As election day looms in the United States, much has been written about how this is a consequential poll for the country. Donald Trump has vowed to reverse policies enacted since he left office, remove undocumented individuals, introduce more tariffs and finish building that wall. His opponent Kamala Harris has warned Trump is a dangerous threat to democratic governance itself. But what about the rest of the world? How is Australia’s fate tied up with who is in the White House? Would a Trump presidency mean business as usual Down Under?
Today Crikey’s political editor Bernard Keane argues the negative case, and American studies academic Dr Rodney Taveira argues in the affirmative.
One way to predict if a Donald Trump presidency will be business as usual for Australia is to ask not what would change, but what can change. The enshittification of political culture both here and in the US will continue unabated.
“Enshittification” was first coined in a 2022 blog post by author and journalist Cory Doctorow. The ugliness of the term captures aptly the frustration many of us feel as once-useful services become increasingly exploitative: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Doctorow is writing about digital platforms such as Google and Facebook, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison to electoral politics and its history of unfulfilled promises to voters.
But politics can’t die — it decides who gets what. The best we can hope for is that the terms of politics will change, that the “what” is actually what we need and want, and the “who” is most, if not all, of us. If Trump wins next week, it’s hard to see the terms changing.
The culture wars that are the enshittification of politics (just who is getting what here?) will continue. They will get hotter as Australia continues to take many of its tropes and rhetorical cues from US political culture — witness the question of whether women’s reproductive rights might be rolled back in Queensland, the furore over transgender people in sport, the scornful dismissal of “woke” of anything that’s non-traditional, reparative or novel. And it’s hard to see them cooling under a Kamala Harris presidency. In short, Trump would continue to use them as president; Harris’s opponents would use them against her presidency.
Part of why it will be business as usual under Trump in the United States is that it won’t change much if Harris were to win. Granted, women’s reproductive rights will likely be a champion cause and the issue has motivated voters in several state elections to reject draconian Republican legislation.
But Trump and Harris are both fighting over who can most aggressively mitigate the apparent menaces of immigration. Here in Australia, the Labor government is introducing unmodelled legislation to cap international students in our universities. The Coalition approves. A large part of the rhetoric centres on cashed-up Asian students driving up real estate prices. It’s not quite “illegals are taking our jobs and eating our pets”, but there is a similar appeal to the public’s viscera.
This appeal is made in an increasingly platform-based and global mediascape. This means of doing politics comprises a mutual reinforcement between the process of enshittification and the spectacularisation of political culture. As Big Tech chases diminishing value, information (and misinformation) by meme increases. The mutual reinforcement will continue if Trump wins — he and MAGA are so much of its fuel — and Australia is too small a player to exercise much control here, even if the government manages to age-restrict social media access.
A September 2024 survey by the US Studies Centre found that a majority of Australians (55%) say that the alliance with the United States makes their country more secure, and a small minority of Australians (26%) would want to withdraw from the US alliance if Trump wins a second term of office. Given this public support, it seems likely that Australia will continue to posture against “the China threat” and express verbal sorrow over the world-historical violence in Gaza while doing nothing to cease that lethal fire.
On the American side of the alliance, while Trump has a more transactional view of any relationship, the massive promised spending on nuclear submarines under AUKUS will likely be well-received and, despite the set-up of Ambassador Keven Rudd for a Trump smack-down by GB News back in March, and the threat of tariffs, it seems unlikely that Australia won’t have learnt its lessons on personality management from the first Trump presidency.
Climate change is another example of the continued enshittification of politics if Trump wins. In the October 24 edition of his online newsletter, Chartbook, historian Adam Tooze decried “the complete absence of any serious climate discussion” in the presidential debates, noting that just 11% of Trump supporters say climate change is important in deciding their vote. Rather than this meaning Harris would necessarily do anything about climate change, the Democrats have already secured the climate vote. Would the cooperative — most notably, with competitor/“newly aggressive” China — and urgent action required to combat climate change be more likely under Harris than Trump? Maybe, but what electoral harm would come to the Democrats if they didn’t take action?
Things will be the same if Trump wins: you know, shit.
Read the opposing argument by Bernard Keane.
