By joining the union, I bought myself a new political identity that stood in solidarity with anybody struggling to make the world a better place.
I grew up comfortable. Not rich, but with two loving public servants for parents, in stable jobs that could provide everything my two brothers and I would ever reasonably need. Our quarter-acre block was quiet and dense with trees, and even now when I return, it feels like a deep, calm breath, nestled on the green fringe of inner-city Sydney, just a little over four miles west of the opera house and the famous Harbour Bridge.
My mom is the daughter of an Irish truck driver, risen above her station to become the first in her family to go to university. My dad is the son of a stuffy British family made briefly wealthy by World War II. They never let us forget our luck to have been born into such a life.
My parents read the paper each morning, and discussed its contents each night. The world had red and blue, rich and poor, lucky and unlucky; clear winners, clear losers, clear enemies, and clear friends. I remember the 2007 federal election, both of them astonished and on the edge of tears of joy, as it became clear that the conservative government that had ruled for the past 11 years would finally fall. They spoke in hushed tones, lest words break the spell: “They’ve lost Bennelong — that’s John Howard’s seat! Labor is going to win!”
As ubiquitous as feelings of right and wrong were, politics for us was largely abstraction; something that happened — in the papers, on TV — and to which you reacted accordingly. You knew your side, and you supported them as best you could; with your vote on Election Day, your anger or pleasure at policy announcements, your words around the table if your company wasn’t too judgmental. It was not something you did, not something you took with you into the streets, into work, or to family Christmas. And to join a union — that relic of a bygone era, of dusty men in peaked caps shouting outside a shuttered factory before heading home for tea? Forget about it.
We were middle-class — quiet, polite, and fiercely self-sufficient — and politics, while important, was not something you fought for as if your life depended on it. Because, well, it didn’t. Though, of course, you were sympathetic to those for whom it did.
I went like this through high school. Though the looming threat of climate change scared me shitless, and I nurtured a growing disgust for Tony Abbott — the lurching, zombielike opposition leader, then prime minister whose slander of women, immigrants, environmentalists, and the poor had toxified Australian politics in the early 2010s — I couldn’t have called myself a political person. The two students in my year who could were, frankly, considered weirdos, and when I did once try to make an intervention — some point about the budget deficit I’d read in my parents’ paper — I earned from one of them a brittle retort: “Well, I didn’t realize you knew anything about economics, Angus.”
University was different. I’d taken a year to work and travel, and joined a group of youth activists who organized workshops across Sydney to teach schoolchildren about climate change, the environment, and sustainability. My nascent political consciousness, freed now from the hollow moral universe of my Christian Brothers school and in search of a language that I could use to describe the world and what I’d change about it, quickly morphed into ardent student socialism. In the company of like-minded teachers and peers in the political economy faculty — routinely dismissed around campus as a slack band of communist pretenders, but to me, a revelation — I crafted meticulous takedowns of the capitalist status quo, which I would then unleash on the unsuspecting, uncaring, or less-informed. I would berate them for their ignorance, expose their complicity in the evil systems that ruled the world, until I was so puffed up with indignation and my own clever theories that I thought I might burst.
Then I would go home, to our leafy quarter-acre, and soak up my parents’ praise over a home-cooked meal.
Because the truth was that this was all theoretical to me. I worked a shitty job, true, and I was scared; of climate change, of cronyism and dodgy bosses, of letting the wrong people win. But I was also a white, middle-class kid from a nice part of Sydney, who had leveraged an expensive education and supportive family into the unshakeable foundations of success inside the very system I so passionately skewered. I was an observer, a pretender, full of words and empty theories, cosplaying as revolutionary at a sandstone university.
When I graduated I was offered a job at the Australian Treasury, punching out the spreadsheets and paragraphs that keep the government running. Notwithstanding criticism from some of my snarkier classmates — “sellout,” they called me, only half-joking — I moved down to Canberra at the beginning of 2019.
Canberra is Australia’s bushy, anonymous capital city, but the Treasury building itself is unmissable. It’s huge, gray, and granite, rising like a prison from the banks of an enormous human-made lake and lawns that stay rich and green during even the harshest summers. On my first day I sat at my desk, shuffling paper, until a polite — though insistent — cough sounded over my left shoulder. I looked up to a smiling face. It was younger than most I’d yet seen in the office, perched over a defiantly patterned shirt with a red-and-white lanyard trailing from the breast pocket.
“Sydney Uni, eh?”
“Yeah, yeah … just finished in November.” I’d talked through my qualifications a thousand times that day.
He nodded, and looked around shiftily. A pause.
