When I carelessly got pregnant at the age of twenty-nine, I sought an abortion. My Sydney GP of ten years’ standing, whom I trusted, cautioned against this course of action. So many of her patients struggled to get pregnant, she explained. ‘Clearly not an issue for me,’ I pointed out, and got my referral to the relevant clinic. Two weeks later, after enduring a second compulsory psychological assessment and handing over a few hundred dollars, I was no longer pregnant. That process was more cumbersome than I would have liked. But it was possible. Importantly, it was safe.

Five years later, when a baby I was carrying had died by eleven weeks, I was provided with medication to induce a miscarriage. Complications meant that I needed surgery, just as twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman, in the US state of Georgia, recently required. At Box Hill Hospital in Melbourne, I was turned away one day and, on the next, waited an uncomfortable length of time. But once again the process was safe and I was fine. Thurman, by contrast, spent twenty hours in increasing and then agonising pain as sepsis took hold. Doctors administered antibiotics and IV fluid, but delayed the required dilation and curettage (‘D&C’). They feared contravening a new felony law that could see them spend up to ten years in prison. By the time they decided the emergency met the threshold for the few exceptions to the law’s ban, it was too late. Thurman died, leaving behind a six-year-old child.

Safe reproduction, or to put it another way, good medical care for pregnant people, is possible in Australia only because of well over a century of women’s activism. Although abortion has been available in Australian states for decades now, it still took immense public pressure to decriminalise it: between 2019 and 2023, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia finally passed the necessary laws. This month, so-called right-to-life advocates in South Australia have brought a bill to prevent the termination of a pregnancy once the foetus is past twenty-eight weeks – as if anyone would make such a decision frivolously.

While the South Australia bill will go nowhere because of the composition of the current legislature, that is not the case in the United States. Donald Trump rose to the US presidency in 2017 on the back of a promise to make abortion illegal. He bragged during the 2024 campaign about his success in doing just that: appointing enough conservative judges to the Supreme Court to tilt the balance. His disdain for women in general is lifelong and all too evident.

It is not just rights to medical care that are under threat. In a recent ‘virtual rally’, Vice President Kamala Harris sat with Oprah Winfrey, in a studio in swing-state Michigan. A parade of Hollywood celebrities appeared on screens that ringed a live audience, among whom were individuals and families who testified movingly about the rising cost of living, gun violence in schools, and abortion bans, including Amber Thurman’s family.

Meryl Streep asked Harris the final question: what would Harris do to prevent Trump or his allies and followers from wreaking havoc if she were to win the presidential election? In her reply, Harris noted that the aim of those who foment fear of ‘another Jan 6’ is to suppress voting. If voters feel that electoral votes will never be certified and/or counted in Congress, perhaps they need not bother casting a ballot. Harris finished her response with a line that gets to the heart of why this election matters so much to people worldwide: ‘We are going to fight for the integrity of the people’s voice and for our democracy.’

The right to vote is precious, as are all our rights. They are not natural, they can be wound back, and they must be protected. Women and gender-diverse people know this perhaps better than cis men; people of colour more readily than white people; Indigenous people in Australia more than settlers. When one belongs to a group that has had to fight for that right rather than to assume it is somehow natural and proper, the necessity of guarding it is clear.

Democracy in the United States is far from perfect. Its electoral processes, lacking independent oversight, are often dismal. And yet, what happens to democracy there is of clear global significance, not least because the rights-based mass social movements of the twentieth century, for all their shortcomings, are nothing less than iconic. For many Australians, this election patently feels personal; we are responding with an intensity arising from the long affinity between the two nations since settler-colonisation took place – shared language and deep, ongoing political and cultural exchange.

Project 2025, the thousand-page manifesto that would guide a second Trump administration, aims to ‘restore’ a United States of nuclear, straight families, where women raise children – lots of children. It lays out policies that Trump has endorsed and that will continue the work of his 2017-21 administration, such as undercutting the public service, especially the Departments of Education and Justice. This work will be enhanced by the recent Supreme Court ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which moves expertise and authority away from public agencies and vests it in the courts, where Trump, if re-elected, will do all he can to stack the benches, just as he did in his first term. Project 2025’s goal is nothing less than to entrench massive inequality and accelerate progress toward a nation ruled by oligarchs.

If Trump is re-elected, Americans will have taken the path of replacing popular sovereignty with a sovereign authority. For now that is vested in one man, but MAGA-infused successors such as pro-natalist J.D. Vance, backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, are nipping at his heels. The erosion of Americans’ rights – to abortion, education, a fair go, and so much else – opens the door ever wider for authoritarianism and fascism.

