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.”

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

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 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.

Given that pattern of behaviour, Trump’s reaction to the election result was shocking but not all that surprising. The larger letdown was surely that Republicans did not urge Americans to respect and trust in the democratic process. At the time of writing, a shift occurred among two of Trump’s key allies, with Attorney General William Barr saying the Justice Department had not “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election”, while a comment from Trump’s Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about “what the new administration wants to pursue” also indicated a recognition of Trump’s loss. That came after a month of entertaining and broadcasting Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud. “In 2016, Trump defeated 16 rivals to take the nomination. And when he beat them, they came to fear him. So over the past four years, when any Republican deviated from Trump who happened to be up for election, he found another Republican to run against them in preselection and the Trump candidate wins almost always. And so they are fearful and intimidated,” Wolpe explains. “So even though privately, if you put them in a closet and interrogated them and asked them, ‘Well, do you really support Trump?’, many of the Republican leaders in Congress would say ‘no’, publicly they don’t dare say it. And so as long as Trump is on the stage, he has them where he wants them.”

Wolpe says there will be “a moment of truth in the Republican Party as to whether they stay with him or break with him”. There have been signals that Trump will run again in 2024, or that one of his children could run – in either case, the party may choose to remain branded ‘Trump’. “He has cemented

his position with them because he has been, for the base of the Republican Party, immensely popular.”

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.”

TRUMPIAN FOREIGN POLICY

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 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”.

In Asia, defenders of democracy, and human rights activists, have expressed concern that Biden won’t be confrontational enough when dealing with China. In spectacular irony, campaigners in Hong Kong and Taiwan have even repeated and asserted Trump’s claims of an election victory. Meanwhile, Uyghur human rights activists have also mourned Trump’s loss. In an opinion piece for The Independent, World Uyghur Congress director Rahima Mahmut says Trump’s aggressive moves against China had given Uyghurs hope. She wrote that apart from “endless statements” from nations declaring their support for the Uyghurs, “very little has been done to help us”. “Many of us are fearful now that Donald Trump is leaving the White House. To most onlookers this will seem like heresy, but you have to try to put yourself in our shoes. For years nobody stood up for us,” she said.

Australia 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 coronavirus outbreak. At the time of writing, Australia-China relations have reached a new low. In addition to China hitting a wide range of Australian exports with bans and tariffs, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has demanded China apologise for posting a fabricated image to a government Twitter account showing an Australian soldier murdering an Afghan child. But as Morrison called for a “reset” where the nations can “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 in Chinese politics and professor at the 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 an “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 speaking up in support as the Ardern Government has done.”

MAGIC WEAPONS

Besides the fact that economic dependencies have hampered nations’ ability 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 last few years have posted a return and it is 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 such as the Commerce Commission and the Press Council; the legally supported 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.”

VISIT MiNDFOOD.COM

Gearing up to take over his predecessor’s divisive 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.

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