Historian, satirist, essayist, screenwriter, scriptwriter, political advisor, author and pundit. Don Watson is that rare thing among Australians; a man of letters who backs his beliefs and observations with beautifully crafted words. His Quarterly Essay, High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, lends a kindly and eloquent light to the electoral goings-on across the Pacific.
When he penned the essay from the campaign trail, the fate of the United States hung in the balance. Polling predictions has the election pegged as a dead heat; the tightest presidential race in history, instead of the landslide that it was. But Trump’s victory can be read in Watson’s erudite tea leaves. Through his analyses of conversations with everyday Americans, Watson reveals a near palpable sense of disarray and discontent. Throughout this essay, Watson explains how that the not-so-United States are revealed to be an imperfect union that is in real, imminent danger of suffering more violence and even civil war.
Don Watson is a frequent traveller to the United States and here he treads much familiar ground. Present, he notes, is the expected inequity and ineptitude, the advantaged decrying the disadvantaged, and duelling worldviews over a backdrop of hopelessness. It is around the issue of race, however, that Watson identifies as the wellspring of American discontent. ‘American democracy co-existed with slavery for most of its first hundred years, with terror and segregation for the next hundred, and with segregation still.’
Now more than ever, he contends, the reality of an increasingly divided people and their pain means democracy ‘can’t deliver to everyone all the time. An election is democracy’s effort to outrun the anger and envy arising from its failure to honour the promise of a fair shake for everyone.’
‘Trump’s magic works because the neoliberal policies of the last forty years are exhausted and disgraced, and the new technology its regime conjured. While making a few mainly unlovely people rich, it does not leave people feeling their lives are easier, richer or safer.’
And faced with their own toppling from the summit of national life, Watson points the finger squarely at American men, the proud boys of the United States population, who, one might argue, were never going to elect a woman of Indian and African American heritage as their president. For Watson, Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) cult consists of ‘70 million … handing up their sovereignty to Trump and the movement’ to achieve ‘the feelings