Novelist Sinclair Lewis, writing of the heartland of ‘America First’ territory in the 1930s, parodied his compatriots’ complacency about fascism in the book he titled It Can’t Happen Here. In fact, it can happen there. In Australia, where populist politics around refugee policy and Indigenous people’s power have been extremely successful for those seeking elected office, it is no wonder people are watching the US election closely. It can happen here, too.

James Curran

An American presidential campaign typically brings out the great paradox in how a country like Australia relates to, or even understands, America. The rhetoric around the US-Australia alliance drips with the sentiment of shared values and solidarity. Yet the campaign only highlights just how different the two countries really are. Australians can be prone to look quizzically or in awe at the pomp and pageantry of the party conventions, the sweeping purple prose tumbling from the candidates’ lips, the sea of bunting and balloons.

In 2024, we should bring a certain scepticism to this judgement. A recent poll published locally showed that nearly a third of Australians would vote for Trump if they could. Thirty-six per cent of Australians had a favourable view of the Republican candidate. There should be no sotto voce tut-tutting that only the land of the free is beset with the brand of populist nativism that Trump has come to represent. Australia’s political culture will need to be alert to the fertile breeding ground for that style of politics that is already spurred by inflation, cost of living pressures, and wage stagnation.

Spare a thought, then, for Canberra policymakers who have to make sense of the American spectacle and divine its meaning for the country. It has been quite the roller coaster. In mid-July, the conventional wisdom was that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump had delivered so iconic an image that his political position was unassailable. Trump’s bloodied ear, his defiant fist raised as the Stars and Stripes fanned across a clear blue sky – it was as if the Iwo Jima memorial came to life in real time. Then, Joe Biden’s resignation and the initial wave of optimism on which Kamala Harris surfed tightened the contest. At the time of writing, Harris’s momentum had stalled. The vice president was struggling to differentiate herself in any meaningful way from the man she replaced on the Democrat ticket. Her cautiousness seemed at odds with the politics of ‘joy’ she espoused.

Australia should not, however, get prematurely panic-stricken about a second Trump presidency. ‘We’re a long way down Trump’s hate list,’ says one Canberra insider. Aside from a testy phone call with then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, in early 2017, the forecasted doom for the Australian-American relationship never came to pass.

Still, concerns remain. Some in Canberra worry about the potential for civil commotion that might follow a contested result. They know that Australia is likely to suffer collateral damage from Trump rather than targeted damage, especially when it comes to the likelihood of the Republican re-engaging the US tariff war on China and the world. Another fear is of Trumpian gloves being taken off. ‘During his first term, there were those who restrained and even disobeyed Trump,’ says one strategist. ‘The concern now is that those in the inner circle around Trump will be neither a cautious nor disobedient force.’ A Japanese official I spoke to in Tokyo in early October said that the way to deal with any US election was the same way you react to a Christmas present given from a relative: no matter what’s inside, you basically have to like it. This is the reality for those American allies who have so closely hitched their wagon to Washington.

There is concern, too, about some of the signals Trump loyalists have been sending. Last year, one of Trump’s former secretaries of state, Mike Pompeo, visiting Seoul, signalled to the Koreans that the United States would be comfortable if they went nuclear. But what would the Japanese make of this? And what does it mean for the concept of extended US nuclear deterrence?

Others are comforted by the July Foreign Affairs article written by one of Trump’s former national security advisers, Robert O’Brien, about ‘the return of peace through strength’, channelling the Reagan doctrine. In that article, O’Brien said that America’s Asian allies had told him they would ‘welcome more of Trump’s plain talk about the need for alliances to be two-way relationships and that they believe his approach would enhance security’.

Good minders around a president do make a difference. ‘Harris might be light on foreign policy experience,’ quips another insider, ‘but will have good people around her.’ Her current foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, is a specialist on Europe but has referred to the idea of the United States and Chinese economies decoupling as ‘fantasy’.

There are, of course, cases where this assumption about good advice has been disproved. Lyndon B. Johnson pleaded with John F. Kennedy’s ‘best and the brightest’ foreign policy thinkers to stay with him after the assassination. ‘I need you,’ he said to them, in that famous Southern drawl. But their reputation for cool realism and liberal humanism ended up in the mire of Vietnam. Likewise Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had experienced the American nightmare of the 1970s – defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon’s resignation – ended up devising the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Other problems could arise soon after election day, during the transition. ‘It could be a difficult time,’ says one Canberra thinker, because ‘Trump has indicated he will seize the reins of power before the inauguration, on Ukraine and Gaza.’

