Extract from The Guardian
The
Facebook updates from friends in America are a chilling instruction
about the world we live in now. Black friends reporting racist street
abuse. Trans friends stockpiling treatment medicine before Trump ends
the Affordable Care Act. The young women seeking out 10-year IUDs,
concerned about impending restrictions on birth control and desperate to
head off more desperate, punishable future choices.
I spend a lot of time being harassed on the internet but I’ve never seen the volume of hateful garbage that’s appeared on my Twitter feed in the past two days. It’s humanity’s worst values, emboldened with thunder.
America has to face the immediate consequences of its electoral choices. In Australia, we still have the privilege of being able to face the cause. While Facebook discussions dissolve into furious flurries of finger-pointing symptomatic of feeling powerless, terrified and enraged, a calm reminder deserves heeding: “intersectionality” is a word that not only explains that there are complex factors that inform how people are oppressed, but also how others come to oppress them.
Australians appreciate the overt racism and sexism of Trump’s message that inspired the overwhelmingly white, male electorate who voted for him; the KKK isn’t marching the streets of North Carolina because it’s excited about his tax plan. How bragging about sexual assault was forgiven by an electorate moved to explosive passion over fewer emails deleted by a candidate than by George W Bush is but one neat example of an ongoing sexist double standard.
But the significant number of white women, and the smaller but just as crucial number of Hispanic Americans who voted Trump into office, contribute their numbers to the nuanced and difficult story of Trump’s appeal to an American middle and working class displaced and enraged by 35 years of market-first-people-last economic policy.
I wrote an article about the economic anxiety of working Americans when I was in the US earlier this year. Those stories of low pay, poor conditions and very few labour protections don’t affect every individual who voted for Trump, but they are depredations visible everywhere in America, an omnipresence that reminds any American without independent wealth how insecure their conditions are.
In Ken Burns’ extraordinary documentary series about the American Civil War, the point is made that the majority of Confederate soldiers fighting to maintain slavery weren’t slave owners themselves, but gave their loyalty and their lives to the Southern Cause in a willingness to defend the meagre status advantage that another people’s legalised oppression provided them. It’s impossible to witness Trump voters scream hate at women, LGBTQIA+ people, black and Hispanic Americans, people with disabilities and other minorities without remembering this.
But Australians have greater means at our disposal to protect our community from the ravages of Trumpism than the experiences of our English-speaking, Brexit-voting British cousins and now our American ones suggest. The words “we need to speak to the working class!” are ringing out throughout the left’s US election postmortem. Well, there’s one thing better than speaking to the working class, and that’s participating in it: join a union.
Australian unions are the difference that gives the nation’s workforce a comparative comfort that our counterparts in America and Britain don’t have. While America’s Reagan and Britain’s Thatcher were smashing the organised working class in the 1980s, ours not only held on, but Bob Hawke, a former union leader no less, was installed as the prime minister of this country. While their wages were driven down with drivel about “competitiveness”, Australian unions demanded and delivered the award wage system which doesn’t exist in either of those other countries.
Collective bargaining through unions delivered the penalty rates, casual loading and higher minimum wages that Americans and the British have not had. And for all of this country’s struggles with racism, sexism and other forms of marginalisation, we have an opportunity to fight not only neoliberalism’s misery, but also its populist, fascist non-alternative. It should be obvious: economic misery foments conditions that agglomerate hate.
Australian unions campaign for and defend the Medicare system America does not have. Australian unions fight battles against privatisation and keep the gates of quality public education open. They have fought for equal pay, for equal opportunity and for workplace equity, all of which underpin our country’s fundamental belief in its own egalitarianism.
All of these things have, of course, been under attack from neoliberalism’s advocates – if you’re still scratching your head as to why the Coalition has been trying to smash the CFMEU with the ABCC legislation for four long bitter years, now is the time to make the link: when politicians are unconcerned by inequalities, strong unions provide the bulwark against exploitation and greed.
The reason the World Economic Forum reported only 17% of Australians would be tempted to vote for Trump is that the miserable economic conditions that fomented his electoral rage response have not yet – yet – materialised here. If you don’t want it to go any higher, if you want to avoid the American nightmare, there is an alternative to hate. It is solidarity.