“Political economy grads usually join the union, you know. We’ve got an introductory rate on membership — $15 a month. It’s all here on this form.” He slapped a piece of paper down onto my desk, tapped it once (“think about it”), and left.
$15 a month. $180 for the year.
It felt like a lot. I was in a stingy, post-relocation frame of mind. Moving states is never cheap, but even then the brutal early-year Canberra rental market, competing with the annual influx of new students and bureaucrats for scarce, overpriced rentals, had blown a hole in my savings.
But equally, here it was. An opportunity to at last put some skin in the game. To finally commit to something real, something that was bigger than my textbooks, greater than a collection of coddled kids shouting half-digested words at each other in the corner of a grimy pub. I would be taking a side, definitively, and I would be paying for the privilege. In this seat of political and economic power, at the center of government for a nation that bought so willingly into the crude individualism of the 1980s and ’90s, to be unionized was to be inefficient, slow, lazy, and old-fashioned; to be unionized was to be unable to look out for yourself.
Could I afford it? Yes. Did I want to spend the money? Not really. I was making more than I ever had before, my first proper job after years of minimum-wage work behind bars and shop counters. But it was precisely the cost that mattered. You put your money where your mouth was. And so I joined up.
A few weeks later I was watching the news, and the bulletin flashed scenes of a protest in Chile. It had started in opposition to transit fare increases, but quickly spiraled into a national movement against inequality, repression, and elitist government. In the footage thousands of people were marching down the street, waving flags and chanting as a line of armed police advanced with riot shields. It cut to the president announcing a state of emergency, and then back to violence, bands of protesters now running, pelted by water cannons, and police firing tear gas into the crowd. On the banner along the bottom of the screen scrolled words: Chilean unions call general strike, join calls for new constitution. Leader: “We want to demonstrate that unity is strength.” And suddenly I felt it.
In one sense I couldn’t have been further away. I was in my living room, in pajamas, with cockatoos hacking in the trees outside and dinner bubbling away on the stove. In that moment, though, I had a powerful, palpable sense of myself as a node in a vast network of political energy, spanning forward and backward through time and across continents. I felt connected to these people, marching in the sun in a country I had only ever heard of, against problems I myself had never faced. By joining the union, I realized, I had bought myself a new political identity that stood in solidarity with anybody struggling to make the world a better place. Not to mention the generations of workers who had lived, fought, and died for things that now felt eternal. The 8-hour day, sick leave, weekends, and holidays; all once dreams, then goals, then demands, then facts. This was an identity that demanded I act, not merely discuss, and for which politics was as real, pressing, and personal as hunger pains or a police baton.
I became surer, more confident; bluster was replaced by a calm sense of purpose. At work, I realized more people than I had ever imagined were union too; the young guy who sat on my right, the 10-year veteran at my back, the manager at the end of the hall, and the woman in the cubicle immediately opposite my own. We tried to bring more people into the fold, joined arbitrations and wage negotiations, protested against reductions in public service staff levels, and stood in solidarity against the inequalities of race, sexuality, and gender that clove our workplace as much as any. We would see each other in the white-collar trenches — kitchen, meeting room, afternoon tea — and know that we were, in our sterile, small, but very real way, working to make positive change.
I stood up to my boss, and called him a racist when he was being a racist. I wouldn’t have done that before.
On September 20, 2019, I joined my first strike. It was an unseasonably warm day, with a hot, dry wind, and the first embers of the Black Summer bushfires that would rage for six months, decimating half the country and claiming over a billion animal and human lives, were beginning to smolder. The union had called on its members to leave work in solidarity with millions of children across the world, who in turn had left school in solidarity with one 16-year-old Swedish girl who, every Friday for the past year, had stood outside her country’s parliament with a sign that demanded they do more to fight climate change.
As I walked, in a suit, in the blinding sun, shouting under union colors that the government I served must take the fears of its people seriously, I felt a lifetime apart from the mouthy student who harangued his parents over dinner. Even more so from the sheltered, confused schoolboy I had been. I had arrived, in the streets, and politics was no longer theoretical. Now, I could not only imagine a better world — free of the inequality, insecurity, and environmental catastrophe that had terrified me first into silence, and then into shallow dogma — but I also knew I would fight alongside legions of others to bring it into being.
Angus Chapman is a writer and researcher from Sydney, Australia, now living in London.
Is this reverse psychology a little too clever?
Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who compared gun control to policies under Nazi Germany and shared an image saying Roe v. Wade was “so much” worse than the Holocaust, got over $800,000 in ad dollars. Maryland state Delegate Dan Cox, who has associated with QAnon conspiracy theorists, got $1.2 million. And Illinois state Sen. Darren Bailey, who pushed to evict Chicago from the state, got $35 million.