Whatever the result, it is obvious that the way in which American power is exercised will affect Canberra most directly. Australia may think it has the capacity to influence how that power is dispensed. It should certainly keep trying to do so. But we got more than a whiff of the imbalance in that power equation in August when a hot mic in Tonga picked up America’s Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell telling Anthony Albanese that it was all right for Australia to have the Pacific ‘lane’ in fashioning a region-wide policing agreement. Like a pro-consul, Campbell looked as if he was giving imperial permission to America’s junior ally.

It was all rather sadly reminiscent of LBJ’s reported quip en route to Australia in July 1966: ‘I like to come out and look my prime ministers over.’

Anthony Albanese and Joe Biden, Tokyo, 2022 (World Politics Archive/Alamy)

Clinton Fernandes

ABR is right to wonder if Australians’ ‘almost prurient fascination with the United States’ diminishes their interest in our national affairs. The United States Embassy in Canberra does not fall into this trap. The Wikileaks cables revealed that US diplomats are close followers of Australian domestic politics. They constantly enter into sensitive conversations with political leaders, corporate chiefs, trade union officials, and other insiders. US diplomats are regular visitors to Parliament House in Canberra. Dr Philip Dorling, former adviser to a Labor shadow foreign minister, has said that they were ‘a frequent presence in the corridors and offices’ there, and sometimes ‘knew things about goings-on within the Labor Party that were not known to many MPs and staffers’. This suggests that Australia’s obsession with the United States incurs opportunity costs.

The outcome of the US election has global implications. There are people who genuinely fear the onset of a neo-authoritarian or proto-fascist system. The US Constitution, written in the eighteenth century, has a distinctly pro-rural bias, ensuring that rural voters today possess disproportionate electoral strength. Their pro-Republican Party sentiments, combined with their growing unity as a voting bloc, give a distinct advantage in the House of Representatives to the Republicans, now more an insurgency than a traditional political party.

In the Senate, states containing as few as seventeen per cent of the population can theoretically elect a Senate majority because the least populous states – heavily rural in composition – are overrepresented as never before. Democrat voters’ tight urban clustering leaves them disadvantaged by the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc. A Supreme Court packed with judges who will strike down unwelcome legislation ensures that the problem is unresolvable within the current constitutional framework. The seeds of a major political crisis are in place.

All this is of deep concern to Australia’s defence and security establishment, which has coasted in the slipstream of US supremacy since the end of World War II. Australian policy planners know that the true character of our relationship with the United States is a transactional, dramatically unequal one. Australian diplomats strive to demonstrate their relevance to American policymakers by anticipating and fulfilling US interests.

Some pro-AUKUS federal parliamentarians have begun calling themselves the ‘wolverines’, a name taken from a 1984 Hollywood film, Red Dawn, about a group of high-school football players who defeat a Soviet invasion of the United States. The Australian wolverines display stickers featuring wolf claw marks on the entrances of their parliamentary offices. The sub-imperial ideology on display is instructive: an imagined commitment to Australian security via an American pop cultural reference, with China standing in for the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, addressing the US Congress in 2011, spoke for them when she said, ‘For my own generation, the defining image of America was the landing on the moon. My classmates and I were sent home from school to watch the great moment on television. I’ll always remember thinking that day: Americans can do anything … Americans inspired the world of my own youth.’

American cultural influence in Australia is overwhelming, as the character and aesthetics of reality television demonstrates. Identity operates alongside material interests. The United States is the biggest investor in Australia by far. Vital sectors of the Australian economy are integrated into the value chains of US corporations. According to data from the Bloomberg Professional Terminal, foreign investors own as much as three-quarters of shares in the top twenty companies on the Australian Stock Exchange. These twenty companies make up approximately half the market capitalisation of the entire ASX. US-based investors are the biggest owners of sixteen of the top twenty companies.

Britain enjoyed a similar status in the past, for similar reasons. In the 1950s, Britain supplied sixty per cent of the total foreign investment in Australia, more than double the investment of the United States. Robert Menzies’ Cabinet contained men born in the 1890s and the 1900s, when the British Empire reigned supreme. For them, Australians were Britons who happened to be born in Australia. As with the United States today, Britain’s cultural influence (via film, television, and literature) and economic influence were two sides of the same coin. Menzies was being quite honest when he assured Britain’s Anthony Eden during the 1956 Suez Crisis, ‘You must never entertain any doubts about the British quality of this country.’

