When truth becomes a casualty, democracy is put at risk

 You may know of Raimond Gaita as the author of Romulus, My Father, a memoir of his childhood, as the only child of postwar European parents growing up in rural Australia. It was turned into a movie directed by Richard Roxborough (his directorial debut) and starring Eric Bana. What you may not know is that Raimond Gaita is also a professor of philosophy who happens to live in the same metropolis as me, albeit in different suburbs.
 
I borrowed his latest tome, Justice and Hope; Essays, Lectures and Other Writings, from my local library (published last year, 2023), and have barely made a dent in the 33 essays, unequally divided into 6 parts. So far, I’ve read the 5 essays in Part 1: An Unconditional Love of the World, and just the first essay of Part 2: Truth and Judgement, which is titled rather provocatively, The Intelligentsia in the Age of Trump. Each essay heading includes the year it was written, and the essay on the Trump phenomenon (my term, not his) was written in 2017, so after Trump’s election but well before his ignominious attempt to retain power following his election defeat in 2020. And, of course, he now has more stature and influence than ever, having just won the Presidential nomination from the Republican Party for the 2024 election, which is only months away as I write.
 
Gaita doesn’t write like an academic in that he uses plain language and is not afraid to include personal anecdotes if he thinks they’re relevant, and doesn’t pretend that he’s nonpartisan in his political views. The first 5 essays regarding ‘an unconditional love of the world’ all deal with other writers and postwar intellects, all concerned with the inhumane conditions that many people suffered, and some managed to survive, during World War 2. This is confronting and completely unvarnished testimony, much darker and rawer than anything I’ve come across in the world of fiction, as if no writer’s imagination could possibly capture the absolute lowest and worst aspects of humanity.
 
None of us really know how we would react in those conditions. Sometimes in dreams we may get a hint. I’ve sometimes considered dreams as experiments that our minds play on us to test our moral fortitude. I know from my father’s experiences in WW2, both in the theatre of war and as a POW, that one’s moral compass can be bent out of shape. He told me of how he once threatened to kill someone who was stealing from wounded who were under his care. The fact that the person he threatened was English and the wounded were Arabs says a lot, as my father held the same racial prejudices as most of his generation. But I suspect he’d witnessed so much unnecessary death and destruction on such a massive scale that the life of a petty, opportunistic thief seemed worthless indeed. When he returned, he had a recurring dream where there was someone outside the house and he feared to confront them. And then on one occasion he did and killed them barehanded. His telling of this tale (when I was much older, of course) reminded me of Luke Skywalker meeting and killing his Jungian shadow in The Empire Strikes Back. My father could be a fearsome presence in those early years of my life – he had demons and they affected us all.
 
Another one of my tangents, but Gaita’s ruminations on the worst of humanity perpetrated by a nation with a rich and rightly exalted history makes one realise that we should not take anything for granted. I’ve long believed that anyone can commit evil given the right circumstances. We all live under this thin veneer that only exists because we mostly have everything we need and are generally surrounded by people who have no real axe to grind and who don’t see our existence as a threat to their own wellbeing.
 
I recently saw the movie, Civil War, starring Kirsten Dunst, who plays a journalist covering a hypothetical conflict in America, consequential to an authoritarian government taking control of the White House. The aspect that I found most believable was how the rule of law no longer seemed to apply, and people had become completely tribal whereupon one’s neighbour could become one’s enemy. I’ve seen documentaries on conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia where this has happened – neighbours become mortal enemies, virtually overnight, because they suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of a tribal divide. I found the movie quite scary because it showed what happens when the veneer of civility we take for granted is not just lifted, but disappears.
 
On the first page of his essay on Trump, Gaita sets the tone and the context that resulted in Brexit on one side of the Atlantic and Trump’s Republican nomination on the other.
 
Before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, Brexit forced many among the left-liberal intelligentsia to ask why they had not realised that resentment, anger and even hatred could go so deep as they did in parts of the electorate.
 