I spend a lot of time being harassed on the internet but I’ve never seen the volume of hateful garbage that’s appeared on my Twitter feed in the past two days. It’s humanity’s worst values, emboldened with thunder.
America has to face the immediate consequences of its electoral choices. In Australia, we still have the privilege of being able to face the cause. While Facebook discussions dissolve into furious flurries of finger-pointing symptomatic of feeling powerless, terrified and enraged, a calm reminder deserves heeding: “intersectionality” is a word that not only explains that there are complex factors that inform how people are oppressed, but also how others come to oppress them.
Australians appreciate the overt racism and sexism of Trump’s message that inspired the overwhelmingly white, male electorate who voted for him; the KKK isn’t marching the streets of North Carolina because it’s excited about his tax plan. How bragging about sexual assault was forgiven by an electorate moved to explosive passion over fewer emails deleted by a candidate than by George W Bush is but one neat example of an ongoing sexist double standard.
But the significant number of white women, and the smaller but just as crucial number of Hispanic Americans who voted Trump into office, contribute their numbers to the nuanced and difficult story of Trump’s appeal to an American middle and working class displaced and enraged by 35 years of market-first-people-last economic policy.
I wrote an article about the economic anxiety of working Americans when I was in the US earlier this year. Those stories of low pay, poor conditions and very few labour protections don’t affect every individual who voted for Trump, but they are depredations visible everywhere in America, an omnipresence that reminds any American without independent wealth how insecure their conditions are.
In Ken Burns’ extraordinary documentary series about the American Civil War, the point is made that the majority of Confederate soldiers fighting to maintain slavery weren’t slave owners themselves, but gave their loyalty and their lives to the Southern Cause in a willingness to defend the meagre status advantage that another people’s legalised oppression provided them. It’s impossible to witness Trump voters scream hate at women, LGBTQIA+ people, black and Hispanic Americans, people with disabilities and other minorities without remembering this.
But Australians have greater means at our disposal to protect our community from the ravages of Trumpism than the experiences of our English-speaking, Brexit-voting British cousins and now our American ones suggest. The words “we need to speak to the working class!” are ringing out throughout the left’s US election postmortem. Well, there’s one thing better than speaking to the working class, and that’s participating in it: join a union.
Australian unions are the difference that gives the nation’s workforce a comparative comfort that our counterparts in America and Britain don’t have. While America’s Reagan and Britain’s Thatcher were smashing the organised working class in the 1980s, ours not only held on, but Bob Hawke, a former union leader no less, was installed as the prime minister of this country. While their wages were driven down with drivel about “competitiveness”, Australian unions demanded and delivered the award wage system which doesn’t exist in either of those other countries.
Collective bargaining through unions delivered the penalty rates, casual loading and higher minimum wages that Americans and the British have not had. And for all of this country’s struggles with racism, sexism and other forms of marginalisation, we have an opportunity to fight not only neoliberalism’s misery, but also its populist, fascist non-alternative. It should be obvious: economic misery foments conditions that agglomerate hate.
Australian unions campaign for and defend the Medicare system America does not have. Australian unions fight battles against privatisation and keep the gates of quality public education open. They have fought for equal pay, for equal opportunity and for workplace equity, all of which underpin our country’s fundamental belief in its own egalitarianism.
All of these things have, of course, been under attack from neoliberalism’s advocates – if you’re still scratching your head as to why the Coalition has been trying to smash the CFMEU with the ABCC legislation for four long bitter years, now is the time to make the link: when politicians are unconcerned by inequalities, strong unions provide the bulwark against exploitation and greed.
The reason the World Economic Forum reported only 17% of Australians would be tempted to vote for Trump is that the miserable economic conditions that fomented his electoral rage response have not yet – yet – materialised here. If you don’t want it to go any higher, if you want to avoid the American nightmare, there is an alternative to hate. It is solidarity.
Thank you for sharing. This article is very helpful and Inspirational. Excellent!
ReplyDelete