Talking Point: In America we can no longer trust
HAD Hillary Clinton won the US presidential election, we would now be in a sea of recriminations and speculation of impeachment.
But Donald Trump won and instead we are in an ocean of convenient forgiveness. As Tony Abbott has counselled us, achieving high office can bring about goodness. That is: let’s give this racist, misogynist, multi-billionaire swaggart the expectation of greatness and await his conversion to saintliness.
In reality, Trump’s election is about greed, not good. This is the Age of Materialism and a person’s worthiness is best measured by their assets. The most surprising thing about Trump winning the election was the market reaction: it went down. However, it took less than a day for the stock exchanges of the world, the modern places of worship, to realise that in terms of making money, this new supremo is a priest, rather than a pariah. After a splutter, the logic of the markets, that greed is good, came good. Stocks soared.
The dupes here are all those poor, struggling gun-toting, Christian, white American males who are Trump’s bedrock constituency (the Women for Trump brigade are in a category of their own). The President-elect promised to raise everyone out of poverty while cutting taxes and increasing spending on the military. That this is illogical nonsense did not matter. If Trump can survive bankruptcy and prosper, why should not America?
It is a little less problematic that fervent Bible-worshipping American Christians can ignore Christ’s parable of the good Samaritan and the biblical injunction that a rich man has no more chance of getting to heaven than a camel does of getting through the eye of a needle. The Bible and Trump cannot both be right and Trump got the votes.
Groucho Marx said: “Show me a millionaire and I will show you a crook.” Crook or not, Trump’s ascendancy is America’s decline. The empire is over. It is not so much that the US has only 5 per cent of the globe’s people as it is that the other 95 per cent of the world is catching up or overtaking in education, opportunity and morality (not a high bar there). This year’s news that Beijing has more billionaires than New York underscores the shift.
We are in the century of global community. Everybody aboard planet Earth knows, or can know, what everybody else is doing or getting. America is less and less relevant in the popular perception that we share our fate — either the human world will work together for a secure common future, which includes physical and intellectual exploration of our existence in the universe, or we will fail together.
That Trump’s finger will be near the nuke button is a wake-up call for the world to work to an age of togetherness or else. In America, we can no longer trust.
Humanity is the largest herd of mammals ever to graze the Earth and, some calculations have it, this herd is already using the planet’s living resources at 150 per cent of their replacement rate. That is why, every morning, we wake to more people, but fewer forests, fewer fisheries, less arable farmland and an accelerating rate of extinction of Earth’s species. Trump’s absurd foot will press even harder on that accelerator.
It is crunch time.
Common sense calls for a global compact, a readjustment to ensure that every one of us has her or his basic needs and opportunities met within the limits of Earth’s resources. This will require outstanding leadership.
Trump is not it. Nor is America likely to provide it, even though Bernie Sanders did surprisingly well in the Democratic primaries.
When President George W. Bush entered the Australian Parliament in 2003 the galleries were packed. You could hear a pin drop. It was like the second coming, but it was not. I stood to challenge the most powerful politician on Earth, who was justifying the invasion of Iraq: “President Bush, obey the laws of the world and the world will respect you.” There was pandemonium. One fellow parliamentarian threatened to punch my lights out. Rarely since the Romans dutifully worshipped Caligula’s horse was such a challenge so open to such uproar.
At the subsequent media conference the newly elected former Queensland constable, Peter Dutton, MHR, jumped up and down next to me, exclaiming: “You are a disgrace! Outrageous!”
I interrupted and turned to him, saying: “Would the puppy please be quiet.” And he was. His delight now Trump can be asked to address a compliant House is a given. Beyond Bush, Trump’s ascendancy is America’s eclipse. It is not Trump’s fault, for as J.K. Galbraith, the late American polymath, observed 30 years ago, political leadership almost exactly reflects the people who vote for it.
Global leadership of the order required, underscored by the belief that all people of the Earth are born equal and deserve equal respect, is not and never will be within Trump’s potential. Rather, he is likely to bring on more turbulent times and, out of those, from elsewhere, may come the wiser leadership to secure the planet’s future.
We should keep hopeful eyes on the 95 per cent of Earth’s people outside Trump’s presidential mandate, including the half of those who are women.
Tasmanian conservationist Dr Bob Brown is a former leader of the Australian Greens.