I think the root cause of all these dissatisfactions and resentments that lead to political upheavals that no one sees coming is trenchant inequality. I remember my father telling me when I was a child that the conflict in Ireland wasn’t between 2 religious groups but about wealth and inequality. I suspect he was right, even though it seems equally simplistic.
 
In all these divisions that we’ve seen, including in Australia, is the perception that people living in rural areas are being left out of the political process and not getting their fair share of representation, and consequentially everything else that follows from that, which results in what might be called a falling ‘standard of living’. The fallout from the GFC, which was global, exacerbated these differences, both perceived and real, and conservative politicians took advantage. They depicted the Left as ‘elitist’, which is alluded to in the title of Gaita’s essay, and is ‘code’ for ignorant and arrogant. This happened in Australia and I suspect in other Western democracies as well, like the UK and America.
 
Gaita expresses better than most how Trump has changed politics in America, if no where else, by going outside the bounds of normal accepted behaviour for a world leader. In effect, he’s changed the social norms that one associates with a person holding that position.
 
To illustrate my point, I’ll provide selected quotes, albeit out of context.
 
To call Trump a radically unconventional politician is like calling the mafia unconventional debt collectors; it is to fail to understand how important are the conventions, often unspoken, that enables decency in politics. Trump has poured a can of excrement over those conventions.
 
He has this to say about Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ not only espoused by him, but his most loyal followers.

In linking reiterated accusations of fake news to elites, Trump and his accomplices intended to undermine the conceptual and epistemic space that makes conversations between citizens possible.
 
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the seriousness of this. The most powerful democracy on Earth, the nation that considers itself and is often considered by others to be the leader of ‘the free world’, has a president who attacks unrelentingly the conversational space that can exist only because it is based on a common understanding – the space in which citizens can confidently ask one another what facts support their opinions. If they can’t ask that of one another, if they can’t agree on when something counts as having been established as fact, then the value of democracy is diminished.
 
He then goes on to cite J.D. Vance’s (recently nominated as Trump’s running VP), Hillbilly Elegy, where ‘he tells us… that Obama is not an American, that he was “born in some far-flung corner of the world”, that he has ties to Islamic extremism…’ and much worse.
 
Regarding some of Trump’s worse excesses during his 2016 campaign like getting the crowd to shout “Lock her up!” (his political opponent at the time) Gaita makes this point:
 
At the time, a CNN reporter said that his opponents did not take him seriously, but they did take him literally, whereas his supporters took him seriously but not literally. It was repeated many times… he would be reigned in by the Republicans in the House and the Senate and by trusted institutions. [But] He hasn’t changed in office.
 
It’s worth contemplating what this means if he wins Office again in 2024. He’s made it quite clear he’s out for revenge, and he’s also now been given effective immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court if he seeks revenge through the Justice Department while he’s in Office. There is also the infamous Project 2025 which has the totally unhidden agenda to get rid of the so-called ‘deep state’ and replace public servants with Trump acolytes, not unlike a dictatorship. Did I just use that word?
 
Trump has achieved something I’ve never witnessed before, which Gaita doesn’t mention, though I have the benefit of an additional 7 years hindsight. What I’m referring to is that Trump has created an alternative universe, and from the commentary I’ve read on forums like Quora and elsewhere, you either live in one universe or the other – it’s impossible to claim you inhabit both. In other words, Trump has created an unbridgeable divide, which can’t be reconciled politically or intellectually. In one universe, Biden stole the 2020 POTUS election from Trump, and in another universe, Trump attempted to overturn the election and failed.
 
This is the depth of division that Trump has created in his country, and you have to ask: How far will people go to defend their version of the truth?
 
It was less than a century ago that fascism threatened the entire world order and created the most extensive conflict witnessed by humankind. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we are on the potential brink of creating a new brand of authoritarianism in the country epitomised by the slogan, ‘the free world’.