If US election goes pear-shaped, we all

Australians and US are part of the same extended family, writes Peter Boyer

THE parallels between Australian sand the people of the US are remarkable.

Like us, most Americans have Europe in their DNA. Their history, like ours, has been driven by the idea of conquering, ta ming and exploiting the land they live on. Race relations, including unresolved issues with Indigenous peoples, are important in both our stories.

While we kept political ties with our former colonial over lords, the US devised its own government system. But it draws upon many British structures and practices, including the same common law base, and despite points of difference there’ s enough in common to see us all as an extendedfamily.

So when things go pearshaped in the US, we all need to sit up and take notice.

The present state of the Union has been along time in the making. We can go back to the resurgence of corporate America after World War II, the undemocratic “militaryindustrial complex” that president Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961.

Reaganomics—1980s economic policy under Ronald Reagan — was another step in the transfer of power from elected government to unelected corporations. When he slashed income and corporate taxes, Reagan argued that a less restrained economy would deliver higher tax revenue( it didn’ t ).

Political and legal actions by later administrations, both conservative and liberal, further em powered private money at the expense of government authority. By the time Donald Trump won office in 2016, a new breed of robber bar ons was primed to take over the country.

Thanks in part to those earlier power shifts, and in part to a president who knows and cares nothing about the responsibilities of public office, we are facing an era without the US we grew up with. This is still far from certain, but it is entirely possible.

US politics fascinates me, and not just for its host of amazing stories. The country is an enormous well spring of ideas and insights, brilliance and stupidity and everything in between, in the name of democracy. All governments, ours included, tend to inflate the levels of freedom and accountability in their own systems. In truth, democratic principles are always imperfectly applied. But the US has gone further in codifying these ideas and arguing them out in its court system. Those principles have been tested and re-tested, most famously in the 1970s. The Water gate affair saw a sitting president, Richard Nixon, forced out of office for subverting the democratic process. He was never tried, but in the end most Americans accepted his guilt. Nixon was caught breaking rules, but as an experienced politician he understood how US

democracy works and generally abided by conventions of behaviour. Donald Trump has shown no interest in any of those things. For someone who speaks so often of constitutional rights (free speech, the right to bear arms ), he remains startlingly ignorant of the hall owed US Constitution.The Constitution aims to sustain democracy by limiting the power of anyone person, giving equal authority to the president, Congress and the Supreme Court. That principle is crucial to understanding the threat posed by the Trump regime to America and to democracies everywhere.

The forceful advocacy of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made her a liberal icon. Her death 10 days ago sparked a storm of controversy around Republican intentions, amid a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans and seen Trump fall behind in opinion polls. Shockingly, Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and indicated he will legally challenge the election if the count is against him. He is working at record-breaking speed to have his conservative nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, installed in the Supreme Court ahead of an election whose outcome may hinge on that new judge’ s vote. Trump compares himself with Republican Abraham Lincoln. In May he had himself interviewed sitting at the feet of Lincoln’ s giant memorial effigy in Washington. In his 1863 Gettysburg speech, Lincoln called on Americans to dedicate themselves to the proposition that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth .” It was a noble idea, but it has never faced anything like the phenomenon of Donald Trump. The democratic ideal depends heavily on the strength of democracy everywhere. The outcome of this presidential election, and the response of those counterbalancing institutions, the Congress and the Supreme Court, matters for us all.