Australia is not the United States, but we can learn from their last decade and how they proceed over the coming years.
As a candidate and then President of the US, Donald Trump was the response – but not the answer – to a deep dissatisfaction in how America is governed, how power and success are shared, and who has a voice in the future of the country. Australians too are dissatisfied.
Trump understood that, as humans, we have a deep psychological need to belong to a group to define our identity. He mobilised his supporters’ emotional need to beat the “other” (the “swamp”, the “system”, the Democrats, “fake news”). He knew that feeling safe in our identity comes first, ahead of how good a policy or political party is for our personal wellbeing or the future of the country. Lilliana Mason warns that “crisis emerges when partisan identities fall into alignment with other social identities, stoking our intolerance of each other to levels that are unsupported by our degrees of political disagreement”. (For a deeper examination, see Ezra Klein’s 2020 book, Why We’re Polarized.)
Trump turned a new technology into a powerful tool. Just as leaders before him harnessed the opportunities of radio and then television, Trump built a formidable communications channel through social media that bypassed traditional structures. He went straight to his people to enflame dissatisfaction and stoke an “us vs them” group psychology.
But Trump went much further. He combined the power and prestige of his office with a mastery of psychology and social media to attack the legitimacy of the democratic system itself and refused to be held accountable by the system. As Professor Max Cameron warned recently: “The ‘slow death‘ of democracy typically starts with constitutional violations.”
Trump magnified divisions, but he was not the original cause of the dissatisfaction. The guardians of American democracy – in politics and the media in particular – must take responsibility for allowing conditions to build over decades to a point where Trump could take root. They now have a big job to rebuild their country’s democratic system and their own legitimacy.
To protect our own cherished democracy, we Australians together with the guardians of Australia’s system (politicians, the media, social media and digital platforms, and opinion-leaders across sectors) must act on three lessons from recent US politics. They would also be fitting themes for discussion and action at President Biden’s planned global Summit for Democracy.
Address the root causes of dissatisfaction with democracy and politics. Politicians, the media, and opinion-leaders must resist the temptation to enflame and take advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction with the way democracy is implemented, and instead do the hard, patient work together to improve how Australia makes its future.
Keep our political identities separate from our other identities. As individual Australians, we must avoid binding our political identities too closely with our other identities (for example, where we live, where we get our news, what job we have, how much we earn, our sexual orientation, our religious beliefs, where we shop). Otherwise, we risk splitting into a small number of fixed “teams” intent on winning a group rivalry rather than making a future that is good for us and the country. Meanwhile, politicians, the media, and opinion-leaders must honour and promote diversity rather than whipping people up into a group-based frenzy based on fear. Finally, everyone wanting to improve democracy and Australia’s future must take heed of this profound psychological reality.
Shape social media and digital platforms to serve society. Social media and digital platforms are here to stay. They provide enormous benefits – such as social connection and instant communication during emergencies and pandemics. But they also present enormous dangers – as we saw in the US over recent weeks. We must find a way to curtail the dangers while safeguarding the benefits. Individual Australians have a role as consumers in how we choose to engage on social media and digital platforms. Big Tech has a role in what features they include in their products and services and how they define and enforce their terms of use. Finally, government has a role in regulating them for the public interest.
To explore these themes further, Australian Futures Project is hosting a webinar in February. Subscribe to our newsletter to never miss an announcement.