First Americans got rid of Trump in 2020. Then Australians got rid of Scott Morrison in May. Last week, the Tories rid themselves of Boris Johnson, even if he’s lingering like a particularly malignant odour left by Larry the Cat at No.10. Time to cheer the return of normality or, at least, the departure of lying populism?
The gruesome threesome have commonly been lumped together — by some of us with carefully constructed caveats about key differences, by others with much less subtlety. But the differences and similarities between them constitute myriad combinations.
All three routinely lied as a core function of their personal political style, but Trump was an extraordinary outli(a)r, lying virtually every time he opened his mouth. Trump and Johnson both came from television, whereas Morrison was from marketing. All three posed as opponents of elites while being elites themselves. Johnson and Morrison were never fully able to capture their own parties, at neither the parliamentary or membership level, and to an extent were hired to win elections, whereas Trump even now retains a tight grip on the Republican Party at both levels. Trump and Morrison were both defeated at elections at which their personal character was a key issue; the Tories struck Johnson down before that could happen in the UK.
But the removal of the three is by no means an end to the forces that produced them; if anything, they may have furnished a playbook for later, more successful efforts to come.
That applies regardless of whether Trump pursues, or succeeds in regaining, the presidency in 2024, which the autocratic-minded vulgarian may do not merely in spite of but because he may face criminal prosecution for his role in the January 6 insurrection, or for myriad other crimes.
The best-placed Republican after Trump — who beats Trump in some Republican polling — is Florida governor Ron DeSantis. A taste of DeSantis: gun control is communism, he has a long history of racism and associating with racists, he banned attempts to mandate masks, he’s passed laws outlawing abortion in all circumstances after 15 weeks, banned discussion of diversity and sex education, wants to gerrymander the state to disenfranchise Black voters, campaigns against “critical race theory”, refuses to say if Biden was properly elected, and tried to claim Nazis spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric were Democrats trying to smear him. Sound familiar?
Problem is, DeSantis is no crass property developer turned reality TV figure — he is an academically distinguished Yale and Harvard law graduate and a decorated Iraq veteran. And he has the benefit of seeing what Trump did right and wrong. He’ll know to surround himself with better advisers than Trump did and be far more calculated in how he goes about undermining US democracy — and to realise the imperative of stacking courts as much as possible.
Both Trump and DeSantis would be backed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, one of the world’s most malignant and anti-democratic companies, which in the form of Fox News was not merely a key source of support for Trump but, over decades, a generator of and platform for the kinds of extremist political views steeped in white grievance that Trump exploited so effectively.
This echo chamber of proto-fascism remains intact in the US, now portraying itself as a resistance voice, the Combat of the beleaguered forces fighting liberalism. And it remains intact in the UK and Australia too. Despite arguments that it is losing its power, News Corp remains the most dominant media company here and one that, crucially, operates as the in-house network of the Coalition, even if the deranged rantings of many within it carry little weight among ordinary Australians.
With that propaganda infrastructure in place, any favoured right-wing populist starts with an automatic advantage both over their internal party rivals and progressive political opponents, even if it’s not sufficient to guarantee victory.
Tomorrow: how the political and economic stars may yet align for more Trumps, Johnsons and Morrisons.
As Bernard not only reminds us, but actually warns us, complacency and insouciance are very dangerous when it comes to our attitudes to right-wing populism.
Cynical power hungry Republicans like Mitch McConnell help monsters like Trump.
America has any number of toxic hard right politicians ready to continue Trump’s agenda but a lot smarter. Think of the governors outlawing abortion and Ted Cruz. Boris’s successor will likely be a lower taxes ideologue. Here we have Sullen Dutton even more hard right, AnGas Taylor, Folly Hughes, Porker Joyce and the coal miners’ mouthpiece Matt Canavan.
If we look at Johnson and Trump solely as political phenomena, I think we miss the crucial component of their success.
They are essentially leaders of religious movements. The leader is possessed of supernatural powers; he has a salvationary vision; his enemies are wicked, unseen and gathered in devious legions; the leader’s alleged lies and failures are evidence only of how deep is the conspiracy against them; his trite words are evidence of his independent courage. The census tells us we are drifting away from the religions of earlier millennia, but it does not capture the resilience of our desire to believe matters so deeply sourced in faith that a search for proof is not just irrelevant but also blasphemous. Believe the TV chef or the Galilee carpenter; ignore the expert in a suit.
None of this obviously applies to Morrison whose only superpower was Bill Shorten and who effected no lasting change because he saw the prime-ministership as a reward for past services rather than an actual job. Why does he still get mentioned?
Hillsong and their disgraced Pastors Houston father and son personify this. Same for all the American Evangelical fraudsters.
If I remember my anthropology, we’re looking at millennium movements (albeit a couple of decades too late), the kind of phenomena that frequently occurred at the First Millennia. This were populist revolts against established order, led by charismatics who persuaded the many that their vision of truth was the right one, and whose adherents happily went to the sword rather than see logic. Elements of this exist in Qanon, and some of the antivax protests. Your line about the ‘resilience of our desire to believe matters so deeply sourced in faith that a search for proof is not just irrelevant, but blasphemous’, is a good one, by the way.
The give-away in the opening title to X Files (which so many people thought was real or at least faction) was a poster on mad Mulder’s office wall – I WANT TO BELIEVE!
Samuel Clemens put it well – “Faith is what you need to believe something which you know to be untrue.”
There’s no end to people’s credulity – the best that can be hoped for is to provide the masses with something anodyne or at least marginally less deleterious.
Biggest religious type movement is Communism. Have a read of Bertrand Russel’s book History of Western Philosophy. Bertand was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He went to Russia as a communist/socialist and came back a changed man. Smart bloke Bertrand.
This is not historically accurate, apart from remarking that Bertrand was a smart bloke and visited Russia as part of a Labour Party delegation after the Russian revolution in 1920. Bertrand was not a “Communist/Socialist” but a “Liberal/Socialist”. He did not return from Russia a “changed man” but returned to observe that the Russian Communists were hard working and took little for themselves (this would change later and would reach a peak after Brezhnev took power, when the Russian Communists made themselves very privileged indeed). Bertrand compared them to the English Puritans and there is something to that comparison. Communism is a secular faith, as you suggest, but Fascism/Nazism was also a secular faith, with religious cousins in Spain and Portugal, and in the 1930’s had more followers than Communism. Neoliberalism is also a secular faith, which elevates Adam Smith as its founder and has taken near totalitarian forms. So Communism does not stand alone, as you suggest.
Basically cults, yes.
Trump is not going anywhere. The other two lightweights are finished. Trump will be back UNLESS, to quote the Lorax, gazillions of American voters get out to defeat the gerrymanders. Then they need a federal electoral commission. The RWNJs are on a mission from God, they don’t need to win on ideas, they just need to rig the outcomes of elections, which they do, and stack courts.
Turnip belongs in a cell. But he won’t ever see the inside of one.
That should RWRNJ, second R for Religious