Despite all this, Australia retains a sense of difference. When Scott Morrison declared that Virgin Airlines would give US-style priority boarding to veterans at airports, along with a pre-take-off announcement thanking them for their military service, Australia’s veterans by and large rejected it as inconsistent with their more egalitarian values. Unlike their prime minister, they didn’t think the best ideas always came from the United States.

The November 2024 US election won’t change a polarised domestic landscape, nor decrease the prospect of democratic erosion.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard looking at the presidential seal, 2011 (American Photo Archive/Alamy

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I understand the irritation with Australia’s preoccupation with Donald Trump and the upcoming US elections. But I’m not sure that we should stop paying attention. Of course, it can be argued that we should all be thinking night and day about famine in Sudan and the global implications of climate change. But that is never going to happen, because it all seems too hard, too abstract, too far away.

The United States and its bizarre presidential politics are different. As a nation, for better or worse, Australia is a client of the United States. For reasons of size, location, culture, and history, we probably don’t have a choice about that. By the same token, it matters to Australians in an immediate, practical way what happens there. To be sure, this is also not something we can control. But it is something that it is in our collective interest to monitor carefully, and to see that our government does too. Clients can get into a lot of trouble by heedlessly following their patrons.

How big the danger is of the United States going off the rails in the event of a Trump victory is debatable. Having lived in the United States for forty years, ten of them in Texas, I find Trump and his appeal to non-élite Americans remarkable and, in many respects, repulsive, but less surprising than is portrayed in much of the Australian media. Domestically, I do see him as a danger, not least because of his contempt for the judicial system (which is, indeed, highly politicised in the United States), his irresponsibility in stirring up popular violence, and his propensity to introduce into American politics the practice of arresting opponents after (claiming) victory. Internationally, it looks less clear-cut. Trump says all sorts of wild things, but he seems to be something of an isolationist at heart, and in the past half century it has been the interventionists in US politics who did more damage, including for the clients who joined their interventions.

As to the prurient aspect of Australian interest in the United States, I am not particularly bothered. No doubt we have picked up the cult of celebrity from the United States. But its most toxic aspect – mass shootings as the path to instant national celebrity for the shooter – has not taken root here. Before we had American celebrities who were famous for being famous, we had the British royal family. Was that better morally, or even aesthetically?

When I was growing up in the 1950s, there was a lot of alarm about American popular culture sweeping the world, and it was indeed a remarkable phenomenon. American pop culture swept our continent along with the rest, and the Australian accent acquired Americanisms, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Now, it seems to me, that influence is significantly diluted, thanks to diversity within our multicultural Australian population.

We are America’s client. But clients can behave in different ways. At one extreme is the slavish client, not just obedient to the patron but always striving to ingratiate himself. At the other is the client-from-hell who accepts the patron’s protection while disobeying, mocking, and humiliating him at every turn.

It may be too much to wish us to emulate Benjamin Netanyahu in his treatment of the American patron, all the more in that it is hard to imagine us getting away with it. On the other hand, there is no need for us to adopt the ‘abject client’ role as eagerly as Australian politicians on both sides tend to do. The patron-client relationship is inherently unequal, but it can be made to work for the client as well as the patron. It is not submissive and obedient clients that derive the most benefit from the relationship, but difficult ones who need to be kept from straying off the reservation. If we can’t aspire to the Israeli model of clientelism, let us think of emulating France, or at least New Zealand. As Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It is the price of successful management of a patron by a client as well. Australia should remember that if Donald Trump becomes the forty-seventh president – or even if Kamala Harris does.

Timothy J. Lynch

I am paid to sell the importance of American politics to Australian-based students, scholars, and the public. So every US election is the most important for Australia. I gave up calling them when The Age carried my 2012 article ‘Why Rick Perry will be the next president by Tim Lynch.’ I recommend a coin to help you predict the winner this month.

Before addressing the Americentrism of Australian culture, let me argue that the reverse might be true: the United States is unique in its obsession with what foreigners think about it. The experiment started in 1776 by appealing to the opinions of mankind. Alexis de Tocqueville, sixty years later, was baffled by how much Americans craved old-world validation. Indeed, the French aristocrat’s enduring fame, in the nation he visited for only nine months (1831-32), is built on his outsider’s take on American mores.

He witnessed an electoral politics that was deeply enervating and filled with narcissistic mediocrities. Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay (the candidates in 1832) have echoes in Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The former were small men, wrote Tocqueville, animated by the parochial. Tocqueville had a ‘plague on both their houses’ response which we mimic today. The Australian sense of moral superiority is strong. We are so much more normal, civilised, stable, because we compel people to vote.

