If my politics seem leftist to you, trust me when I say they’ve been tempered by the reality-bites of a full-contact occupation that has skewed me to the right for 28 years. Plotted on a chart, I fall fractionally left of dead-centre like a two-inch grouping at 200 yards.
For wont of descriptor, let me call myself a cynical realist — and what a lonely space it is.
In dozens of past posts, distilled and amplified into the most recent (‘no kings‘ 14 June, and ‘bystander‘ 12 August), I predicted a specific BAD THING is likely to happen in America.
Here’s the tl;dr so you don’t have to go back and read all that glorious prose:
‘They’ are fomenting civil insurrection in the US for the express purpose of ending democracy as we know it.
Of course, the ‘they’ I refer to are the masterminds and financiers of Project 25, that shadowy cult of powerful white Christian fascists who want it all for themselves forever.
In their minds, Trump is the perfect vehicle for their ambitions — an easily-led demagogue — but he’s not a member of their inner circle.
Why?
Because Donald J Trump is just too dumb.
Chaotic, undisciplined, egomaniacal — a wilting and withering wildcard — he can’t do the math or stay on message. Which is why the cultists made JD Vance vice-president.
The first king of America won’t be Donald J Trump.
For a party hell-bent on undermining the Constitution, it’s constitutional processes that will be used to execute the coup.
Whether by gross morbidity or a sudden public unaliving, when Trump falls the Administration will weaponise some fiction of ‘liberal terrorism’ and JD Vance will ascend in a thunderclap of lies, histrionics and martial law.
But that’s ‘merica for you. What about Oz?
But I live in Australia, so why give a fuck, right? We just unanimously cast expelliarmus on our homegrown Voldemort and handed the future to a progressive government, i.e., here’s your mandate and lots of rope #PMAlbo.
His address today at the United Nations was statesmanly.
But — illusions of temporary safety aside — I do give a fuck.
I care because people describe this country as America fifty-years in the past, and what I see in the news every day are Americans reaping the bitter harvest of a crop some Australians have begun to sow.
Sdome of us seem to have become very, very angry.
Fascism has taken root, maybe was always here.
A lot of people are angry for all the wrong reasons, and they wear their bigotry loud and proud. I mean, don’t forget we had a White Australia Policy until 1975; as in, yesterday.
So if it really was Mark Twain and not Banjo Paterson who said “history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes”, I wonder what he’d say about the vicarious delight Australian conservatives are taking from the New American Fascism echoing across that country.