To avoid the US nightmare, Australia needs solidarity

The Facebook updates from friends in America are a chilling instruction about the world we live in now. Black friends reporting racist street abuse. Others stockpiling treatment medicine before Trump ends the Affordable Care Act. 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, one still has 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 that the overt racism and sexism of Trump’s message inspired the overwhelmingly white, male electorate who voted for him; the Ku Klux Klan 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 a significant number of white women, and a 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.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about the economic anxiety of working Americans when I was in the US. 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, black and hispanic Americans, people with disabilities and other minorities without remembering this.

But Australians have greater means at their disposal to protect their community from the ravages of Trumpism than the experiences of their 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 post-mortem. 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 Australia’s workforce a comparative comfort that their counterparts in America and Britain don’t have.

While former American president Ronald Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher were smashing the organised working class in the 1980s, Australia’s not only held on, but Bob Hawke, a former union leader no less, was installed as the prime minister of the 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 Australia’s struggles with racism, and sexism, and other forms of marginalisation, Australians 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 that 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 the 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 per cent of Australians would be tempted to vote for Trump is that the miserable economic conditions that fomented his electoral rage response have not yet materialised there. If Australians don’t want it to go any higher, if they want to avoid the American nightmare, there is an alternative to hate. It is solidarity.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Van Badham is a theatre-maker and novelist, occasional broadcaster, critic and feminist. She is vice-president of the MEAA, Victoria. She writes columns for the Guardian and lives in Melbourne