To paraphrase Clive James, we are a nation settled by prison officers passing judgement on a nation made by rebels. We fetishise authority. Look at how the Melbourne middle class loved Covid lockdowns and re-elected the government that imposed them. Americans live in a state of permanent distrust of the power that Australians crave. Wyoming tried to impose a mask mandate; it lasted a matter of hours.

Where we are technocrats, with two parties arguing they can deliver healthcare better than the other, Americans are ideologues. The United States is, after all, an idea. We are an accident. Republicans see nationalised healthcare as a pathway to government tyranny. Democrats embrace the big government necessary to nationalise it. Americans ask: ‘How does this law shift the balance of power between citizen and state?’ We demand: ‘More government services please.’

We just ban guns – boy, does that feed our self-righteousness. There, guns are a proxy for debates about legitimate authority: if Washington can restrict access to guns, it can do the same for abortions. The transformation of whole subcultures is implicated in the pursuit of public policies which we think were settled long ago in Australia.

Perhaps we are not then appropriately equipped to fixate on this year’s unusual election. We are appalled and fascinated by the United States, but lack the requisite nuance to bring these into balance. Both countries have federal systems, but the sectionalism of the United States gave them a civil war. We are both continental, but this was the platform for an American global empire. We both love sport, but Americans are baffled by cricket and play games the rest of the world mostly ignores.

But it is the similarities that drive, in part, the Australia consumption of American politics. It is Hollywood for ugly people. And, like the movies, the United States tells a great story. From a distant trading outpost in British North America to the most powerful nation in world history – in about seventeen decades. Who wouldn’t find that rise compelling? Indian and Indonesian politics are opaque in comparison. And China has no elections for us to obsess over.

In the United States, movie stars and television personalities become president. We can track the careers of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and glean something about the American system. Bollywood has not provided us with an equivalent window into Indian politics. The loud and long presidential campaigns that have become a fixture of the modern era represent the greatest character tests for any democratic politician. Fate has contrived to test Kamala Harris less – she has been running for only two months and has faced no primary election. Most candidates face prolonged interrogation of everything they have ever said and done. By enduring that interrogation, they deserve the presidential power they win. And I would rather nations like Australia be engaged as bit-part interrogators.

Finally, critics of Australian Americentrism indict the wrong kind. The belief that America’s race history maps onto, even compels, our own is much more pernicious. Identity politics, invented on the American college campus, has been too easily swallowed on ours. It has led us down paths that have coddled students, negated academic freedom, and improved the lives of not one person of colour. Decoupling from America’s Great Awokening would improve Australian politics significantly. I look forward to notification of that from The Guardian.

Marilyn Lake

The outcome of the presidential election will be highly consequential for the world as well as for the United States. The result will help to determine the pace of global warming and the climate crisis. It will influence the course of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Closer to home, it will be important for Australian trading relationships, our economy, our dealings with China and the Pacific, and the future of AUKUS. Obviously, we should pay attention.

My regret is the unedifying nature of the coverage of the election in the Australian media. So much sensation and titillation, too much mockery, and too little informative analysis. So much text, but so little context.

As a historian, I seek explanation and understanding. Even if Donald Trump loses, he will have come close to winning. We are constantly told the election is on a knife edge. In Australia, though, most of us struggle to understand how a convicted felon and serial liar, a vainglorious fantasist and proud misogynist – approaching eighty years of age – can attract a majority or near majority of the votes. The media has offered little explanation for Trump’s mass appeal, so we must assume Americans are crazy, deluded, or stupid. They are certainly not rational. The effect of the much of the media coverage in Australia has been to make us feel superior. This represents an opportunity lost. We could have learned more about the world’s oldest democracy, its culture, economy, and history, and, more generally, the emotional dimension of political identification.

In the United States itself there has been some commentary on the emotions – the grievances and resentments – of those who feel ‘left behind’ by globalisation and neo-liberalism, and by the resultant reorientation of class politics. The working class no longer feels empowered by mobilisation – indeed, many no longer feel they are a class at all – but they are angry at the condescension and relative wealth of university-educated liberals and professionals – and they are defiant. The fact that Trump is a billionaire and advocates tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations is not as important, it seems, as his swaggering performance of identification at mass rallies – often with sustained humour, as Irish writer Fintan O’Toole has analysed – and his demonstration that he ‘gets’ the audience’s feelings.

I would have liked to read some class analysis in the Australian media, focused especially on the history of the seven ‘swing states’: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Democrats were shocked when the Teamsters Union, with its 1.3 million members, refused to endorse the Harris ticket. Rather, its president, Sean O’Brien, addressed the Republican Convention and hailed Trump as ‘one tough SOB’ after the first assassination attempt. Then the International Association of Firefighters also decided to withhold their endorsement. The role of organised labour is expected to be especially significant in the ‘blue wall’ states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden is recognised as one of the most pro-union presidents in recent history, but was his gender also important in securing the support of some working-class men, who may now defect to Trump?

