Australia is catching the Trump disease

For many Australians in these troubled times, international current affairs have become something of a spectator sport.

I am not talking about those whose attention rarely strays beyond their immediate surroundings of work and family. In many ways they are the lucky ones, self-insulated from the misery, disruption and upheavals of the nightly news.

Yet even for those who are interested, there is often a degree of detachment. They express shock, horror, maybe even anger, but they are the emotions of an audience watching a powerful drama. Easy to switch off and return to the ‘real world’.

It’s all happening somewhere else and we are comfortable and safe in our living rooms.

Or are we?

I do not mean the country is about to witness angry crowds taking to the streets of Sydney and Melbourne demanding governments fall with the associated tear gas, water cannon and looting. Australia has not reached that point.

There are other, far more subtle signs of a disturbing trend that is leading to increasing division and alienation in societies around the world – not just in those whose cities are currently wracked with violence.  

It is the abdication of the responsibility of leaders to govern for the greater good of all, rather than for the benefit of a core group of supporters.

This has long been the method of dictators, but it is also being adopted in countries that call themselves democracies — in Erdogan’s Turkey, Duterte’s Philippines and Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

The template is United States President Donald Trump whose virulent and often abusive attacks on political opponents, journalists and academics who dare to question him have become routine.

In the United Kingdom the concerns of 48 per cent of the population who opposed leaving the European Union have been derided and dismissed by supporters of the small and increasingly perilous majority who support it.

Australia is not immune, with the arrogance of the Coalition Government ever more on show since its surprise third consecutive election win earlier this year.

Critics are dismissed as being “part of the Canberra bubble”; Ministers refuse to take responsibility for the failings and even the possibly illegal actions of their staffs; blind eyes are turned and parliamentary questions deflected over police actions against journalists.

Perhaps this is not so surprising as it was an Australian, Lynton Crosby, who formulated the successful election strategy for the UK Conservative Party that it should play to its strengths with the electorate and not try to patch up its weaknesses.

That lesson came straight from Niccolo Machiavelli’s 16^th century playbook when he said that as long as politicians cared for a powerful elite group of supporters they were “free to engage in evil”.

Trump-like slogans such as ‘Make Australia Great’, and ‘Drain the Swamp’ are now regular parts of the conservative Government’s lexicon, as are increasingly virulent attacks on any organisation or group that questions the philosophy of the right, from Get Up to climate activists.   

The politics of division is on the march.   

Is Trump too dangerous to defeat?

Those of us who have travelled and lived long enough to experience democratic government in all its forms can only be recoiling in horror at the events of recent months.

I do not directly refer to impeachment proceedings against a United States President; or to the convolutions of a minority Government in the United Kingdom. Unsettling as they are there have been precedents.

What must concern anyone who believes in government of, for and by the people are the antics of those we have placed in these positions of power and the effect it could have, not just on us, but on those nations who in the past looked up to and respected our  systems and tried to emulate them.

As well as for those, trapped and oppressed by authoritarian regimes, who might have clung to the faint hope that our example might eventually result in a change.

How the autocrats must rejoice at the events in London and Washington – a Prime Minister who defies the law; a President who tears up international treaties and tips the bucket on his allies.

The dictators would see this as overwhelming justification for strong and inflexible leadership, keeping an iron grip on their populations as an inoculation against the infection of individualism and democracy creating such havoc in the so called Free World.

US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have both backed themselves into corners of their own making. Johnson’s intransience will hurt his own country and damage the European Union, but the real danger lies with Trump.

An erratic and unstable US President who tweets about his “great and unmatched wisdom” has at his disposal matchless economic and military might. Already during his presidency we have heard threats to consume North Korea in fire, to obliterate Iran from the map and lately, to destroy the Turkish economy.

Should impeachment fail, which is likely in a highly politicised Senate trial, Trump may yet go on to win the 2020 presidential election. Even though the polls are against him, he can still rely on the antiquated Electoral College system to get him over the line — remember that in 2016 he lost the popular vote by some three million, but still won handily in the College.

Yet what if he did lose? This would leave him still in the White House with full presidential powers for more than two months between Election Day and the inauguration of his successor, the so-called lame duck period.

Might he decide to sign off with a dramatic gesture? Cataclysmic revenge on some of the enemies, or countries that have dared to defy him over the previous four years?

If so, who would stop him? The US Constitution, designed in a slow-moving, pre-technological age when it was assumed that those in leadership positions were always going to be reasonable men who played by the rules, is silent on the subject.

Asking these questions would have been unthinkable three years ago, but that was another time; a different world.

The autocrat and the activist

Russian President Vladimir Putin joined the ranks of those who derided 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg after her recent address to the United Nations.

Thunberg’s critics, while a small minority, have been vocal: Some patronising, others dismissive, insulting and worse.

However, Putin’s comments were different.

While taking the oft-repeated line that while Thunberg’s attention to the environment was admirable, the Russian President went on to describe her as “a naïve child who is allowing herself to be manipulated”.