National Democrats, party-aligned nonprofits, and some of their candidates have together spent millions to elevate the most extreme positions of far-right candidates in races in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland, and it’s a strategy that’s divided party operatives. The total investment this cycle was over $44 million as of last quarter, according to an Open Secrets analysis.
Party representatives have claimed it’s because they want to highlight the extremism of today’s GOP, knowing that even candidates who are running as “moderates” will feel pressure to appeal to voters on their right flank. They have denied that it’s with the intent of making extremist candidates more appealing to a Republican primary base and because they think it will be easier to beat those kinds of opponents in November.
But that’s what it looks like to some Democratic operatives, who have mixed reviews of that strategy. Some think it’s too dangerous and that it could lead to some of those extremist candidates actually getting elected. Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson told Politico that the strategy of “putting people into positions where they may actually get elected and have control over the election system in this country — people who don’t believe in democracy — is a very, very risky strategy.”
But others have said that Democrats are simply doing everything they can to give their candidates the best shot at winning in a tough cycle nationally, and also head off the need for major spending in the general election.
They’re not outright telling Republican voters to back extremist candidates. Rather, their ads are trying to employ reverse psychology and attacking candidates for being too extreme, which they know the GOP base will take as a high compliment.
“This is not a strategy that you deploy in every race,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic consultant based in Virginia. “But the whole argument that Democrats shouldn’t be running ads in the primary is predicated on the idea that Republicans are not fully rotted with Trumpism. It’s clear that, no matter what Republican is nominated, they are going to get pushed to move to where their base is. So the best path is to do what you can to set up the best environment for Democrats to win.”
Has the strategy worked to make races easier for Democrats to win?
It’s not the first time Democrats have tried to manipulate GOP primaries. In 2012, then-incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill ran a $1.7 million ad campaign designed to boost one of her Republican challengers, Rep. Todd Akin, by running ads that said he was too conservative for Missouri, knowing that “too conservative” would be a virtue in the eyes of many Republican primary voters. “I had successfully manipulated the Republican primary so that in the general election I would face the candidate I was most likely to beat,” she later wrote in a memoir, excerpted in Politico. “As it turned out, we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.”
Some of the extremist Republican candidates boosted by Democrats this cycle have gone on to win their party’s nomination.
In Maryland, the Democratic Governors Association launched an ad campaign in the final weeks before Tuesday’s primaries that linked Cox, one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates, to Trump and played up his far-right positions. The campaign criticizes him for being “100 percent pro-life” and for “refusing to support any federal restrictions” on guns. Politico reported that the DGA had reserved at least $1.2 million worth of airtime, which is more than Cox himself and the other Republican primary frontrunner, Kelly Schulz, had spent on advertising combined.
Cox won the nomination, though it’s not clear whether the DGA campaign pushed him over the edge. As of Thursday afternoon, the race was still too close to call on the Democratic side. But Maryland Democrats believe that, whoever their nominee, Cox is too far to the right to win a statewide race, and that he has no chance of winning over the Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who previously voted for Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who is term-limited.
In the Illinois Republican primary for governor, incumbent Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the DGA, which he helps fund using his billion-dollar fortune, spent almost $35 million total trying to paint Bailey, a pro-Trump Republican, as the most conservative candidate in the race. Ultimately, Bailey handily won the nomination.
And in Pennsylvania, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running for governor, spent more than $840,000 on TV ads ahead of the primaries saying that if Mastriano, one of his Republican opponents, prevailed, it would be a “win for what Donald Trump stands for.” Mastriano has been a fervent proponent of Trump’s 2020 election lies and was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection for his involvement in busing rallygoers to the Capitol. He also ended up winning the nomination.
But the strategy wasn’t successful in Colorado or California. In the GOP primary for Colorado’s US Senate seat, Democratic groups spent roughly $4 million on ads designed to make far-right candidate Ron Hanks more appealing to GOP voters over his more moderate opponent, Joe O’Dea, who nevertheless won the nomination.
The Democratic-aligned PAC Colorado Information Network, which is primarily funded by the DGA, and liberal nonprofit ProgressNow Colorado also sank almost $2 million on ads painting former Parker Mayor Greg Lopez, who has embraced Trump’s 2020 election lies, as the ultra-conservative candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary. And in Colorado’s Eighth District, House Majority PAC and other Democratic-aligned PACs spent nearly $300,000 on ads boosting Lori Saine over the more moderate frontrunner state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer. Both Lopez and Saine lost by considerable margins.
Democrats similarly tried to boost Chris Mathys in California’s newly drawn 22nd District, spending $110,000 on ads playing up his support for Trump, but his opponent Rep. David Valadao, who voted to impeach Trump following the Capitol insurrection, pulled through.