Not surprisingly, the most informed and incisive commentary on the US election has been published in the United States itself, with Fintan O’Toole to the fore in offering fresh insight. In a recent essay on the rise of the previously under-estimated vice president of mixed Caribbean and Indian descent, O’Toole points to the radical demographic changes that have transformed key American electorates (‘Kamala’s Moment’, New York Review of Books, 19 September 2024). Although US federal politics is still dominated by white men, they are now a decided minority in the population: only thirty per cent of Americans. Yet democracy’s reckoning with demography is yet to come. Maybe Kamala Harris’s moment has arrived, but surveys suggest a drift of younger African American and Latino voters to Trump.

We need this sort of demographic and class/gender analysis of Australian electoral politics. But it is admittedly difficult right now to turn away from the drama of the US election to face the dismal political scene at home, where the evasive, stumbling prime minister confronts an increasingly belligerent Opposition leader with decidedly authoritarian tendencies. The most exciting development on the Australian political scene is surely the challenge to the two-party system posed by independents, with the rise of the Greens and Teals and others. It seems to me that it is this development that might warrant a feeling of hope, if not superiority, a powerful emotion that might yet prove victorious in the US election.

Kamala Harris speaking at the Wing Dinner in Clear Lake Iowa, 2019 (Alex Edelman/The Photo Access/Alamy)

Emma Shortis

This US presidential election does feel more urgent, galvanising, and consequential than next year’s Australian federal election – because, in a way, it is.

Our fascination with US politics reflects this fundamental truth. American democracy faces a critical test this year, one it may not pass. Focusing our attention on what President Joe Biden has described as a ‘battle for the soul of America’ does not diminish our interest in our own politics or in the rest of the world. Quite the opposite, in fact. Our attention is an implicit recognition of the intrinsic connection between what happens in the United States and what happens to us. Like it or not, the United States remains the focal point around which much of the world’s politics revolves.

In Australia, coverage and analysis of the elections seeks to draw a sharp dividing line between US domestic politics and the capital-A ‘Alliance’ between our two nations. The Alliance, we are so often told, is above partisan domestic politics, bigger than presidents or prime ministers. As with so much else, Donald Trump forces us to confront that myth. The line is artificial, and always has been.

There is no neat division between domestic politics and foreign policy – each is a projection of the other. We cannot separate America’s domestic political turmoil from its role in the world. If we care about what happens in the world – and we clearly do – then we must care about what happens in America. If we care about the fate of Ukraine, and Gaza, and Sudan, then we care about what happens in America. If we care about what Australia does in response to these crises, we must care, too, about what happens in America. We can hold all of these things in our minds at once.

What would a Trump victory, or a Harris victory, mean for Gaza? And what, in turn, would that mean for the Australian government’s response? The question for us – and the thing that I think drives so much of our fascination – is how America’s domestic turmoil will be projected outwards.

Trump is a grave and active threat to American democracy. That threat has not diminished since 6 January 2021. Trump has made it clear that he will not accept an election loss; he has mused about ‘terminating’ the US Constitution. Australia does not have a plan for such an outcome. What would the impact of the collapse of American democracy be on the ‘shared values’ of the US-Australia alliance? On our own politics?

It is perhaps that artificial line between the domestic and the international that leads much coverage of US domestic politics to be overly sanguine about the prospect of a Trump victory or about post-election unrest or violence in the event of a Harris victory.

After all, as has been suggested, even if Trump were to win (and that is a real possibility), ‘his second term will soon be over’ and the ‘US republic will presumably ride on’. But why would we presume either of those things? The January 6 insurrection came frighteningly close – minutes, metres – to a very different outcome. Trump, his surrogates, and the movement behind him have learnt the lessons of his first term. A second Trump administration, or even a failed Trump campaign, will be a very different experience from the last round. Are we prepared for what that might mean for the rest of us?

Australia and the world are endangered by an unstable United States projecting its internal instability outwards. It is in no one’s interests – including that of the United States – to see a more unstable, aggressive America projecting further violence into the Middle East, or the Asia Pacific.

Like it or not, the fate of our ‘big, complex, fascinating world’ is tied directly to what happens in America.

That does not mean that Australia has no agency. We are uniquely placed to influence what happens in America and in the world; to insist on the integrity of democratic institutions, and the rule of law. Our collective fascination is surely driven in part by the fear that we are watching these things collapse in real time, as we question how strong they were in the first place.

