Thereafter, American liberalism can trace its history from the 1930s New Deal. It came to mean, in large part, policies of wealth redistribution and economic intervention.

Roosevelt’s success as a national leader lent prestige to his redefined conception of liberalism. For several decades, it attracted allegiance across social and political divides.

For Schultz, therefore, American liberalism in the New Deal tradition means “generosity of spirit and expansion of individual freedom” or using the power of the state “to ensure individual freedom for the maximum number of people”.

These definitions fall within the general tradition of liberalism, but they have a more specific suggestion of government interventions for the common good.

That might seem attractive as a political vision – so what went wrong?

Liberalism unravels

As Schultz tells the story, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, some figures on America’s left were losing patience with what they saw as a stultifying, bureaucratic, politically timid liberal establishment.

Schultz pinpoints 1964 as a key year when American liberalism began to lose its prestige. As he describes in detail, there was a marked change in political tone between 1963 and 1964, when Black radicals started to criticise white liberal allies, whom they had come to regard as spineless and hypocritical. From this point, white liberal crystallised as a term of abuse on the political Left.

Schultz appears sympathetic to the Black civil rights leaders of the time, whose impatience with the pace of change was understandable. But he also reminds us of the considerable effort, self-sacrifice and achievements of white liberals during the 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in dramatic initiatives such as the landmark Civil Rights Act.

Part of the problem was a mismatch, not only of priorities, but perceptions of what was realistically achievable. As radical left-wing movements emerged during the 1960s, their leaders distanced themselves from liberals and liberalism.

American liberals endured much worse from the conservative side of politics. During the “long” 1960s – the decade and a half from the late 1950s to the early 1970s – there was a right-wing backlash. Key conservative figures, such as William F. Buckley, ceded the term liberal to their opponents, which Herbert Hoover had refused to do in the 1930s. Then they attacked it and everything that it stood for within their understanding.

Conservatives like William F. Buckley associated ‘liberals’ with radical politics.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Political conservatives associated liberals with radical politics, atheism, communism, and what Schultz refers to as “cultural effeteness”. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew weaponised this narrative in the the 1972 presidential election and inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Democratic Party’s candidate, George McGovern.

Schultz sees the term liberal as having been abandoned during the 1970s, in the sense that almost nobody in politics or public debate wanted to identify with it. Instead, it was used to label others. More recently, liberalism has been blamed for the harshest outcomes of what is known as neoliberalism, although the latter has little to do with traditional liberal ideas such as individual freedom, social toleration, or the rule of law.

The term neoliberal has a history dating back to at least the 1930s, but has been applied to regimes and administrations not otherwise regarded as liberal. As Schultz reminds us, it was first applied pejoratively to the economic policies of the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Schultz emphasises an “owning the libs” strategy that has recently prevailed on the American right. Anybody with even slightly left-wing, liberal or progressive tendencies is now painted by conservatives as an unhinged radical deserving of mockery and political, if not personal, destruction. The “libs” have thus become an imaginary enemy against which disparate groups on the right can unify and rally.

Ironically, historic liberal reforms in areas such as health care and social security remain widely popular with the American electorate, but the actual words liberal and liberalism seem to have become toxic.

Some deeper issues

In explaining the challenges to American liberalism during the long 1960s, Schultz adds to our understanding. Yet Why Everyone Hates White Liberals is seriously incomplete: it glosses over important issues and entire decades.

I can only go so far in exploring what it omits, but for a start, Schultz ignores important developments in the late 1970s and the 1980s. This was a time marked by fraught debates over censorship, pornography, abortion and numerous other hot-button issues. These debates severely tested what liberalism stood for in the US.

As the legal scholar Owen M. Fiss has argued, the debates of that era revealed “liberalism divided”. On the left side of politics, identity-based demands, (mild) socialist influences, and activist approaches to legal interpretation increasingly clashed with the liberal instinct to restrain government power and support individual freedom. This rupture within American liberalism, or perhaps within America’s broader political left, has never healed.

At one point, Schultz drops a clue to some of the deeper issues. Following the historian David L. Chappell, he identifies a fundamental disconnect between white liberal reformers in the 1960s and the Black activists who came to despise them. Despite some common goals, they had different temperaments and worldviews, grounded in different experiences and cultural histories.

The white liberals’ optimism about human nature and the possibilities for incremental progress clashed with the Black activists’ prophetic sensibility, their more pessimistic view of human nature, and their demands for national repentance and total transformation of American society.

This points to a larger problem that only became more difficult in the decades that followed. It’s one thing to defend the rights and freedoms of one or another oppressed group, viewing the issues from a traditional liberal perspective. It’s a different thing to defend a group’s rights and freedoms by adopting whatever ideology or rationalisation the group itself (or its leaders) might develop.

Moreover, as oppressed groups recognise each other’s struggles and form pragmatic political coalitions, they tend to see analogies between each other’s causes and attempt an ideological synthesis. As they do so, they are likely to seek insights from whatever sources they can find. Importantly, they needn’t confine themselves to ideas and thinkers from the liberal political tradition.

A demonstration by members of the Black Panther Party on the steps of the Washington State Capitol building in Olympia, Washington, February 28, 1969.
CIR Online, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Thus, liberals can find themselves supporting demographic groups whose representatives are, in turn, nourished by various kinds of religious fervour – or else by Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and other -isms that are not especially concerned with liberalism’s traditional ideas, such as freedom and toleration. Goals might be shared at a high conceptual level, but with starkly different perceptions of legitimate methods and acceptable costs.

