The View from Canberra

The country founded as a prison for England looks at the country that took the detritus of Europe and says:  "Thanks, but I think not."

We'll start here, in media res:

Almost nobody predicted it, with the notable exception of Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik. Amalrik is not as well known as dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn because he was killed in a car crash in 1980 - but not before his writings had been smuggled out to the West. Amalrik was unlike other dissidents, who sought East-West accommodation and a little softening of the Soviet hard line while still under a communist regime (because the end of the regime seemed a hopeless cause).

Instead, Amalrik pointed out in detail the inherent rottenness of the Soviet communist system, which he said would be gone by 1984. He was not far out. He pointed out the circumstances in which a great power succumbs to self-delusion because it imagines itself to be indestructible.

Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., wrote an essay in the most recent Foreign Affairs magazine outlining Amalrik's theory of great power decay, very cleverly avoiding directly applying it to the US.

King wrote: "The 'comfort cult', as Amalrik called it - the tendency in seemingly stable societies to believe "that 'reason will prevail' and that 'everything will be all right'" - is seductive. As a result, when a terminal crisis comes, it is likely to be unexpected, confusing, and catastrophic, with the causes so seemingly trivial, the consequences so easily reparable if political leaders would only do the right thing, that no one can quite believe it has come to this ...

"Viewed from 2020, exactly 50 years since it was published, Amalrik's work has an eerie timeliness. He was concerned with how a great power handles multiple internal crises - the faltering of the institutions of domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored and venal politicians, the first tremors of systemic illegitimacy. He wanted to understand the dark logic of social dissolution and how discrete political choices sum up to apocalyptic outcomes."

Take just that much, and consider which country spent the most of its "capital":  governmental, military, economic, even cultural; opposing the Soviet Union.  And remember the phrase attributed to Nietszche:  those who fight dragons too long, become dragons themselves.

It's comforting, in other words, to blame the current state of affairs on Goldwater radicals or Newt Gingrich radicals or the fact Donald Trump seems to have the balls of all the Senators in the GOP in a lockbox, or that Mitch McConnell has traded away the American birthright for a set of judicial appointments.  But maybe that's the story we tell ourselves so we don't bear the burden of blame, and "they" do.  Whoever "they" are; so long as they're not "us."

Don't look at me like that, or I might not be too sure who you are.  Isn't that how McCarthyism started?  Am I sure you don't have something hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin in a pumpkin patch?  Should I scrutinize your typewriter?  Have we all forgotten Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn worked together, and were virulent anti-Communists?  Do you still think there's no through-line here, and that we haven't been helping it along?  It's not like aliens or lizard Illuminati did this to us while we slept.

Look at the US now. Its president is so psychiatrically disordered with narcissism that he is incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 crisis in a coherent, empathetic way. Everything he says and does is through a prism of himself. He has now turned his whole re-election campaign into one of race hate, law and order and a bizarre invention of a threat from "left-wing fascists".

But worse, the US seems to have a national self-delusion that once Trump loses and is gone, everything will return to normal. The delusion extends to a belief that the COVID-19-stricken economy will bounce back to normal in a V shape.

Trump is as much just a symptom of the underlying rottenness as an integral part of it, even if his sucking up to authoritarian leaders in Russia, China and North Korea is unprecedented.

The underlying weakness in present US democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it. COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change and energy policy go unattended.

I like the idea that partisanship "has become so extreme."  It's like saying "the gun just went off."  It absolves us of blame to act like concepts like partisanship can develop without our input, just like inanimate objects like guns can fire on their own, without our effort.  It absolves us.  It makes us acted upon, rather than actors.  It removes agency, dissolves responsibility, makes it easier to accept this was done to us, never by us.

That's a comfort, isn't it?  It comforts Trump, anyway; which should tell you all you ever want to know about that.  Besides, I remember when "partisanship" was so extreme Dr. King was considered a pariah and a criminal and a trouble-maker, and people walking peacefully in the streets were met with dogs and water cannons.  I remember when Mayor Daley unleashed his police on anti-war protestors and four innocent students were shot on the campus of Kent State and the general consensus was "they deserved it."  We ended the '60's with three major public assassinations, all of them political.  What's the definition of "extreme partisanship" we're using now to excuse our selfishness and disconnection from our duties as citizens of this republic?

The motives of "the other side" are routinely vilified without evidence. The Democrats are blamed for everything. The Republicans can do no wrong. And to a lesser extent, vice versa. My side of politics, right or wrong.

In a vicious cause-and-effect circle, the imperative of winning at all costs corrodes the political process, and the corroded political process makes winning at all costs even more imperative.

The Trump presidency has made all this worse, but the seeds were there long before. He has appointed incompetent ignorant toadies to the most senior positions in his cabinet and the bureaucracy. He has undermined the Supreme Court with appointments based on politics, not law.

But I can remember when Texans were Democrats by birthright and by history, and it had to do with the Civil War and Reconstruction (which was a brute process down here, not exactly the model of the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of German and Japan after World War II).  I've seen the extremes of party affliliation:  Gingrich didn't invent it, nor did the internet, nor did Twitter.  It's as old as Jefferson v. Adams, and it's not going away soon. But again, this wasn't done to us; and we've done it this way before now; long, long before.

For a long time, the electoral process has been corrupted by state governors drawing unfair electoral boundaries so that the Republican Party is grossly over-represented in Congress compared to its vote, and has won the presidency twice this century with a minority of the vote.

The electoral process has also been corrupted by runaway bribery through political donations.

Another vicious circle has emerged. The politicised Supreme Court from 2010 on has refused to control corporate and individual political donations - thus favouring the Republicans.