What happens in America matters. What we do matters, too.

Dennis Altman

One of the most disturbing images from our recent history is the picture of Scott Morrison, flanked by Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, at the announcement of the AUKUS pact. That Australia still sees itself as part of a white Atlantic world in the 2020s suggests a deep inability to come to terms with our actual geographic and demographic realities.

We look to Britain as one might look to a slightly doddery great-aunt who still holds our affection, even if the great-aunt is now replaced by a great-uncle in the shape of Charles III, who, bizarrely, remains the head of state of a country in which he does not reside. But nostalgia for our British ties has long been overtaken by the thrall of the United States, the powerful godfather whose love we constantly crave and whose neglect we constantly fear.

Here I plead guilty: I was enthralled by the United States fifty years ago when I first encountered it as a graduate student, and my early writings were only possible because of my immersion in things American. The deeply anti-communist Frank Knopfelmacher, horrified by American counterculture and the new left, called me ‘an agent of American imperialism’ – and he was right.

A few years ago, I acknowledged this by entitling a memoir Unrequited Love, but if my love for the United States has faded I remain as fascinated as the rest of us. I also deplore the fact that we increasingly view the world through American eyes.

Our mainstream media, both newspaper and television, relies heavily on US content (SBS sometimes varies this with footage from Al Jazeera). Except for the Greens, our politicians constantly speak as if we are inevitably joined with the United States on every issue of consequence, despite the reality that in practice we often disagree.

Except for Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, all our prime minsters have contributed to this assumption. At least the Albanese government has not gone timidly along with the United States on every UN motion concerning the current wars in the Middle East. The Liberals have attacked them for this, apparently assuming that our national interest requires no more than looking to the US representative before raising our hand.

Most galling are our cultural institutions. The so-called Festival of Dangerous Ideas relies heavily on speakers brought in from the United States, and the ABC program Q&A, which seems to survive only on life support, features far more guests from the United States than the entire Global South.

Two hugely consequential elections earlier this year, in India and Indonesia, received little coverage. Meanwhile, two of Black Inc.’s star writers, Stan Grant and Don Watson, have written cover stories on the US presidentials. Far more interesting would have been their insights on the two Asian elections – or indeed the recent left-wing victory in Sri Lanka.

It is undeniable that the outcome of this month’s election will affect us, and not only because of Donald Trump’s erratic policies on foreign policy, trade, and climate change. Most insidious is the effect of a potential Trump victory in fuelling crazy conspiratorial views here.

I have always suspected that had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Malcolm Turnbull might not have been deposed as leader of the Liberals. Trump’s success emboldened the right wing of the Coalition; once Covid-19 emerged, Trump’s craziness infected much of the anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown protests in Australia.

We live in the slipstream of the American Dream, even if, on the surface, our politics move to a different rhythm. But the outcome of the US elections will have an impact on ours next year. A Trump repudiation of Biden’s push for cleaner energy – ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ – will boost the Coalition’s scepticism about climate change. A Trump bent on attacking ‘woke’ politics would give new energy to his counterparts here.

The global consequences of a Trump victory are incalculable, although one assumes that both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are prepared to continue their wars in the hope of a change in Washington and a Trump administration more inclined to support them.

Clearly, a Kamala Harris presidency would cause less disruption, but even if she wins it is likely that she will face a hostile Senate and domestic deadlock. At least the next AUKUS picture would include a woman of colour, which might remind us that the world is more complex than an imagined world of Biggles and the Famous Five that seems the limit of the Opposition’s grasp on foreign policy.

Michael L.Ondaatje

Presidential elections in the United States are now global events. Their international coverage exceeds that of all other national elections in the world combined. People everywhere, including in Australia, tune in to US elections with a mixture of expectation, amazement, and anxiety. As spectacles, they have achieved an extraordinary grip on the global imagination, especially since the rise of Donald Trump. Ever since Trump entered the political arena in 2015, US elections have come to resemble a strange new kind of reality television show – but the reasons we are increasingly engaged by them are more complex than merely seeking entertainment.

The contemporary obsession with US elections is partly about politics – a recognition of the reality and reach of US power in a complex and volatile world. The US president is the most powerful person on earth, vested with the authority to make big decisions on critical issues such as war, trade, migration, climate, and security. The stakes are often high. As historian Timothy Garton Ash recently noted, for some people a decision by a US president ‘may literally be a matter of life or death’.