In this setting, liberals face a conundrum. How far should they maintain traditional liberal ideals, and how far should they move towards non-liberal, and potentially illiberal, ideologies if these seem more promising for the purposes of social change?

When rapid and comprehensive change seems imperative, might this justify illiberal methods, such as attempts to control what people say and think? In the past, revolutionaries have often believed so, but the conflict with traditional liberalism is obvious.

Yet Schultz appears dismissive of any idea that American liberals sometimes veer in illiberal directions, or that this might undermine their credentials if they still claim to be part of the broader liberal tradition springing from the Enlightenment.

Useful, but frustrating

Why Everyone Hates White Liberals offers a useful, if limited, defence of America’s (white) liberals and their achievements, particularly in the face of unfair criticism and derision since the 1960s.

As far it goes, the book’s history is accurate. But it is incomplete, and hand-in-hand with this there’s a frustrating analytical shallowness.

For Schultz, the actual words liberal and liberalism are irredeemable in the US. For all I know, this might be correct (though it might also be slightly hyperbolic). Be that as it may, Schultz backs off examining how the problems for American liberals go deeper than slogans and words. These problems deserve a bolder reckoning. More

Charlie Kirk, figurehead of the American far right, took a question at a 2023 event in Salt Lake City about the second amendment to the US constitution and gun-related deaths. He answered: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Two years later, once again in Utah, Kirk was killed with a gun. His death comes against a backdrop of increased political violence in the US, driven by a new set of political, societal and technological factors, and its future trajectory will determine the health of American democracy.

Political violence is differentiated from other crimes and it is helpful to have clarity about its particular meaning. It is defined specifically as acts intended to achieve political goals or intimidate opponents through the use of physical force or threats to influence a political outcome or silence dissent. While most of these incidents come from the far right, violence is used by extremists on both sides.

Over the past decade there has been a dangerous escalation in political violence driven by rage and resentment without clearly defined goals by self-radicalised individuals rather than organised extremist groups. High profile incidents have dominated headlines. These include the insurrection of January 6 2021, the shooting at a baseball practice session of Republican members of Congress in 2018, the plot to kidnap Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the vicious attack on Paul Pelosi – the husband of the speaker of the House of Representatives – in 2022, the torching of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s family home in April this year. And, of course, the assassination attempts on Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2024.

Spiral of violence: polarisation has driven people to extreme acts, such as the January 6 2021 Capitol riots.
AP Photo/John Minchillo, File

But the threat has spread beyond the very visible faces of US democracy to targets such as judges, election officials, journalists and even private citizens based upon their perceived political affiliation.

It is shocking yet unsurprising, given the new factors fuelling rage in an already deeply divided society. These can be broadly summarised by three characteristics.

Hyper-partisanship at boiling point

The way politics is discussed today shows that division can’t be seen in merely partisan terms. Opponents have become enemies and those with different worldviews have become traitors. In many examples, pundits, politicians and their mouthpieces indulge in dehumanising rhetoric. Research has consistently found that dehumanisation contributes to a more ready justification of violence.

Indeed, Trump and other high-profile figures have incited violence, even when not actually issuing direct calls to action. This was most notably evident on January 6 2021, when Trump goaded supporters in Washington to march on the Capitol, telling them: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Fight like hell: Donald Trump’s ‘Save America’ rally.

Digital echo chambers

These pressure cooker arguments play out on social media and online forums that help spread conspiracy theories, disinformation and violent content. Highly influential creators are able to conjure up “bespoke realities” for their followers, generating huge personal wealth from the fomenting of rage and hate. Citizens are consuming deeply flawed, incendiary political content in isolation. This fuels self-radicalisation when people become detached from reality of the world outside their bubble.

Indeed, immediately following the Kirk shooting, social media was already awash with disinformation about liberals celebrating his death and the motivations of the killer before the shooter had been found.

Erosion of trust in democracy

When faith in government, the justice system, and the electoral process erodes, citizens may come to believe that the established systems are rigged, unresponsive, or illegitimate. This makes traditional avenues for change seem futile. In this environment, violence can be rationalised as the only effective means to “correct” the broken system. The American right has long railed against a corrupt and malevolent “deep state” convincing some citizens that democratic norms no longer apply.

What next? There are three possible scenarios. The worst case is an escalation of violence in both its frequency and its organisation.

The far right has been pushing for strict limits on civil liberties, and the most extreme members may use Kirk’s assassination as an excuse for violent retaliation. Widespread civil unrest is a persistent threat, particularly approaching the 2026 midterm elections. Many fear that if Trump’s allies sense they can use escalating disorder to declare an emergency suspension of democratic processes, they will push him to do so.

More likely, but no less unsettling, is a stagnation in which political violence becomes a normalised feature of American political life without escalating to an existential crisis. This has potentially far-reaching consequences as more moderate politicians on both sides perceive the risks of being in public life to be too high and vacate their offices. This paves the way for more extreme candidates to fill the gaps. With the more moderate voices gone, it’s less likely the conversation will cool down.

But things could improve. It will require bipartisan condemnation of political violence and a reconnecting of politicians to their constituents. Both sides need to work together to drag a bigger portion of the political debate back into the real world. Meanwhile social media platforms and the legacy media alike must be held accountable for the tenor and veracity of the content they feed to the public.

And efforts must be made by political elites, the media and the public to rebuild civic trust. As the foundation stone of a healthy democracy, citizens’ trust in their government and in each other must be carefully pieced back together.

America does not need to accept violence as the norm, in fact, it must collectively and consistently reject it. The future of its democracy may depend on it. More