NOTE #1: Finding our starting point
THE UNRAVELLING
November 11, 2024
Not surprisingly perhaps, given the times we live in, many are looking for the singular to explain the seemingly inexplicable.
‘Why have so many ordinary American people put their faith in Trump?’
As with all real-world things therein lies complexity, contradiction and conflict.
But is this even the right questions for us in Oz?
For a start, it is a question that impossibly invites a simple, neatly boxed answer. It focuses on actions and outcomes, not causes or context. And to focus on Trump the individual both trivialises and misses the power politics at play.
The subtext for the above question, and one that has more universal appeal, is perhaps closer to where we need to start:
‘Why did so many people seemingly vote against their own interests?’
Ah, but did they?
On the face of it, the political leadership on offer to Americans was stark: more of the same or disruption.
And yes, the proponents of disruption are questionable in their intent. In many senses the ‘Trump machine’ has turned conventional party politics on its head – by offering the familial as the political, by bringing the hidden wealthy denizens that often control politics in the background into the limelight and by offering freshly radical departures from the norm.
Maybe the question should be:
‘Why would people want a radical departure from the norm?’
The fact we even need to ask the question is emblematic of how far daily politics has become divorced from the lives and concerns of the many.
Everyday people in western democracies have, in the last four decades, taken quite a battering and many are deeply concerned for the future. On many fronts the edifice of security has been undermined and the prospect of ‘shopping our way out of it’ no longer holds true, if ever it did.
Indeed, the more interesting question might be:
‘Why did it take so long for people to reject conventional politics as being favourable to their own interests?’
‘We’ve been through an awful lot lately’. It’s a statement in the Australia reMADE video What is the country of our dreams? And it feels right to dust it off and bring it to the fore in this conversation.
And to begin that enquiry we could do a lot worse than be guided by two important ideas:
Listening as a revolutionary concept: Wendy Brown reminds us that most life forms ‘listen for survival’ and many ‘listen in order to coordinate’ instead, we humans ‘have such limited hearing, hav[ing] filled the world with so much noise.’ (Brown: The Violent Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy)
Calm as an act of resistance: Naomi Klein’s advice in these times is to reach for calm. Not at the expense of passion and commitment but to provide ‘the precondition for focus’ and to provide the bearing within the chaos, relying on John Berger’s assessment that ‘calm is a form of resistance’. (Klein: Doppelganger pp.226-7)
Before we slip into the vortex of ‘politics-as-normal’ as we face our own 2025 federal election let’s use this disjuncture to listen deeply and openly, to try to understand what is going on in everyday people’s lives, right here in Australia. We are not the USA, nor are we immune to the global forces revealed in their election outcome. While we try to understand daily lives, we must also interrogate the system that has given rise to the preconditions for people to seek radical, if dangerous, alternatives. And to do so with the idea of finding the radical that genuinely speaks to the yearning for something different.