Donations from billionaires, mainly to the Republicans, consequently boomed from just $17 million in 2008 to $611 million in 2018 - and rising. This results in policies more skewed to the wealthy and conservatives, and therefore greater inequality. These policies include engaging in wars in remote places where the only real US interests are those of war profiteers. In turn, these policies result in more donations from billionaires, who get repaid manyfold, and who now have as much if not more control of the process than voters.

Hyper-partisanship is not our national nightmare:  lack of partisanship is.  When Texas was a one-party state, and that party the Democrats, you could be as liberal as LBJ or John Nance Garner and still get elected to public office; because you were a Democrat.  The "yellow dog Democrat" would vote for a yellow dog if it was on the Democratic ticket, because the yellow dog  Democrat always voted.  It was the lack of partisanship that did in Hillary Clinton.  She lost because Democrats who should have been partisan enough to vote for the "yellow dog" said "Nah, man.  Not gonna do it.  But Trump can't win!  So it's all good."  And despite that Clinton won by 3 million votes and Trump won by the arcane and archaic electoral college, and even at that he barely carried some states which should have gone for Clinton.  Except a failure of partisanship failed to drive voters to the polls.  That and a sense that "somebody else" would take care of it, because "my vote" is too precious and holy to be sullied by casting it for the less than perfect candidate.  Or just because "why bother? It don't matter anyway." Neither of which is partisanship, but something even more pernicious:  selfishness.

And that became the national ennui which led to our present national nightmare because we bought into it.  Aliens didn't land and rob our brains, or slip subliminal messages in our TV shows and our newspapers and magazines.  Lizard Illuminati aren't surveilling us from the Moon.  We accepted this state of affairs, hook, line and sinker.   We gave up and said "Fuck it, nothin's any good!" Government was the problem, not the solution.  Government was bad, not decent people. Even the people we knew who worked for government (teachers, firemen, police officers, if no one else) were good; but government was still "bad."  And mostly government was bad because government was too nice to the black people who suddenly had "rights" and could sit at lunch counters with "us," and go to "our" schools (the number of private schools in Texas skyrocketed in the '60's.  By the time I got to "liberal" Austin, Texas in the late '70's, they were still fighting the desegregation battles I had gone through in my East Texas (redneck to the core) hometown 6 years earlier.  In Austin the segregation was even uglier because some schools in the district were well taken care of; some schools were all but entirely ignored.)  It was the hidden wound of racism made manifest, but we hid it from ourselves again.  We had nothing against "those people."  We just resented government "interference," that's all.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions; but ours were never really that good.  We just told ourselves they were.  We were "good people," after all; how could our intentions be bad?

Tragically, American exceptionalism - "we are the first and best democracy on Earth" - contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy. Even the so-called checks and balances are not working - they are causing gridlock, rather than adding a bit of mild caution to a system that is overall supposed to be geared to problem-solving, not political point-scoring.

The system has become so warped that those disenfranchised, disempowered and disenchanted are taking to the streets, questioning the legitimacy of the whole system.

The only question is whether the taking to the streets can break these vicious circles, or whether it is just another step in the decline and fall of a great power.

Dr. King was questioning the legitimacy of the whole system.  So were the anti-war protestors.  So did LBJ, with his Great Society programs.  Why do you think conservatives hated him so?  He established Medicare as ineradicable a program of the federal government as FDR did Social Security.  The legitimacy of the whole system supposedly rested on individual endeavors and personal worth and what your earned by the sweat of your brow, even though most CEO's and corporate heads and titans of commerce and robber barons never really broke a sweat one day of their lives.  Which legitimacy was questioned, and by whom?  The legitimacy of the Constitution in 1865? Of the Constitution after the 14th Amendment?  The holding in Dred Scott wasn't finally and fully overturned until 1954, just shy of its centenary year.  How legitimate was "the whole system" before that?  Before the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act?

The "people in the streets" didn't pass those laws.  The death of JFK propelled the Civil Rights Act into law.  LBJ got the Voting Rights Act passed.  The Warren Court finally atoned for the sin of Dred Scott.  Because ideas changed and people backed the changes; not just because people marched in the streets or had their heads broken in Selma.  Few of those protestors (aside from John Lewis) became legislators or men of influence or smashed the "vicious circles" into useless pieces.  Even Dr. King didn't do that.  The anti-war protests didn't end the Vietnam war; futility did that.  The pointlessness of ever being there, did that.  We learned nothing from it.  We did it all over again in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and learned the lesson of not imposing a draft to make rich white kids go to war or go to college.  That lesson we learned especially well.  The other lesson we learned was to declare "victory"! and bug out.  The myths are we spat on returning Vietnam soldiers, and called them "baby-killers."  We did worse to the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq:  we ignored them.  They don't exist.  Those battles never happened.  We didn't lose because they were never really "wars."  We never really fought there.

But we didn't break any vicious circles with Vietnam or civil rights; we never have.  We took the chains off the slaves, and put new chains on them, because to this day we fear what we did then, and what those we punished and oppressed might do if we gave them equal freedom and equal rights to us.  George Floyd died because we use the police to express our fears and to keep us "safe."  We need to be kept "safe" because we are so afraid; not of invaders, but of the very people in our cities, on our streets.  "We" are afraid of "them."

Legitimacy?  Of what?  If we're not a great power anymore, maybe that's a good thing.  If our "preeminence" didn't last 100 years, maybe we'll learn something afterwards.  Maybe we'll learn some humility from this.  Maybe we'll go through some national self-examination, and offer some serious counsel to the world.  Maybe.  We'll see.