Just ran across this:
Rippling Trumpism
The view from Australia
https://thebaffler.com/latest/rippling-trumpism-hawking
THE MOST PROFOUND LEGACY of Donald Trump’s presidency may well be the fact that, both in the United States and outside it, his success has emboldened a rogue’s gallery of people who absolutely did not need emboldening: far-right demagogues, aspiring fascists, and faux-populist rabble-rousers. Even if Trump himself is a busted flush—which is by no means certain—his style of politics lives on in the United States in the rhetoric of Marjorie Taylor Greene et al., and in the hilarious pathological mendacity of now-indicted Congress member George Santos. Around the world, too, Trump-like figures have grasped for power: the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is one example, right down to January’s ransacking of government buildings in Brasilia after Bolsonaro failed to win re-election.
As someone who was born and raised in Australia—I currently live in Melbourne—and who spent nearly a decade living in the United States, it’s been fascinating to watch Australian conservatives’ attempts to adopt Trumpist tactics. We even have a genuine homegrown aspiring Trump in the form of Clive Palmer, a bloviating mining baron who spent some $120 million during the federal election campaign last year on advertising for his populist United Australia Party, plastering its slogan “Make Australia Great”—lolsigh—on billboards around the country. During the same campaign, incumbent prime minister Scott Morrison grabbed onto the Trump playbook as he sought to retain power, taking an increasingly autocratic hold over the workings of both his own Liberal Party and the Coalition it has formed for decades with the rural-focused National Party.
As a quick aside: it’s said that Trump was so famously rude to then-Liberal Party leader and prime minister Malcolm Turnbull during their first phone call in 2017 because he saw the word liberal and reacted exactly as one might expect. But the liberal in “Liberal Party” refers to economic liberalism, not social liberalism—in Australia, the Liberals are the conservatives, a fact that rarely fails to confuse Americans who find themselves studying our political landscape.
Anyway, as the election approached last May, Morrison announced that he was making a “captain’s pick”—selecting several candidates himself rather than letting them emerge from the state party apparatus. One of Morrison’s hand-picked candidates proved particularly controversial: Katherine Deves, a political neophyte from Sydney notable only for her frequently expressed and deeply unpleasant views on transgender people. When footage emerged of Deves likening her efforts to prevent trans women from participating in women’s sports to being in the French resistance during World War II, a media shitstorm ensued: Deves apologized-but-not-really, Morrison made it clear he agreed with her views against trans participation in sports, and those who supported Deves traded arguments and insults on social media with those who found her views obnoxious.
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