When Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr announced on 9 October that he would be running as an independent candidate in the 2024 American presidential election, it was a break with tradition that signalled far more than just an historic change within a family dynasty. There was almost a sense of relief; the jig was up and we can now talk openly about what has been obvious for decades – the centre left have completely abandoned their traditional voter base. Not just abandoned, but in the case of Israel and the working class, they are contemptuously working against everything for which these two entities stand. As a result, millions are now politically homeless throughout the Anglosphere. The question for conservative politicians next year is whether or not they are going to provide an alternative voting option for the common man and woman.

The newly released book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, examines this in depth, concluding that the Democratic party has drifted far away from its roots in New Deal liberalism and is now the party of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Certainly, if President John F. Kennedy were alive today, his views would make him a conservative and a candidate for the modern Republican party. Kennedy was a patriot who loved America, a view that would be ridiculed by many Democrats today. As Reagan famously said, ‘I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left me.’

At no time was the contrast between past and current centre-left parties more obvious than the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination on 22 November, 2023. The news cycle of that week featured little of Kennedy. The focus was on another left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his now infamous interview with Piers Morgan. The world had tuned in to witness the man who came very close to being prime minister of Britain refusing to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. The juxtaposition between the left of today and yesterday could not have been starker. JFK was a second world war hero who fought to defeat Nazism; Corbyn is a man who openly espouses the destruction of Israel as the ‘from the river to the sea’ chants reveal.

L.P. Hartley could have been describing the moral decay of the left when he wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’. My grandparents, indeed, anyone’s grandparents wouldn’t recognise what the modern left has become. Ditto for former prime minister Bob Hawke who had the old-fashioned notion that the voter base deserved respect.

Hawke had a special relationship with Israel, having first travelled there in 1971 as the President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. He described meeting Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir as ‘life-changing’ and denounced the far left’s attacks on Israel as being unacceptable and incompatible with the values of the Australian Labor party. Should Prime Minister Albanese have met Meir today, he would be unable to celebrate her as the first female leader in the Middle East, what with the left’s inability to define what a woman is. Perhaps to do so might bring too much attention to the fact that if you are a woman, then supporting Israel, which is the only democratic country in the Middle East, is a no-brainer.

Previous generations of centre-left leaders had strong ties to, and respect for the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, regardless of their own religious views. ‘If the bell tolls for Israel,’ an agnostic Hawke once said, ‘it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind.’ British Labor prime minister Harold Wilson authored the history book, The Chariot of Israel: Britain, America and the State of Israel and was described by Shimon Peres as being ‘…a true friend of Israel’.

This is chalk and cheese when compared to Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, who immediately rushed to judgment that Israel had bombed a hospital killing five hundred people. No need to check the facts; it fitted Wong’s narrative. The left has done a 180-degree turn in relation to Israel.

Advocacy for the working class from the left has ceased, replaced by a bubble of inner- city elites, who openly disdain all those who work with their hands. Identity politics, with a totem pole of victimhood, has replaced the aspirations of the working class. Class struggle has been replaced by race or sexual struggle; that’s all that matters. The modern left has morphed into a club that excludes rather than unites. They speak in nonsensical riddles and are committed to green energy policies and a MeToo movement that isn’t interested in the sexual violence committed against Jewish hostages because Jewish women are the wrong kind of victim.

The left’s globalist stance that countries shouldn’t have borders has resulted in a seemingly endless stream of illegal immigration and cheap labour that benefits corporations. Only the liberal elites can afford to be ‘global citizens’, the rest of us are too busy trying to survive the cost-of-living crisis. Nationhood is dear to us; we are intimately tied to the countries and cultures we live in; especially the working class who don’t have the opportunity to be in a different city every other day, à la Greta Thunberg. Binding ties to country and community are part of our human nature, yet the left openly mocks them. So much for JFK’S notion of asking ‘what you can do for your country’. The modern left’s despising of nationhood is one of its most transparently elitist stances.

Rather than listen to the working and middle classes and advocate for them, the left now dictates to them with puritanical glee. Perhaps Wong and others could take a page out of Hawke’s book, when he noted, ‘Do you know why I have credibility? Because I don’t exude morality.’

Conservative politicians in 2024 have a rare opportunity indeed – all they have to do to win an election is to be conservative. Looking at the UK, where the Tories have squandered their 2019 landslide victory, the future doesn’t look promising. Far more hope is to be found closer to home – the best election campaign for Dutton is Albanese himself.

The real battleground of course for 2024 is America. One shudders to think what JFK would make of the current Democratic party, or if he would even recognise it.