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    Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump
    Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump
    Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump
    Ebook156 pages3 hours

    Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

    By Don Watson

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    About this ebook

    In Enemy Within, Don Watson takes a memorable journey into the heart of the United States in the year 2016 – and the strangest election campaign that country has seen.

    Travelling in the Midwest, Watson reflects on the rise of Donald Trump and the “thicket of unreality” that is the American media. Behind this he finds a deeply fearful and divided culture. Watson considers the irresistible pull – for Americans – of the Dream of exceptionalism, and asks whether this creed is reaching its limit. He explores alternate futures – from Trump-style fascism to Sanders-style civic renewal – and suggests that a Clinton presidency might see a new American blend of progressivism and militarism. Enemy Within is an eloquent, barbed look at the state of the union and the American malaise.

    “If, as seems likely, Clinton wins, it will not be out of love, or even hope, but rather out of fear. She can win by simply letting her deplorable opponent lose. On the other hand, she’s nothing if not adaptable, and she could yet see the chance to lead the nation’s social and economic regeneration … Call it a New Great Awakening or a New New Deal; it would owe something to both, and to Bernie Sanders as well, but also to her need to be more than the first woman president.” —Don Watson, Enemy Within

    ‘Must read...[Don Watson] is the ideal person to survey Trump’s America’ —The Weekend Australian

    ‘A fascinating journey through the United States...’ —ABC Brisbane, Weekend Bookworm
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateAug 29, 2016
    ISBN9781925435207
    Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump
    Author

    Don Watson

     Don Watson's bestselling titles include Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime Minister, Death Sentence and The Bush, which won the Indie Book of the Year and the NSW Premier's Literary Award. An acclaimed speechwriter and screenwriter, he is also beloved for his columns and essays on Australian and American politics.  

    Read more from Don Watson

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      Book preview

      Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within - Don Watson

      Quarterly Essay

      Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd. Publisher: Morry Schwartz.

      ISBN 978-1-925435-20-7 ISSN 1832-0953

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

      Essay & correspondence © retained by the authors.

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      Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group. The paper used to produce this book comes from wood grown in sustainable forests.

      ENEMY WITHIN

      American Politics in the Time of Trump

      Don Watson

      CORRESPONDENCE

      James Curran, Henry Reynolds, Peter Leahy, Kim Beazley, Peter Whish-Wilson, Judy Betts, Malcolm Garcia, Rory Medcalf, James Brown

      Contributors

      1.

      I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world …

      These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are principles of mankind and must prevail.

      – Woodrow Wilson, 1917

      US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness …

      – Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

      Every four years the people of the United States of America choose the person they think most likely to keep them free and safe; and best placed to decide what their country’s interests are and how they should be pursued. Among those interests are the interests of national security, which means they are in effect choosing the person who will decide who should be spied upon, selectively bombed or invaded, and who left alone; who should live and who should die; if life on the planet should continue or pretty much cease. Well, if they don’t do it, who will? Actual voting is for American citizens only: while recognised as people by the US Supreme Court, corporations wholly or partly owned by foreigners cannot vote, but may contribute as much money as they like to the candidate of their choice. On election day, across the country about 130 million of the 230 million who are eligible turn out to vote, some of them with marvellous knowledge of affairs, and some in bottomless ignorance of everything; some with the tiny part of the brain that enables them to reason and judge, and some with the evolutionary accumulations of instinct and fear that lurk in the other 98 per cent of it.

      We have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states, Barack Obama told the crowd in Chicago the night he was elected in 2008. The words were just the thing for the occasion, of course, but every day since has given the lie to them. Obama was doing in this speech what all the best American speeches do: laying the stress on the egalitarian and the communitarian, as if the qualities recommended by the Reverend John Winthrop for his Christian colony of Massachusetts 400 years ago remain the qualities that set the United States apart. But, of course, if any country is a collection of individuals it is the United States. Otherwise all that talk about rugged individualism and the American Dream and doing it my way would be so much hogwash. It has to be a collection of individuals or advertising wouldn’t work.

      Americans are divided on party lines as never before. The lines between red and blue states, counties and communities have never been so clearly drawn. Of course, there are purple states as well as red and blue ones: battleground states, meaning states where the contest is tight, where the ducks are; the ducks being the ones hunted by the candidates, the relative handful of people who decide those questions that a presidential election decides for the world. In purple states the differences that divide one state from another divide the state itself. Check the electoral map of Pennsylvania: in 2012 Obama won in just 12 of that state’s 67 counties, but he took the state and its 20 electoral votes because he took Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Since 2008, the whole country has come to resemble a battleground, albeit one, like the Somme for long periods, in stalemate. And 2008 was another age: back then there was only one red party and one blue party. Now there are two of each.

