DEMOCRACY

Despite pro-Taiwan moves and measures to condemn repression in Hong Kong, Donald Trump has proven he has little appetite for defending democracy following the US election. The outgoing president has joined China in posing a threat to democratic systems.

Donald Trump has proven he has little appetite for defending democracy.

With Joe Biden’s win in the US presidential election came an unprecedented assault on the democratic system. Between endless lawsuits, lies that were lapped up by the Trump base, and a pressure campaign on state legislators, Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election threatened to upend America’s democracy.

When the election results proved to be immovable, it renewed faith in the resilience of the system. But as journalist Jim Rutenberg has warned, just because the system did not succumb this time, doesn’t mean it’s not susceptible to doing so in the future. “Yes, the checks and balances worked. But they only worked because people like the Secretary of State of Georgia, people like the lone Republican who is willing to vote for certification in Michigan, believed in that system enough that they followed the law and didn’t go along with President Trump on this,” he told

The Daily podcast. “But it took those people standing up. That’s been the lesson here – the system is run by human beings with their own partisan passions.”

Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre who worked with the Democrats in Congress for 10 years, says if Trump had been re-elected, he’s not so sure the checks and balances would have held. “A lot of people were afraid that if Trump had been re-elected, that he would not have just tested the norms and guardrails of democracy, he would have broken them, and that it would have been much more absolute power under his authority than before,” he says. “These things can take a certain amount of stress, but they can’t take overwhelming stress for an extended period of time.”

In Wolpe’s opinion, Trump was “a really profound threat to democracy”, challenging democratic norms throughout his presidency. “He absolutely snubbed Congress’ right to have oversight of the executive branch,” he says. “Congress appropriates money, they have a right

“DEMOCRACIES HAVE THEIR OWN ‘MAGIC WEAPONS’... NOW IS THE TIME TO USE THEM.”

ANNE-MARIE BRADY

to have oversight of how that money is spent. Trump snubbed it all the time and would refuse to let people testify and Congress could never do its job adequately.” Wolpe lists a number of examples of unprecedented behaviour by a president – defying Congress and diverting funds from the Department of Defense to build the Mexico border wall; co-mingling the foreign policy of the United States with his political interests by asking the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden; and using the Justice Department, with the cooperation of William Barr, as his “private law firm, as opposed to the law firm for the American people”. “There’s a consistent pattern of him using his power to get government agencies to do his bidding in his personal and political interests, not just in the national interest of the United States,” Wolpe says.

Trump is by no means the first demagogue in American politics, but Wolpe still believes Trump’s approach is unique. “There have been strains of what Trump has talked about – nationalism, isolationism, protectionism, nativism, antiimmigration – in the Republican Party for a long, long time,” he says. “He put them all together and with his extraordinary media abilities, he has pushed it into new heights of power and influence. My feeling is that Trump is a one-off. In other words, I don’t think anyone can put together those issues and that media skill and execute the role like that.”

One could argue Trump’s inability to accept the outcome of the election was at odds with his moves seeking to preserve autonomy in Hong Kong, strengthen relations with Taiwan and denounce China as a threat to democratic ideals. In his dealings with China during his term, Trump has been criticised for an inflammatory approach, questioned over his motives and called out for hypocrisy, but some tangible actions against human rights abuses were taken. “The outgoing administration of US President Donald Trump has been frank about the abusive nature of Chinese Communist Party rule, and it has gone so far as to impose sanctions on Chinese government officials, agencies and companies credibly alleged to have committed serious human rights violations,” says Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, in a piece calling for Biden to stand up to China when he takes

Trump was “a profound threat to democracy”: Bruce Wolpe

office. “Human rights advocates have welcomed these moves but worry that questions about the administration’s motives undercut the message.”

Writing for The Conversation, Griffith University senior research fellow Hui Feng said the shift in America’s China policy is “no doubt one of the major legacies of the Trump administration’s foreign policy”.

“Although China’s rise had been a concern of the previous Bush and Obama administrations, it was the Trump administration that transformed the entire narrative on China from strategic partner to ‘strategic competitor’,” he writes, adding that this new way of thinking deemed the previous decades-long China engagement strategy “a failure”.

“Prior to Trump, the US had sought to encourage China to grow into a responsible stakeholder of a rules-based international order. But the Trump administration believes such ‘goodwill’ engagement has been exploited by China’s ‘all-of-nation long-term strategy’ of asserting its power in the Indo-Pacific region. According to the Trump administration, this is centred on ‘predatory economics’ in trade and technology, political coercion of less-powerful democracies and Chinese military advancement in the region.”

Australia, too, has been a prominent player in standing up to China, being the first country to take a number of actions including banning Huawei’s 5G technology, passing laws to deter foreign interference, and calling for an independent investigation into the source and handling of the novel coronavirus outbreak. But as Australia-China relations reached a new low and Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for a “reset” where the nations could “sit down and start talking sensibly”, the comments seemed to recognise Australia has limited leverage. Like many nations, Australia is deeply reliant on trade with China – 39 per cent of Australian exports go to China. Anne-Marie Brady, a specialist of Chinese politics and professor at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, has said Australia having to make political concessions to China for economic benefit was a “Faustian choice made by previous governments”. In an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald, Brady encourages Australia’s allies to present a “united front against the united front”.

“An important means to stop systemic bullying is if others can speak up, and stand with those who are under attack,” she says. “Australia’s friends and allies can do more to help, by looking to ways to partner economically and by speaking up in support, as the Ardern government has done.”

Besides the fact that economic dependencies have hampered nations’ abilities to speak out against China’s efforts to undermine democracy, foreign influence activities also have consequences for the sovereignty and integrity of political systems outside China – something Brady explored in her 2017 conference paper ‘Magic Weapons: CCP Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping’, which helped lead to a parliamentary inquiry into foreign interference in New Zealand. “China’s strenuous united front efforts of the past few years have posted a return and it’s increasingly able to use its soft power ‘magic weapons’ to help influence the decision-making of foreign governments and societies,” warned Brady in the paper. But she says democracies have their own ‘magic weapons’ that can safeguard us, just as they have in the US in the wake of the election: “The right to choose our government; balances and checks on power through the courts; our regulatory bodies; the legallysupported critic and conscience role of the academic; freedom of speech and association; and the Fourth Estate – both the traditional and new media. Now is the time to use them.”

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Gearing up to take over his predecessor’s woeful handling of the pandemic, Joe Biden tells Scott Morrison he will look to Australia’s COVID-19 response for lessons in how to combat the virus in the US. mindfood.com/biden-australia