The acquittal of President Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstructing justice did not go as I expected. I had thought that two Republicans would have crossed the floor but this week has shown us that only one managed to find a conscience and that one person was Mitt Romney.
What this means is that no signals were sent to the American people other than the obvious one that the Republican Party will be complicit in knavery if necessary. This however is entirely expected.
I tend to look at politics in the three most charismatic Anglophone countries, largely because I speak the language and largely because politics as a spectator sport, tends to have the most to report about these three. Politics in Canada tends to be far more quiet and politics in New Zealand due to its unicameral parliament is either one way or the other and never anything in between.
This means that the great pendulum swings in the Anglosphere happen in the US, the UK, and Australia. At the moment, all three are swinging to the authoritarian right; leaving the economic left and the cultural south flapping about in the winds of time. In all three countries, there appears to be no obvious plan or decided heading for either the economic left or progressive politics.
The problem that progressive politics finds itself in, is the problem that it hasn't decided what it wants to be. What we saw from about 2007 onwards, was the thrust forward of identity politics which offered itself as the alternative to mere politics by economic management; which is what the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty first was about.
Australia was the start of this trend with the election of the Rudd Government but it immediately became obvious from 2008 with the Global Financial Crisis, that identity politics has no answer whatsoever to genuine economic problems.
Australia fortunately had the best Treasurer at the helm in Wayne Swan, and Kevin Rudd was replaced with a highly competent technocrat in Julia Gillard. The United States played identity politics as though it was football match and got Barack Obama in 2008 and the UK flailed about and got David Cameron's Conservative Government, which then made it a policy to kick the heads of the poor.
America didn't find any real solutions to the GFC and simply weathered the storm, the UK sunk, and Australia was the beginning of the next wave of identity politics when the right decided to play the game too, and played even more chips into the middle by playing borderline fascist cards.
Since 2013, Australia, the UK and the United States have all elected increasingly nativist and borderline fascist governments, while burning the underlying principles of any hint of economic management, while the progressive parties have all seem to forgotten how to do politics at all.
When Jeremy Corbyn became head of the Labour Party in the UK on a platform of actual lefitst economics, the rightist media absolutely lost their minds and simply had to kick him as hard as they could so that nobody would be looking while actual people burnt to death in building fires and while far right racists took centre stage and had their agendas legitimised by 'conservative' parties in order to buy votes. Thus we can explain Abbott, Dutton, Morrison, Trump, and Brexit fairly easily.
The obvious question then is what exactly is progressive politics' next move? America which has always been so hideously right shifted in politics, is currently grappling with the ideas that Bernie Sanders is putting forward; which was actually the platform of FDR in 1944¹. The rest of the Democratic Party however doesn't seem prepared to enter the 1930s and is still grappling with the same issues as it was with women's rights but over LGBTIQ issues instead. The Republicans on the other hand, are playing with the same play book as 1920s National Socialists were in the Weimar Republic.
The UK has retreated even further back, with Labour now being an irrelevance until mid-2024 and the Conservatives rapidly trying to undo the European experiment by adopting a 1900s approach to the world at large. The City of London should do immensely well out of what will be a new pewter age²; while the rest of the country and especially the North, now lives up to the promises that Thatcher left behind, of complete and utter neglect but still subsidising The City.
In Australia, the Labor Party has decided that the best form of Opposition is no opposition at all; while the Morrison Government has learned that it can practice open corruption and cruelty and racism without repercussions, and be praised for it by their owners at News Corp. Illegal pork barrelling warrants no investigation at all by the Australian Federal Police; neither does actual forgery of documents which were 'leaked' to the media and State Government.
Meanwhile, we are perfectly fine with locking up refugees and migrants and even people born in Australia, in gaols on tropical islands. The Australian people have then rewarded this behaviour by re-electing cruel governments.
The thing is that apart from Bernie Sanders and maybe Jeremy Corbyn (whose political career is now counting down to a return to the backbench), I see no actual leftists left. If Sanders actually achieves what I think is impossible and becomes President, he might be able to get a lot done but only if he has a friendly House and Senate which can only happen in 2022 at the earliest. Other than that, there is no grand vision from Biden (who has probably reached the end of the road), or Buttigeg, or Warren. Their only aim at this stage is the second Tuesday in November; which is exactly the same as Trump's³.
In the UK, Labour and the SNP have four years to think about what they're going to do, provided that the UK doesn't snap into three parts first.
In Australia, I honestly have no idea what an Albanese Government would do and I don't think that Albanese has any idea what an Albanese Government would do. Come to think of it, I think that the current Morrison Government has no idea of what it wants to do; except bash poor people and cut them out of the Commonwealth.
In the long game of politics as it literally becomes impossible to remember a past which people were never inside of, the left has already unlearned the past and the right is setting about taking back everything that it thinks is theirs. The Right makes might right, where the powerful do what they will and the poor suffer what they must. The Left has no idea what's left and unless they work out what's left then there will be nothing left at all.
¹FDR's 1944 State Of The Union address outlined what he hoped would be a Second Bill of Rights; however the United States doesn't actually believe in the rights of the people or the responsibilities of the state.
²The City is probably in the middle of a gilded age but the rest of the nation is looking like tarnished scrap metal.
³Trump has consistently proven that he had no real plans beyond that second Tuesday in November of 2016.
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