David Turner, a spokesperson for the DGA, pushed back on the idea that the organization is replicating McCaskill’s strategy this cycle with far-right candidates. He told Vox that, by making these investments in the primaries, the organization has merely “started the general election early and educated voters about the extremism of their positions on all sorts of things.”
He said that Cox and Mastriano were already among the frontrunners in their respective races by the time Democrats ran their ads, and that they’d also benefited from Trump’s endorsement. In April, before Shapiro’s May 5 ad boosting Mastriano aired, Mastriano was already leading the primary field, according to a poll by Eagle Consulting Group, a Republican consulting firm based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And prior to the DGA’s July 1 ad, Cox also had a slight lead over Schulz in Maryland, according to a June Goucher College poll.
So to the extent that DGA’s ads might have made them more appealing to Republican primary voters, it’s because Republican primary voters were already energized behind far-right candidates, Turner said.
“Republican primary voters, again and again, are saying ‘This is what we want,”’ he said.
Will Democrats’ strategy backfire in the general election?
Democrats’ assumption that it’s easier to beat a more extreme right-wing candidate is a risky one. Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has since left the party, called it “bad for the public and a symptom of how perverse our current system is.”
Certainly, it might be easier for a Democrat to run against a candidate who has been endorsed by Trump, who proved an effective villain in 2020, and especially so in left-leaning states like Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland. The strategy could pay off as a shrewd investment that will avert the need for heavier spending in the general election, freeing up funds that could be put toward more competitive races elsewhere.
But as history has shown, there’s still a risk that these far-right candidates will put up a fight and even get elected. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign made the mistake of seeking to elevate Trump and other “Pied Piper” Republican presidential candidates with extreme conservative views in the primaries over the more establishment Republicans then perceived as her true rivals.
The poll numbers in Pennsylvania — a state where Republicans hold a 2 percentage point advantage, according to the 2022 Cook Partisan Voting Index — aren’t encouraging for Democrats hoping to avoid a repeat of 2016. Mastriano is trailing Shapiro by no more than 4 percentage points across three separate polls conducted in June by Cygnal, Suffolk University, and Fabrizio, Lee and Associates/Impact Research.
That said, Mastriano still faces an uphill battle in the state, where he’ll need to broaden his appeal beyond the GOP base. So far, he’s not getting much help from the party establishment: nine current and former Republican state officials have endorsed Shapiro over Mastriano. The Republican Governors Association has yet to announce plans to come to his aid, despite Mastriano’s pitch at an RGA meeting in Colorado earlier this week where he said, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Shapiro has also spent more than $4.7 million on ads since the primary, whereas Mastriano has not spent anything.
The other states where Democrats have boosted right-wing candidates look safer. In Illinois, Pritzker had a 7 percentage point advantage over Bailey in a June Fabrizio, Lee and Associates poll.
Although the Democratic primary results in Maryland are still being tallied, there’s reason for Democrats to be confident heading into the fall. President Joe Biden won Maryland by more than 30 percentage points in 2020, and there are more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans. If there are grounds for Maryland Democrats to be nervous, it’s that none of their candidates have really been able to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack in the primary, and that could make it harder for the ultimate winner to energize voters ahead of November. None polled above 16 percent among primary voters, according to a survey conducted last month by Goucher College in partnership with WYPR and the Baltimore Banner.
The message that Democrats are going to deliver in the general election in those races is the same as the ads they’ve been running in the primaries: that the Republican Party has “gone off the rails,” Turner said.
Inside the American right’s effort to bring their ideas to Israel.
TEL AVIV — Several hundred feet from the Mediterranean Sea, and several thousand miles from the Cuyahoga River, Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance (R) was working a crowd.
“If you listen to the fake news media, what they tell you is that Israel is all kinds of terrible things … it’s disgusting,” he said in an improvised speech. “God bless you for caring enough about this civilization to protect it.”
Vance was a surprise treat for the VIP guests at the Israeli edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the most prominent mass gathering of the American right. The Wednesday event, the first ever CPAC to be held in Israel, is part of a broader effort by CPAC’s leaders to build bridges between right-wing movements around the world. In a brief interview after his speech, Vance told me that he thought it was a worthy goal.
“Obviously applying the proper humility if you’re talking about a different country, there’s a real opportunity,” he told me.
Vance started to give an example but was cut off by Richard Grenell, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, who wanted a selfie with Vance for his Twitter feed. Matt Whitaker, Trump’s former acting attorney general, popped in for a shot or two.
. @CPAC Israel - with the great @JDVance1. pic.twitter.com/jTl8YgEuaM
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) July 20, 2022