Democracy is under threat, but failure to deliver its benefits is the most likely reason for it to collapse. We need to take note…
Following their presidential election, the accusation that Americans must be stupid is a slur, of course.
It is just as scurrilous to say that Russians are evil bastards because their country invaded Ukraine.
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In both instances, individuals are unfairly freighted with the odium of their baleful governments, yet it is increasingly difficult to resist this freighting because policy decisions by those governments now affect us immediately, directly, and personally.
Consider, anti-woke biases now affect American research grant funding of Australia’s universities, threaten to unwind our valued Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and restrict sensible anti-falsehood legislation of social media platforms.
Deep philosophical roots
These threats are not the scatter-gun whimsical caprice of a malign, small-minded, oligarch-loving, fatally vain, kiss-my-a***, wannabe autocrat, but have far deeper philosophical roots.
Charles King’s review of three conservative writers shows that the current conservative bent originates in extreme-right valorised recastings of pre-Enlightenment thought, power practices, and social structures.
Sweeping aside more conventional conservative notions of personal freedom and political legitimacy, these views challenge America’s founding principles and advocate instead a return to “much older order, before the wrong turn of the Enlightenment, the fetishizing (sic) of human rights, and the belief in progress”.
Particularly alarming is a deeply undemocratic advocacy.
One writer suggests that “democracy and elections have no special claim to delivering the common good” and is happy to recommend the restoration of the proper anti-liberal order by adopting “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” – essentially sedition, just like the January 6 Capitol riots.
Another recommends the restoration of “… Christianity as the normative framework and standard determining public life in every setting in which this aim can be attained” – a perspective uncomfortably close to ISIS if the word “Christianity” were replaced with “Islam”.
Thus, though expressed in a loathing of the current political and economic order, the current blizzard of Trumpian directives should more properly be conceived as the first stage of a systematic dismantling of America’s founding principles in favour of a much darker medieval condition.
Here is America’s Taliban, hard at work.
Though lamenting and alarmed by these perspectives, King reminds us they do not represent the views of the vast majority of ordinary Americans.
It is fundamentally not our business if Americans choose to throw away their democratic heritage with little demur, but if we disagree, we should heed King’s warning and stridently defend our own democratic world (despite its many faults), not continue with our current flaccid indifference.
Flaccid indifference?
As we have already seen, the biggest threat to democracy is the erosion of its legitimacy.
The Arab Spring failed by not delivering meaningful improvement to the lives of affected citizens.
Likewise, American ultra right populism followed the un-remedied social ruptures produced by unfettered globalisation.
Disturbingly, these preconditions exist in Australia as well.
Too much of our recent political endeavour has drifted towards the performative, entrenching the status quo and embedding privilege – consider our largely futile political responses to the climate crisis, housing affordability crisis, gambling reform, financial sector reform, cost of living pressures, toll-road fiascos, persistence crime in the building and casino industries – the list is long.
Australia may merely be “behind the curve”; many will recall images of prominent glinty-eyed Australians celebrating Trump’s triumph during his victory soiree.
How can we strengthen our democracy – examples please?
Any democratic defence should entail, firstly, the swift rejection of noxious conservative policy nostrums and, secondly, the spirited and demonstrably superior delivery of democracy’s many benefits.
As we have seen, Rana Foroohar suggests not the dismantling of government, but its development of new roles that better reconcile local and global interests.
Let’s review a few hypotheticals, previously explored examples to illustrate.
The first explored a controversial road enlarging proposal, T2D, down the long axis of Adelaide from its northern to southern metropolitan extremities.
It was suggested that it could be imaginatively combined with housing provision and the acceleration of environmentally sustainable transport, all under the aegis of a state government keen to distinguish itself as providing greater urban imagination than its larger siblings.
Also led by state government, the second was the opportunity to decontaminate surface road networks from extremely scarce and valuable inner-city land, deliver more affordable housing closer to jobs, and provide room for the CBD to grow, as explored here for WestConnex.
A third example was recently highlighted by a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, Lucy Turnbull, who lamented the patchy roll-out of affordable housing and community infrastructure that will damage new inner-city communities in Waterloo.
Lastly, the east coast High Speed Rail (HSR), Australia’s perennial national project, considered what virtuous overlaps exist in response to the intensifying climate crisis that threatens legacy transport technologies like air travel, explored here.
HSR
Of these examples, only HSR still contains seeds of opportunity; the rest have effectively been “locked in”.
Abatement of air travel carbon emissions will be difficult, costly and incremental if confined to initiatives wholly within the airline industry.
Australian domestic aviation fuel usage is slightly less than international usage (see Figure 2), yet the domestic sector travel is dominated by the Brisbane-to-Melbourne corridor. The Melbourne Sydney run is the fifth busiest in the world at some 9.22 million seats in 2024.
Thus, and drawing on recent European transport initiatives, if air travellers transferred to HSR along this route, “mode agnostic” airline businesses could potentially obtain immediate carbon offsets unavailable to their international services, equal to the difference between air and rail carbon miles, multiplied by the number of passengers decanted to rail and improve the economic viability of HSR.
The cost of air travel carbon abatement is only likely to rise, along with the prospect of steepening carbon taxes at borders for laggard nations, such as contemplated at the recent COP 29 in Baku.
Confirming some of these forecasts, the CEO of Qantas considers airfare increases will eventually exclude all but the wealthy from air travel unless other abatement measures are found.
Our national government already regulates air travel, carbon abatement commitments, cross-state project leadership and the funding required, as is already occurring in Europe.
Many nations are rolling out HSR. Travel writers report with admiration Turkish, Saudi and Tunisian HSR services.
Rail is woefully underdeveloped in Australia.
At almost 4000 kilometres, Spain’s HSR network is the second-most extensive (after China) yet per kilometre is Europe’s cheapest.
The area of Sydney is some 12,000 square kilometres and accommodates a population of some 5.5 million at a density of 440 people per square kilometre. The length of the Sydney rail network is 369 km (919 km of track).
By comparison, the area of Switzerland is almost 40,000 square kilometres and accommodates a population of just under 9 million at a national density of 227 people per square kilometre, yet it has a rail network (excluding cog railways, tram lines and cable cars) of 5317 km.
Mind, Australia’s GDP per capita is some $71,000 (IMF, “international” dollars) compared to Switzerland’s $98,000, though Sydney’s GDP per capita is the highest of Australia’s capital cities.
However, European cities celebrated for active encouragement of lower-carbon train travel for short haul flying have the benefit of long established HSR networks to which they can now quickly direct air travellers.
Following a commitment to build a single HSR line, it would take years for Australia to adopt the same policy for Australian air travel, yet this timeframe may well correspond to the rate of rising costs that the Qantas CEO fears.
Why don’t we do this then?
Some will complain that more integrated strategic policy delivery is simply not possible due to the contemporary shrinking of the “Overton window” – the range of policy any community is generally willing to contemplate.
This was profoundly refuted during the first two months of the Trump presidency, which has demolished the entire wall within which the Overton window conceptually sits. Even the constitutional limits of its outer buttresses are now threatened.
Trump at least demonstrated that greater political ambition is a precondition for greater policy achievement.
This brings us back to the start: how well is our democratic governance delivering on its urgently needed and desirable strategic endeavours?
The truism that all nations decline gradually until they collapse in a rush is being demonstrated in real time on American TV; is a picture forming for us?
