The forthcoming election is one of the most important to me since I first cast a ballot more than four decades ago. And yet this time – while I’ve never felt more invested in an election’s outcome – I won’t have a vote.
I’m not talking about the next federal poll in Australia – the one that’s most likely to be held early next year. No, I’m referring to the United States presidential election in November, the result of which will reverberate with profound global consequences and – therefore – with significant personal others as well.
Yes, I’ve heard our ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, praise Donald Trump’s “discipline’’ and tell people to “just chill’’ because “we’re not going over some chasm’’ if the 45th president – a narcissist and misogynist with a chaotic vision (or hallucination; it’s hard to tell) – is elected the 47th. And I’ve heard the rote, condescending nonsense – equally aimed to assuage the fears of the decent and progressive – from Australian politicians: that the US-Australia relationship exists between two “great democracies’’ and that it is effectively immaterial who the next president ... blah blah.
But I did also hear another, rather more convincing, non-ambassadorial version of Rudd say Trump was “nuts” (mild criticism, really, given the array of damning material in the ether about the Republican presidential nominee). Just as it resonated when the Republican veep nominee, JD Vance, called his running mate “cultural heroin’’ and “America’s Hitler”. In fairness, that was in the not-so-distant past (according to him, another country) when Vance had a book to sell and before he decided that he’d like to follow Trump all the way into the Oval Office.
Indeed, there seems to be a bottomless well of character assessments (“morally reprehensible human being’’ – again, hard to argue!) Vance gave Trump in the unforgiving continent that is the past.
My obsession with what happens next in the US – and my sense of powerlessness to change it – is manifesting in personally unprecedented engagement with US news, commentary media and polls. This fixation is doubtless related to advancing middle age, legacy and a future (without me in it) that will still be inhabited by my children and grandchildren.
America is the most geopolitically and militarily influential of countries. It is also the west’s most culturally and socially impactful. It’s why I fear for my – and everyone else’s – descendants (not least women and girls like my daughters and granddaughters) in a world whose the two potentially most-powerful men – Trump and Vance – are also so apparently misogynistic, hateful and narcissistic.
The litany of Trump’s actual (and verbal) offences against women is notorious. This seems too often forgotten or overlooked by admirers the world over – especially among sections of the political class here in Australia – to the file marked “character’’ and made, therefore, somehow irrelevant.
But such character traits are as highly relevant globally, as Trump attacks the reproductive (and human) rights of American women and deploys vicious slurs against women who threaten – or call out – their misogyny. The latest to come to light seems to be Vance’s weaponisation of parenthood, in 2021 labelling senior Democrats – including now presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – “childless cat ladies’’.
Trump’s latest attack on Kamala Harris – saying she had “turned black’’, an unsustainably false challenge to her racial identity – makes him less worthy. Just as this will give succour to racists the world over, it also enables politicians, including here, who would weaponise racial identity for cynical gain.
While Trump and Vance, like all populists, are perilously short on constructive policy and plans and optimism for the future, their prescriptive visions for social design when it comes to families and how they reckon they should look are coming into very sharp – and alarming – focus.
If this is all starting to sound, well, somewhat dystopic, that’s because it is. The most alarming thing for me, a world away, about the re-emergence of Trump (twice impeached, 34 felony convictions) and the upwardly-managing Vance is the global licence they give others to ape, voice and enact their misogyny. If it’s good enough for the leader of the free world and his apprentice ...
With Trump’s cozying up to despots and dictators and his own dictatorial fantasies (having denied the last election result then incited a 6 January lynch mob to attack the capitol in pursuit of his then vice-president, Mike Pence, who certified the legitimate election of Joe Biden), Trump is the embodiment of autocracy. The danger he poses potentially extends far and away beyond the US, and with a deputy like Vance (who would not stand up to him the way Pence did), Trump’s power would be unfettered. So, “responsible’’? No. Don’t just chill. Be vigilant.
I could go on about how Trump’s general playbook and cynical identity politics has already influenced and enabled elements of Australian leadership (as it has elsewhere in the world) from the tenor of civic debate to renewables (“drill baby drill’’), emissions targets and a range of social issues. But it is the Trump/Vance attitude – their words and actions regarding women, gender, families, race and society – that makes the forthcoming presidential election the most consequential for the rest of my life.
It’s true we don’t have a vote down here. But as many have said, maybe we should. Meanwhile, some of us can continue to hope and watch carefully.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
