Perhaps the most fatuous of the reaction pieces on Donald Trump’s conviction were those explaining that it wouldn’t hurt, and might perhaps even help, his chances of defeating Joe Biden in November (for example here, here, here and, perhaps inevitably, Peter Hartcher, with his uncanny ability to channel hot takes from several years ago).
Trump’s immunity to Western political norms, and particularly those around criminality and misconduct by those seeking public office, have been on display for many years. It was Trump himself who best articulated it, in a possibly unique moment of truth-telling, when he said in 2016 “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
This continuing electoral appeal — and the willingness of Republicans to overlook pretty much any misconduct by Trump, up to and including launching an insurrection in 2021 — is the most important feature of Trump given he has laid out a quite clear plan for an authoritarian regime.
That includes plans to use the apparatus of the state to go after justice system officials, his critics and political opponents, using the US military for law enforcement, shifting power from Congress to the executive branch, removing discrimination protections and possibly even banning access to contraception.
That’s before you get to the promised global trade war, the abandonment of any climate action and the embrace of the world’s worst dictators, all of which have serious implications for countries like Australia.
The lack of interest in the “why” question whenever the issue of Trump’s appeal to a large segment of the US electorate comes into view is thus a serious problem. For the first time since the 1930s — and much more so than then, Father Coughlin never had a chance of breaking into politics — the United States is at real risk of sliding into fascist dictatorship. Coverage of Trump that fails to engage with that risk is adding nothing of value to discourse; if anything, it risks normalising Trump as just another politician, one operating within normal parameters, when he has demolished parameters both normative and legal repeatedly.
A clue to this reticence as to “why” can be found in the attempted character assassination of Laura Tingle last week here. In a staggering example of truckling to its right-wing critics, the ABC censured Tingle for the opinion, that she voiced outside the ABC, that Australia was a racist country and that Peter Dutton was exploiting migration.
Both are statements of fact; it is less than 12 months since the electorate voted overwhelmingly to continue to pretend Australia was empty when British invaders arrived. Indeed, ironically, many of Tingle’s critics at News Corp and within the Coalition, at the same time as calling for Tingle’s head, are complaining about the appalling tide of antisemitism that they claim has swamped Australia. And Dutton is demonstrably seeking to use migration for political advantage given it was the centrepiece of his budget reply. Tingle’s failure was to add that Labor and the Coalition actually have very similar policies on migration; the difference is primarily rhetorical. Both sides want to reduce net overseas migration, but not enough to make a serious difference to house prices.
The pile-on wasn’t merely about an attempt by News Corp and the Coalition to discredit the ABC and a journalist they despise. Tingle’s “Australia is a racist country” touched a nerve.
The core of Trump’s appeal is white grievance and victimhood. More than any other politician, he has tuned into a burning resentment on the part of white Americans, and not merely working-class whites, that the “system” — politics, the economy, even and perhaps most of all, American culture — doesn’t work for them, doesn’t give them the primacy and privilege they believe they deserve, that they’re no longer in control. Trump encompasses a deep hostility to that system, for the “liberals”, the “elites”, for people of colour, for migrants, for anyone different, a tribal willingness to burn it all down. If previous populist racists like George Wallace were a scream into the darkness, Trump is the darkness embodied, the darkness that would be all that was left if so many of his supporters had their way.
But it comes with a peculiar sensitivity to accusations of racism. Both those who share this victimhood and those who exploit it bitterly resent being called racist. Trump has repeatedly insisted not merely that he is not racist but that, despite his long and well-recorded history of racism, “I’m the least racist person in this room“; “I’m the least racist person you’ve interviewed” . The accusation of racism fits very uncomfortably with the white grievance narrative, suggesting that angry white people aren’t the targets of a hostile system but in fact the perpetrators of it — not the victims but the oppressors.
Australia is awash in a similar sense of white victimhood. The current migration debate isn’t directly connected to it — the angst for most is over the volume of migrants and where they’ll live and our failure to provide sufficient housing and infrastructure for our population, not who they are or where they’re from — but the Voice referendum campaign was steeped in white grievance and resentment directed toward our most immiserated and alienated people, a giant kicking-downward exercise replete with accusations that it was Indigenous peoples themselves, and Yes supporters, who were the real racists.
Being called racist clearly irks racists, irks them deeply.
The more productive exercise, given the dangers posed not just to the United States by Trump but to countries like Australia as well, is to determine the source of white grievance and victimhood and address it, if possible. Not by restoring the privilege and discrimination — the loss of which so upsets many people — but restoring to them a sense of economic certainty that 40 years of market economics has taken from most of them. The alternative is persistent tribalism and division in a battle of the aggrieved.
How big a role has racism played in the rise of Trump? And how much of a danger does he pose to Australia? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