Yet these elections are increasingly policy-lite affairs. Symbolism trumps substance, politicians are cast as celebrities, and soap opera-style sagas dominate campaigns. As political scientist Simon Tate explains, ‘There’s something about US politics at the moment which makes it weirdly hypnotic, even if you aren’t that interested in politics.’ Even people who loathe Donald Trump feel compelled to watch him as they eagerly await the next plot line in the election story. The American media plays a key role too, providing 24/7 election coverage to virtually all parts of world. Through this form of Americanisation, Rupert Murdoch and Co ensure that US elections occupy a unique and unrivalled position in the global consciousness.

Australians’ strong interest in recent US elections has undoubtedly been shaped by these realities. But it might also be understood as part of a longer story of engagement with American politics and culture going back decades. When viewed in an international context, our current fascination with Washington is neither remarkable nor especially new. Australians have displayed high levels of interest in US elections since at least the 1960s and 1970s, when television ownership soared around the world. Then, as now, American political coverage dominated the agenda and established the United States as the primary site of Australia’s international news: think JFK, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. Australia was hardly alone here: for much of the Cold War era, the United States provided a security guarantee for many countries, and elections figured prominently on the political radars of friends and foes alike.

Political scientist Brendon O’Connor points out that global interest in US elections ‘gradually increased’ throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but that there was a ‘quantum leap’ around the hotly disputed 2000 election. After thirty-seven days of legal wrangling and intense media focus, the US Supreme Court dramatically halted the Florida recount, effectively handing the presidency to the internationally unpopular George W. Bush – as the world watched on.

Meanwhile, in Australia, shifts in media reporting by the early 2000s arguably reflected the community’s deepening interest in US politics: ‘while in 1996 Bill Clinton’s re-election as America’s president did not lead the national broadcaster’s nightly television news’, by 2008 ‘it was the primary victories of [Republican candidates] Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich that were leading the bulletin’, explains O’Connor. Of course, this was the year of Barack Obama’s historic candidacy, and US election news dominated Australian and international media like never before. More recently, and with Trump’s ascendancy, social media has significantly expanded our exposure to, and engagement with, the intensity of US electoral politics.

Today, US election coverage is booming in Australia. In August, the ABC cut into its coverage of Question Time to broadcast Joe Biden’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Recent reports indicate that Australian television and radio has given the current US election double the airtime of the most recent Australian federal election. And audiences have lapped it up: who doesn’t love a good political drama, with the mud-slinging, assassination attempts, conspiracy theories, criminal prosecutions, and more? The cultural entertainment factor surrounding the upcoming US election is especially high.

This doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the coverage as little more than a media circus or, conversely, focus purely on the drama. The 2024 election is taking place against the backdrop of the ‘biggest election year in history’. US experts in Australia have been weighing heavy matters of geopolitics and debating their implications for our country, the region, and the world. After two decades of ‘democratic backsliding’ around the globe, nearly thirty countries are holding elections this year. Yet in the United States, some say, democracy itself is on the ballot (a reference to Trump’s election denialism), and in Australia there is concern that a Trump victory could affect us in tangibly negative ways. A recent YouGov poll suggests that around two thirds of Australians would vote for Kamala Harris, while one third said they would support Trump.

There are fears about the future of the ANZUS alliance if Trump wins. Harris would likely offer continuity with long-standing US foreign policy around global leadership, international cooperation, democracy, and security. Trump Mark II is an altogether different proposition. As Michael Fullilove and many others have noted, Trump is unsympathetic to free trade, partial to isolationism, an admirer of autocrats and sceptical of alliances. He is also an election denier. Conservative icon Ronald Reagan would be turning in his grave at Trump’s vision for America and what he has done to the Republican Party.

In Canberra, there has been predictable lip service to the ‘enduring’ nature of the alliance and how the Albanese government will work effectively with Harris or Trump. This is the standard line, and it is a reasonable one when applied to all other past or aspiring US presidents who, despite specific political differences, shared a broad strategic outlook on America’s responsibilities to our region and the world. Trump doesn’t fit this mould.

What if Trump, the protectionist, ratchets up the US-China trade war by hiking tariffs on Chinese imports? Some have warned that this could have unintended consequences and seriously harm the Australian economy. On the other hand, what if Trump does a trade deal with China that involves compromising US and Australian security interests in the Indo-Pacific? The implications for freedom and democracy could be huge.

Given these possibilities, and the damage Trump could do to America’s own institutions and standing in the world, serious political scrutiny of the 2024 US election in Australia is both welcome and warranted. The fact that a large number of us also experience the election as cultural entertainment need not detract from the critical analysis that the times demand.

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This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.