In Donald Trump, US elites face consequences of their own attitudes

Sometimes a powerful personal insight vanishes over time, only to resurface at unexpected times and stun you. During several years of involvement with the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a diplomatic initiative that brings together US and Australian leaders in government, business and media, I really felt that the Washington power elites neither knew nor cared about big swathes of opinion within their country; they didn't feel they had to know. The difference between the US and Australia This election has crystallised my sense of the significant differences between the politics of our two countries: one with compulsory voting, which I felt then and still do, keeps elites more honest, and the other with anything but. Australian politicians and analysts are arguably forced by compulsory voting to understand and absorb dark undercurrents, dislocation and resistance within the wider population: an understanding it seems is so deeply in deficit in the US. Professor James Curran, an historian specialising in the Australian-American alliance, told a Lowy Institute election post-mortem on Wednesday that populism had always been present in American politics, going right back to the 19th century, but that it had never before seized presidential power.