He continued:

“No one has explained to Greta that the modern world is complex and people in Africa or in many Asian countries want to live at the same wealth level as in Sweden.”

Really, Putin’s conversion to concern for the people in less well-off parts of the world is illuminating.

Up until now his attention in this area has largely involved sending his air force to wreak havoc on defenceless civilians in Syria. His road to Damascus has only been in order to support of the murderous regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Elsewhere he has sponsored the Wagner Group, a shadowy band of mercenaries waging secret wars on his behalf from Ukraine to the Central African Republic.

He has taken part in a not so subtle war against the European Union, cheering on the United Kingdom’s plans to leave that group, while his support for Assad had ensured a steady and destabilising flood of refugees into European countries.

Only in recent days, the identity of another group, so called Unit 29155, has been revealed, charged with attacking the EU through campaigns of disinformation, hacking, even plotting attempted coups in individual member countries.

It would be a welcome change of course for Putin if he was to become the champion of the oppressed people of this world instead of trying to blast them into the next.

It would be absolutely wonderful if he used some of Russia’s capital to construct wells rather than bomb craters; if he made a contribution to world peace, rather than indulging in Tsarist plots to expand his nation’s territory and malign influence over his neighbours.

Perhaps he might even do something about the more than 19 million of his own people who live below the poverty line – a figure that is expanding at an alarming rate.

The Russia President was right about one thing: The modern world is complex — a complexity that demands difficult solutions, involving sacrifice on all sides.

Unfortunately he and a growing number of world leaders do nothing to solve these complexities. In many cases they are the problem, not the solution.

Thunberg is over-young for what she is seeking to achieve, but she and her supporters have pointed to a way forward, and even if the details are missing, they have the energy and commitment to put to the task.

They will also be around for many years after Putin and other current world leaders are just pages in the history books.

Two men on the wrong side of history

Amid the torrent of news and comment out of Washington surrounding efforts by the White House to rope in national leaders to discredit the Mueller Inquiry, speeches by the two main protagonists at the United Nations have been largely passed over.

United States President Donald Trump and Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov gave widely varying accounts of how they saw the world, but their addresses to the General Assembly had one thing in common — neither had any relation to reality.

Trump concentrated on the “spectre of socialism — the wrecker of nations and destroyer of societies”.

Referencing Venezuela, he described socialism and communism as “being about one thing only: Power for the ruling class”.

He claimed the United States Democrat Party was embracing radical socialism, and called upon Americans to “defeat rising socialism in the US”.   

Lavrov used his address to take aim at the ‘West’ (by which he means the United States and its European allies), saying it held to a dated philosophy that was out of step with present-day realities. 

“It is hard for the West to accept seeing its centuries-long dominance in world affairs diminishing. It is trying to impede a polycentric world,” he said.

Interestingly he also chose Venezuela as an example, saying that under Western intervention that country’s statehood “was destroyed before our eyes”.

Trump’s attack on socialism fails to recognise the many socialist governments that have existed around the world in the 20^th and 21^st centuries which have neither wrecked their nations nor destroyed their societies.

The United Kingdom’s Labour Government of 1945-51, the most socialist administration the country has had before or since, was instrumental in setting the nation on the path to recovery after a ruinous war.

Socialist governments in Europe and elsewhere were often at the forefront of legislation that has been of immeasurable benefits to their citizens – universal health care, affordable education, support for the less fortunate.

Those European socialists never, as many doom-sayers predicted, lapsed into authoritarianism, even when the Soviet Union’s communist-controlled clients were on their doorsteps.   

Lavrov is similarly mistaken when he talks of the ‘West’s’ out-of-date philosophy.

The rise of right-wing elements in Europe is a challenge to traditional liberal democracy, but by no means signals its destruction.

Trump himself is a challenge to the traditional order in the US, but a country that has survived a civil war, two world wars and decades of racial unrest, will not easily succumb to the eccentricities of one man, even if he temporarily holds the most powerful office in the land.

Liberal democracy has weathered much worse, survived and prospered.

Indeed, Lavrov is guilty of wishful thinking by seeking to draw a firm division between Russia and his West. There is no definite line, it is at best blurred.

Liberal democracy infiltrated Russia after the fall of communism and despite the best efforts of President Vladimir Putin, refuses to be put back in its box.

Attempts by the Kremlin to play the Superpower game will eventually founder in an ageing nation with an economy no bigger than that of Spain. Signs of dissent are already apparent in Russian cities and are only likely to grow.

There is no doubt a regression has occurred among some of the world’s leading nations.

Politicians with dreams of self-grandeur have resulted in an Emperor in China, a Czar in Russia, and a President in the US whose fondness for adoring rallies and distaste for the truth provoke dark echoes of the 1930s.

Their antics have produced a rash of minor imitators from Turkey to the Philippines, but they will not prevail.

At the UN it was Trump and Lavrov who were on the wrong side of history — and history, while patient, is eventually unforgiving.