      The United States is a miracle of an ever-evolving pluralist democracy and, in the absence of any other candidates for the role, still the last great hope of humankind. It is a wonderland of invention, a marvel of freedom and tolerance, and by most measures the greatest country on earth. "We are, and always will be, the United States of America," Obama said. He surfed on the cheering, and in that moment some of us almost joined in. God bless them, we almost said.

      But to think of the United States as a place, or even as a state, is probably the first mistake. While their political leaders will forever say there is more to unite than divide them, in fact the citizenry is divided by cultural, historical, racial, ethnic and ideological differences that every day – every minute in the media – make the platitudes laughable. Democrats say there is more to unite them – as they divide them with identity politics. Republicans chide the Democrats for their identity politics while they dog-whistle to bigotry and preach nostrums they learned at the feet of Ayn Rand.

      Some of these tears are visible and categorical: in the suburbs and the cities, for instance, where the dividing lines are so abrupt you can find yourself in a different world in the space of a few absent-minded steps. Some are invisible or subterranean: on the highways you cross them, like songlines, without knowing. There are fractures going back to the Civil War and beyond, forces for good and ill generated in now forgotten times that nevertheless impose themselves, even as the politicians declare their boundless confidence in America’s promise and implore the people to think of tomorrow. The state has been so deeply fractured for so long that only national crises, real or imagined, and their associated eruptions of fear and loathing of an external enemy can bring it together. We talk of Americans wrapping themselves in the flag: they bandage themselves in it. The yard signs of the election season are polite disguises for the underlying truth: the United States is a concatenation of sulky tribes, provincial, ignorant and seething with ambition, frustration and resentment.

      The first days of June were great days for Hillary Clinton. She had just won the California and New Jersey primaries. In a prerecorded video released by the Democratic Party, Barack Obama had endorsed her as the most qualified candidate for president ever. Elizabeth Warren was busy endorsing her all over the place, including on Twitter. And at last she’d driven off the old wolf who had appeared on the landscape out of nowhere and dogged her wagons every day for months. True, Bernie Sanders was holding out, and Hillary’s supporters were unbecomingly narky and impatient with him. But Sanders was thinking of his own supporters: how to keep them believing and wanting to vote, and, before her election platform was agreed, how to bargain as much radical Bernie into routine Hillary as he could. Bernie’s crew were going to take some convincing. Hillary is a bad aunt, an eighteen-year-old girl told me. What’s Bernie? I asked. A cool uncle, she said. She was very cool, a cool millennial. "Bernie represents millennials, she said. Hillary tries to be like them." There was more in that observation than symptoms of a first political crush.

      On 10 June Hillary Clinton spoke to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in Washington, DC. Planned Parenthood had endorsed her way back in January. These were her people. We expected her to be exultant. She was brilliantly not so. As the cheering died down, she offered a history lesson. When Planned Parenthood was founded, in 1921, as the American Birth Control League, women could not vote. In most states they could not sit on juries. It was a crime to offer information about birth control, let alone provide it. Today half of all US college graduates are women and women make up nearly half of the paid workforce. There are twenty women in the Senate. There are women on the Supreme Court and women in leadership positions in Congress. Three women, including Hillary Clinton, have been Secretary of State. And now, the last pane in the glass ceiling, a woman was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. She resists the applause.

      In a steady conversational tone she reminded her audience of the part that Planned Parenthood played in this progress. She thanked them. It was in large measure a result of their efforts, she said, that fifty-one years ago the Supreme Court legalised birth control – for married couples – and soon after, in Roe v. Wade, recognised the right of women to have abortions. Planned Parenthood can take credit for the dramatic drop in maternal mortality in the United States, and for the fact that there are fewer unintended pregnancies than ever before, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer abortions.

      Clinton drew the links between the work of the organisation and broader realms of public health, economic growth and opportunity, the strength of families. In thanking them, she was doing more than acknowledging the advances they have made for women; more than thanking them for endorsing her. She was also demonstrating that whatever the bitter and often bizarre state of current US politics, the country can change, and not only through technology, or start-ups, or economics of any description. Her paean to Planned Parenthood was to recognise progressive thought as a defining element of American politics, and to acknowledge the grassroots battlegrounds where politicians – Clinton, Obama and Sanders included – earn their chops. Organising around an idea or a cause, networking, lobbying, educating, publicising, protesting and pushing into representative politics to change the world from within – these are American democratic traditions. Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on the subject. Denied the higher offices, grassroots organisations have long been women’s political arenas. This was true of both major parties until the election of Ronald Reagan (in the words of a Republican woman) buried the rights of a hundred million American women under a heap of platitudes and handed the women’s vote to the Democrats.

      Planned Parenthood occupies deeply contested territory. In the most recent physical attack, in November 2015, a religious maniac shot dead three people, including a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado Springs. Nine others were wounded. A lot of people who are not religious fanatics also dislike Planned Parenthood. Jeb Bush wants to defund it. So does the Heritage Foundation, and the largest Protestant body in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention. And of course for most of the 95 million evangelical Christians in the United States, some of whom might

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