The Trump ascendancy has, and not for the first time, posed a simple question to Australian foreign and defence policy makers: what limits are to be put on the national tolerance of egregious behaviour by the United States? What is apparent now (even if many ignored it before) is the accelerating transformation of this country’s closest, and dominant ally into an oligarchal Christian fascist state. It is a change which cannot be ignored; moreover, it is one that should give pause to all joint ventures.
If truth be told, the pause was due decades ago on the grounds that the metamorphose was palpable and attention to it was being drawn by a growing list of the most astute observers of US politics.
What follows is an aide-mémoire – in the form of annotated bullet points for quick reference to remind us how bleak the situation is.
- Overall, it is beyond bleak as a Canadian reporter for The Globe and Mail outlined the presidential election of 2024:
Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt… the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
- And it is not gratuitous to add that the historical record reveals that the president’s dishonesty has reached unfathomable depths – a psychopathy which has now been complemented by his assertion that there is no need to recognise constitutional limits on his authority since, in an apparent expropriation from Napoleon Bonaparte, “he who saves his country does not violate any law.”
How was this possible?
- The national fantasy that is American Exceptionalism is among the causes. It is many things including a foundational belief in America’s immaculate conception and an equally irrational conviction that, no matter what its contrivances, it is immune from history, nature, society; in a word it believes it is immortal.
- While American Exceptionalism is longstanding, of great concern more recently are the hallmarks of fascist sentiment that are etched into the character of US Government, basically through its ways of thinking and habits of mind.
Thirty years ago Umberto Eco — long before the first Trump presidency — identified this as a turn to what he described as Ur Fascism (summarised in a post on this site in 2021).
In a reduced form it is identified by the following axioms:
- Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn’t represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.
- Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.
- Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.
- The national identity is provided by the nation’s enemies.
- Argument is tantamount to treason.
- Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear.
- Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of “the people” in the grand opera that is the state.
- Ur Fascism was possible because, abroad, the US detached itself from the project of being a democratic republic and succumbed to the temptations of empire, the consequences of which, over time, are close to immutable.
- At home, the forces and influences which made empire desirable created extreme wealth for the few, declining standards of living for the many, and an American society that turned in on itself in the search for scapegoats responsible for its diminished standards of living and status.
- The turn, irrationally, was to leaders whose affiliations with the majority was at best transactional. Why? Because they promised a return to utopia (notwithstanding that it never existed in the first place).
- This was aided, without question, by the abandonment, over time and now, of the lower socio-economic strata of society by the party that traditionally represented them, and conversely, by the appeals of “strong leadership” which promised a restoration.
- The latter were, and are, better resourced, more convincing, and unafraid of espousing what is essentially minority, or more accurately, fringe government.
The Fringe Coalition’s counterintuitive success
- Mainstream political science holds that minorities should not and cannot rule in the United States. In this, mainstream political science is wrong. A 2006 monograph by the American historian, Gary Wills, Bush’s Fringe Government, outlines the precedent for the present.
- Minorities — particularly aggrieved minorities — can rule if they form coalitions with the strategic aim of seizing the levers of power in every way possible. Foremost among such minorities then, as now, was the Christian Right, convinced that the US had fallen so far from God’s grace that it was an “apostate state”.
- Today the umbrella term is Christian Nationalism, but with essentially the same grievances and demands as before:
- The US is an apostate nation; the entire culture is corrupted.
- The country must be governed inspite of itself.
- Need is to roll back the Enlightenment.
- Promote themselves as persecuted white victims and a minority.
- Adulterate the channels of public information with toxic disinformation about migrants, gender, education, civil rights, and political opponents – the secular bigoted elites.
- Democracy, because it demands co-existence with apostates, is anathema.
- The US Government should be a theocracy, an integration of church and state.
- American citizenship to be redefined in terms of commitment and faith, political and cultural engagement, and even whiteness.
- These beliefs are to be instilled in every aspect of government policy.
- Success depends on the denial of democracy: after all, if the state is generally deserving of the sobriquet “apostate”, then it is pointless to involve the corrupted majority: they cannot be trusted because they are part of the problem. As Wills observes, the country can only be morally governed in spite of itself – and that means from the fringes of morality.
- The fringes, moreover, was prepared: as Chris Hedges, found in his lengthy and intensive research, there are to be found the core of a mass movement which fuses unbridled nationalism with the hatred of an open society. In American Fascists, he cites the evidence of the emerging Christian Fascism which is becoming part of the national structures of American society. These include:
- The movement’s call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America.
- The movement’s yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry.
- The movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivalled power.
- Success also depends on a mutually beneficial relationship between oligarchs and the Christian Fascists. This is essentially an agreement to facilitate, to the maximum extent possible, the unfettered acquisition of wealth by the former in return for enacting the Christian Fascists’ agendas as law. Unspoken is that this arrangement is pragmatic — a form of peaceful co-existence — and relies on neither party intruding upon the other.
- Of note is that Trump’s transition team, cabinet, and other appointments are the richest any administration has ever assembled: they are populated by those whose success and wealth derives from life pursuits predicated on the notion of citizens as atomised, acquisitive individuals, and thus opposed in the extreme to notions of democracy and shared publics.
- Chalmers Johnson, writing in 2006, foretold this as the “four sorrows” of the self-destructing American empire:
- A state of perpetual war leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut.
- A loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal “executive branch” of government into a military junta. [Irrelevant junior partner].
- Replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, military legions with a global presence, and a baroque arsenal.
- Bankruptcy – as the US pours ever more resources into grandiose military projects it shortchanges education, health, welfare, and the general security of its citizens.
The present sorrows for the US would also appear to be its long-term fate. While that is sad — indeed dangerous — it cannot excuse Australian Governments from a fundamental reappraisal of an alliance relationship which undermines both the nation’s declared values and its national interests.
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Judy Hemming has researched and taught extensively in the areas of Sociology, International Relations, and Strategy; among her published works on education and politics is: The Triumph of Neoconservatism and the Religious Right (2010). She is a member of the Emeritus Faculty, the Australian National University.