I Couldn’t Look Away – You Never Can from a Slow Moving Train Wreck

“No” Brett said “we don’t express a political point of view in the Monday Reflection, even about some other country.” So this article about why we are so fascinated by this US election won’t be coloured by our views on who should win. Because we are fascinated by Trump v Biden.

The coverage has been similar to what you might expect for an Australian federal election and a lot more than you’d expect for a state election. So what is it that has made someone else’s election so critical for us? And what does it tell us about ourselves that causes this election to stand as such a symbolic event?

Is it that Donald is so awful that we want to see him get his comeuppance? Or the backwash of Coronavirus and the deaths of so many Americans? Or the media business model that prefers “breaking news” to considered argument? Or wonder at how the “deplorables” continue to be attracted to Trump? Or the bare-knuckle savagery of it? Or amazement that the Democratic Party couldn’t find a more compelling candidate? Or the result of the size and transparency of US politics and media which makes the process so visible for us? Or the significance for Australia of the leadership of our key defence partner? Or the sense that we may be witnessing the decline of the USA? Or the dawning awareness that China thinks nothing of using corruption and trade as political weapons?

All these factors have a part to play. But we didn’t have this fascination when it was Clinton v Trump (2016) or Obama v Romney (2012) or Obama v McCain (2008). It seems to me that this election brings the challenges that we feel we are facing, individually and as a nation, into focus. Although we can’t influence the outcome, the process and the result and our reaction to it tells us a lot about ourselves.

An interview with Barry Jones, former Labor Party President, quoted him as saying of Australia and the world more generally: “We see a retreat from reason; the rejection of facts and expertise; the rise of populism, snarling nationalisms, tribalism, and conspiracy theories; a fundamentalist revival and hostility to science; a failure of ethical leadership; deepening corruption of democratic processes; profound neglect of the climate change imperative; and the triumph of vested interests.”

That’s a pretty damning litany and suggests a real pessimism about the world we’ve created. It also leaves out the fact that fewer people per capita died in the last two decades in armed conflict than at any time in the past century or two, declining crime rates everywhere, a billion or so people dragged out of poverty in the last two decades, and an enormous decline in famine.

The events of the past 12 months have made us realise how fragile we potentially are – to bush fires, to a pandemic and its economic consequences, to a China that doesn’t hesitate to use spurious excuses to turn off our exports, to a change in the post WW2 certainties of an engaged USA underpinning the stability of Europe and Asia.

Since 2005 our debt to GDP ratio has risen from ~10% to ~50% and it’s heading higher. The US federal government ratio is about 100%. This and other challenges are wicked problems and if the US with its sclerotic political system can’t fix them, what will be our chances.

In a peculiar way Trump v Biden makes us reflect on the apparently greater fragility of our own place in the world, to realise the extent to which The Lucky Country was supported by US policy and cultural alliances. No wonder we can’t look away.