Failure to improve the lives of those governed is a well-understood predictor of the slide into hard-right authoritarianism. Until a year ago, this slide was unthinkable in America, yet … here we are. Is a similar collapse possible in Australia?
Next 28 January marks the 40th anniversary of the shocking Challenger space shuttle disaster.
The images of that awful event – the powerful arc of rocket exhaust abruptly disintegrating into the chaos of death and smoking debris – eerily evoke America’s current political trajectory.
“Hey, the bare-chested whack-job in the bison hat looks as angry as me, why don’t we vote for him”?
Some five months after that anniversary, on 4 July next year, will mark 250 years since the American declaration of independence. Such has been the rapidity of change over the past six months, many doubt America’s revolutionary promise and power will survive by then.
In both spacecraft and politics, the predictions of calamity were long foreshadowed. Inquiries into the Challenger disaster revealed that repeated warnings of failure were ignored, subsumed by the “launch fever” that flourished during the space shuttle program.
Likewise, predictions of broad-scale calamity are crowded out by the breathless daily news output of that administration, hotly followed by analysis of the latest presidential idiocy.
Though planted long before, the seeds of decline may not have germinated from a different electoral result, yet fertilised by the tumult of the last half year, national catastrophe in the US now seems inevitable.
Resentment replaces hope
Obama’s famous election poster valorised hope.
It seems we have moved on.
The MAGA ascendency was founded on resentment. Its promulgator-in-chief promised retribution for the real and imagined indignities visited by elites, woke-socialists and Democrats.
Well-illustrated in the recent SBS series Mussolini: Son of the Century the hard-right right thrives on resentment.
Both were open in their autocratic intentions. Mussolini set out to eliminate elections. Trump promised to be an autocrat only on “day one”. Both evinced a belief in their own genius and unique capacity to fix everything.
Both were also remarkable for their almost pathological mediocrity and disgraceful behaviour, none of which seemed to diminish their appeal.
The “Trump was right about everything” cap could well be displayed both in a presidential library and a museum of psychological pathology.
Once thought a democratic bulwark (though with defects), America was assumed to be immune to authoritarianism. Yet as the last few months have illustrated, the two don’t live on opposite sides of the town but are near neighbours.
In America, the rapid slide from one to the other was greased by resentment, perhaps because this emotion finds natural accommodation in both systems.
Resentment is a strident motivator for democratic participation – vote to fix the problem. Authoritarians exploit resentment by offering bold solutions, with a rider that only they can deliver if relieved of further democratic review.
As the American election campaign well illustrated, splenic rage is also eye catching as a political/rhetorical device. It personalises the appeal because it reinforces a narrative that “the whole world is a conspiracy against me”. Its vehemence aims to jolt receivers into a new state of awareness that exists beyond reason.
Unlike, say, hope, resentment harbours mostly negative emotions and invites similarly negative remedies. This in turn provides further licence for authoritarian tendencies. Democratic trampling is excused as long as retribution continues to be inflicted against the un-righteous.
However, retribution as a policy, a bit like a Ponzi scheme, eventually runs out steam.
Democratic competence
It is an uncontested truism that democracy is not set-and-forget yet participation is too often treated apathetically as a chore.
Democracy actually requires more from those governed than just about any governance system. Compare it to autocracy, which requires only that subjects meekly obey. The democratic bargain is that citizens elect their representatives who are then granted authority to operate the levers of state to enact whatever policies the electors voted
This simplistic construction highlights two duties: that voters participate soberly and electees actually do what they promised.
Failure to participate intelligently is the reason why America re-elected it’s a “clown car”.
Failure to acknowledge the scale of problems and match them with workable solutions – failure to fulfil the other half of the bargain – is the reason for America’s current rapid decline (see cartoon below).
Resentments and the housing crisis
Though concerning, recent demonstrations about immigration policy are otherwise benign because the assertions are so easily rejected. Long term-immigration trends are tracking lower than assumed in most recent budgets.
However, the same rage also originates from the housing crisis. As Elizabeth Knight observes, “the housing debate and the immigration debate have dangerously coalesced”. Noting the fracture into opposing social factions, she observes that rancour is “…turbocharged through social media’s hotbed of discontent and churned into race bait, income bait and age bait”.
If unaddressed, these resentments are far more dangerous, for a number of reasons.
Most prominently, when exploited by unethical firebrands these emotions can be directed against our democracy, just like America’s.
Recent outbursts from Federal MP Bob Katter, the stubborn reappearance of fringe groups like Neo-Nazis, and amplification of resentments in social media all closely follow the American playbook.
It begs the question: how far is our electorate from concluding “hey, the bare-chested whack-job in the bison hat looks as angry as me, why don’t we vote for him”?
A complementary reason is that the housing crisis was both long predicted and remains largely unresolved, thereby providing ample grounds for resentments to explode.
Though some progress is evident, policy sclerosis stubbornly persists. As Philip Bull points out, even implementing the modest planning changes in support of TODs (transport oriented development) are struggling.
A third reason is that housing is so central to the economic vitality of a city.
Just like water and power, affordable housing is essential infrastructure in any city.
Failure to provide sufficient affordable housing is a predictor of a city’s decline.
As Alexandra Smith points out, her children will need to move to another city when they enter the workforce, taking their skills, enthusiasms and contributions to the economy with them.
Another reason lies at the heart of our system of governance and our faith in it to resolve our collective problems.
There exists a plethora of other housing affordability tools, yet most remain in the policy shed, collecting dust. Why, we are entitled to ask?
Unfortunately, housing affordability continues to be treated with the same two tools; the earnest wringing of hands and the quiet banking of profits.
Toxic resentments
Resentments express dismay at the failure of the democratic bargain.
As Seth Jones has observed, failure to improve lives is the principal reason why the Arab Spring petered out and nations returned to autocratic rule.
Once transformed into fevered rage, resentments obliterate reason in political contests – a bad choice is thought better than steady-as-she-goes.
Though spectacular, both the Challenger disaster and America’s unravelling are fundamentally tragedies of human ambition – the failure to live up to our ideal selves.
In both examples, this failure was not due to the unattainability of those goals. Instead, it was due to our stubborn refusal to acknowledge and respond to warning signs attending that ambition.
This is why and how resentments become toxic.
Spot on.