Donald Trump and Peter Dutton have both embraced populism. Are working-class voters buying it?

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has often been accused of copying former US President Donald Trump’s tactics. Some analysts even refer to Dutton, like Trump, as a “populist” who seeks political gain by pitting ordinary citizens against corrupt “elites”.

There is evidence of this populism in the willingness of Trump, Dutton and other figures in their parties to attack “big business”.

This is unusual for the conservative parties, and it has alarmed business-aligned outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the Australian Financial Review.

Republicans and Liberals have always preferred to identify with small business rather than big business. Their relationship with corporate interests has not always been smooth.

But they do not believe there is a natural conflict between business and workers, or between different sections of the economy. And they usually align with big business on the critical issues of taxation and government regulation.

So Dutton’s declaration earlier this year that the Liberal Party is “not the party of big business” but “the friend of the worker” marks a notable rhetorical shift, even if there is reason to doubt the substance behind it.

It mirrors a similar shift to pro-worker rhetoric among leading Republicans. Florida Senator Marco Rubio said in 2020, for instance, the future of the Republican Party is based on “a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition”.

Expanding their share of the working-class vote may be necessary for both parties, given their losses of tertiary-educated, middle-class voters and seats in recent elections. Economic populism may be one path to do it.

But how economically populist can conservative parties get in either country?

Why attack big business?

A lot of Republican and Liberal attacks on big business are fundamentally cultural rather than economic.

Publicly-owned corporations have embraced diversity, equity and inclusion policies. They declare commitments to “sustainability”. And plenty of them have backed causes like marriage equality, Black Lives Matter and the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

However cosmetic these gestures are, many conservatives see major corporations as culturally hostile to them. More importantly, they no longer see big business and finance as reliable political backers.

And they don’t need them like they once did. Dynastic wealth in both countries has seen the ascendancy of private companies owned by super-rich individuals and families. These, not corporate donors, are now the most consistent sources of financial and political support for conservative parties.

These changing conditions have given Republicans and Liberals a free hand to make big business – never a popular entity – into a target of populist campaigns.

Many of their attacks are about “wokeness”. But not all. Consumer protection has also become an opportune theme, given the cost of living crisis in both the United States and Australia.

Trump, for instance, has floated capping credit card interest rates at 10%. Dutton has proposed using the government’s divestiture powers to break up supermarket and hardware chains that are accused of using their monopoly power to exploit consumers and suppliers.

They can propose these ideas because voters usually trust the Republican and Liberal parties more than their opponents on economic issues. Most Democratic and Labor politicians would be unwilling to take populist measures that far because of their perennial fears of being seen as economically irresponsible.

But when it comes to actually siding with workers over business, a different picture emerges.

The Republican romance with ‘union workers’

As president, Trump had a notably anti-union record. His appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces labour law, consistently ruled against unions.

In Trump’s current campaign to re-enter the White House, unions have criticised him for holding a rally appealing to “union workers” at a non-union shop, and for praising tech billionaire Elon Musk because he sacked workers who threatened to strike.

Trump also said recently that as a business owner he hated paying overtime. He has also previously said he preferred to use non-union workforces.

Despite all this, the Trump campaign is making a serious play for the votes of unionised workers, who could be critical in Midwestern battleground states.

Although unions as organisations usually support Democrats, the number of voters in union households who support Republicans is sometimes more than 40%.

This year, Trump sought the endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the North American truck drivers’ union with 1.3 million members. The Teamsters have supported Democratic candidates in every presidential election since 2000, but prior to that, the organisation had also backed Republican candidates like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.

This year, the Teamsters did not join most other unions in quickly endorsing Democratic incumbent Joe Biden before he stepped aside for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Teamsters’ president, Sean O'Brien, almost got into a fight with a Republican senator in a committee hearing in 2023 after calling him a “greedy CEO who acts like he’s self-made”. Nonetheless, he got an invitation to speak at this year’s Republican National Convention. He praised Trump as a “tough SOB”, but then blasted various businesses and business organisations for being anti-union, to the discomfort of the audience.

The Teamsters ultimately endorsed neither candidate. However, they released polling showing nearly 60% of their members supported Trump compared to a third for Harris.

Trump-era Republicans frequently praise “union workers” rather than actual unions. When Senators JD Vance (now Trump’s running mate) and Josh Hawley supported the striking United Auto Workers last year, they criticised the union’s leadership. But they are happy to be seen as being on the side of unionised workers against big businesses who send manufacturing jobs overseas, a trend Trump promises to reverse.

The term “union workers” prompts conservative nostalgia, especially for a group like the Teamsters with their mostly male membership and reputation for toughness. It evokes the anti-communist, blue-collar workers of the 1960s and ‘70s who supported Nixon and brawled in the streets with college-educated anti-Vietnam War protesters.

That is not the only nostalgic element. Through heavily protectionist measures, Trump is promising to restore millions of manufacturing jobs to the United States – the kinds of jobs that used to be largely unionised. He also promises to roll back environmental regulations to expand mining, drilling and fracking on federal land. Again, these are the kinds of jobs often associated with “union workers”.

When Trump and others praise “union workers”, they are not really talking about unions, but a certain type of blue-collar job they are promising to create and protect. “Union” in this context has the positive connotation of well-paid, stable work.

But Trump claims it is his policies that will guarantee these jobs, making unions themselves virtually irrelevant.

Where Liberals won’t follow

Dutton may praise workers, but he is unlikely to add the prefix “union” anytime soon. It is hard to imagine any Liberal leader courting the support of a union because Australia’s party system effectively enshrines the country’s adversarial industrial relations system in its politics.

The Australian Labor Party began as the parliamentary wing of the union movement, and to this day affiliated unions are entitled to 50% of delegates at party conferences. American unions are not linked to the Democratic Party in the same way.

This does not mean the votes of union members are off-limits to other parties. In 2006, then-economist (now Labor MP) Andrew Leigh estimated about a third of union members voted for the Coalition on a two party-preferred basis from 1966 to 2004. But Liberals will not appeal to these voters as “union workers” in the same way Republicans do.

Trump’s dream of restoring American manufacturing dominance would involve a resurgence of long-term employment in large and medium-sized firms. He is promising the stability once associated with unions, not the “flexibility” that Australia’s Liberals want in workplaces.

For the most part, Liberals still prefer to talk about blue-collar workers as independent tradespeople or aspiring business owners rather than employees.

Dutton says the modern Liberal Party is the friend of “small business owners and employees in that business”. This conjures images of family-like operations where staff loyally put in unpaid overtime – instead of larger, impersonal workplaces (where unpaid overtime is also the norm).

And unlike Trump Republicans, the Liberal and National parties still believe in free trade. After a long bipartisan opposition to protectionism, Labor has recently embraced a major new industrial policy. The Coalition is not on board.

Some doubt whether Trump is a genuine populist. But he has a wider scope for genuinely populist rhetoric than Dutton, at least for now.

Even though he’s a symbol of capitalist excess, part of Trump’s message is that capitalism has taken a wrong turn. Not just into excessive wokeness, but into globalisation and financialisation, where investment and speculation are more profitable than production.

There are limits to how much any Liberal leader, even Dutton, can tap into anger with capitalism itself.