https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/tag/Phil%20Shannon
The Editor,
Australian Book Review
Until the last issue (#391), ABR had managed to keep its anti-Trump animus relatively subdued but with James McNamara’s review of two satirical books on Trump, the levée has broken and the magazine has fed its tributary into the liberal elite’s torrent of rage and resentment at American voters for electing a bozo and/or fascist.
When, after a flurry of ad hominem anti-Trump jabs, McNamara’s invective finally abates and he gets around to asking how such a cruel buffoon could win, he ticks off all the obligatory, but largely innocent, suspects - the Russians, misogyny, Fake News, James Coney and the “hideous racism, sexism and xenophobia that has always run through American society”.
Absent, however, is any mention of Trump’s major policy theme of the malignity of neo-liberal globalisation. Unmentioned by McNamara are the factory-shuttering effects of ‘free trade’ and the off-shoring of manufacturing industries to low wage countries; the job-displacement arising from the import of cheap immigrant labour; and the community-eroding effects of open-borders.
Whilst Hillary Clinton dreamt of a global free market of ‘open trade and open borders’, extolled the wonders of multiculturalism and stigmatised 62 million Trump voters as ‘a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it’, it was Trump who appealed to a largely white working class who’d had a gutful of being screwed over by global capital and its divisive adjunct of Identity politics. Trump’s triumph is neither surprising nor shocking.
The liberal elite (and the socialist left, my left of four decades), however, missed the boat on candidate Trump. As exemplified by McNamara, the progressive self-elect errs by its schoolyard personalising of politics, its retreat from class to the political ghettos of identity, its disdain for the demos (especially its non-coloured bit) and its disrespect for democracy when the plebs’ electoral verdict is at odds with elite values. This may be consoling therapy (‘we are right, the people aren’t’) but all it does is wrap another layer of protective bubble-wrap around the elite’s insular world.
McNamara concludes by hoping that the “just fury” at Trump’s election “is already redefining American politics” for the better. This is delusional. Until liberal progressives, including ABR, learn to re-engage with the legitimate concerns of the working class through a left wing economic nationalist policy, a recognition that it is possible to have non-racist objections to immigration and that ‘Diversity’ is not all that it’s cracked up to be, then more Trumps will be the future - for the environment-trashing, corporate-tax-cutting, military-loving worse.