Australia can’t prevent the collapse of US democracy, but we can learn from it

The January 6 mob attack on the US Congress last year was not the end of the movement to topple American democracy by violence.

A 42-year-old American man is to be charged with attempted murder after breaking into the home of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on Friday armed with a hammer and zip ties.

IllustrationCredit: Dionne Gain

He asked, “Where’s Nancy?” and then struck Pelosi’s husband on the head with the hammer, according to the police officers who arrived on the scene at that moment. Paul Pelosi, age 82, suffered a fractured skull.

The Speaker was not at home. Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery after urgent surgery.

“It’s reported that the same chant was used by this guy they have in custody that was used on January 6 in the attack on the US Capitol,” President Joe Biden told a fundraising event for his party, the Democrats. “And the chant was, ‘Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?’ This is despicable.”

Biden put the blame squarely on the Republican Party: “And what makes us think that one party can talk about ‘stolen elections’, ‘COVID being a hoax’, ‘this is all a bunch of lies’, and it not affect people who may not be so well balanced? What makes us think that it’s not going to corrode the political climate? Enough is enough is enough!”

Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home.Credit: AP

And while many Republican leaders publicly condemned the Pelosi assault, one was conspicuously silent. Three days later, Donald Trump has still failed to acknowledge the attack.

Hillary Clinton also blamed the Republicans in a tweet. Musk, who now owns Twitter, wrote a reply seeking to muddy the apparently clear-cut morality of the assault. He has since deleted it.

“There is a tiny possibility that there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” said Musk, and linked to a known source of fake news which was claiming that Paul Pelosi had been drunk and fighting with a male prostitute.

A common theme in US commentary was that the apparent attempt to harm Pelosi was an inevitability after years of Republican hate speech and incitement.

One Republican screened a campaign ad called “fire Pelosi” featuring pictures of himself firing a gun; another aired an ad of himself shooting a gun at actors playing Pelosi and Biden; Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that “a bullet to the head would be quicker”.

An Australian expert on political violence, Lydia Khalil from the Lowy Institute, says: “The January 6 riots are absolutely not the end of the story. The MAGA movement in the US is still going strong,” referring to the Trump slogan Make America Great Again.

“With or without Donald Trump, this ideological and political movement has legs and will continue in one form or another,” says Khalil, who describes herself as a “transplanted American” who has worked for the New York Police Department and the White House Office of Homeland Security.

A Democrat congresswoman, Debbie Dingell, reacted to the Pelosi attack by saying: “Somebody is going to die.” And it was not just about Congress: “I know school board members that are wearing bulletproof vests to meetings now.”

Khalil observes that the US has a history as a revolutionary society and a bitterly divided one, noting the political rioting and assassinations of the 1960s. This movement, she says, is different for three reasons.

One is the internet and “social” media, allowing extremist ideology and organisation to go wider and deeper. Another is that public disenchantment among the population at large is more substantial today. A third is that “you have political figures not only willing to foment hatred for political gain but to really break the system – it’s the first president who hasn’t accepted election results”.

But does the right bear all the blame? Democrat leaders have used the language of violence against Trump, for instance.

Biden said: “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” Nancy Pelosi has said of Trump: “I’m gonna punch him out, and I’m gonna go to jail, and I’m gonna be happy.”

And the right has no monopoly on political violence. There were outbreaks of rioting and violence during some of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The Carnegie Endowment’s Rachel Kleinfeld wrote last year that between 2017 and 2020, “Democrats and Republicans were extremely close in justifying violence, with Democrats slightly more prone to condone violence”. About 40 per cent of each saw the other as “downright evil”.

But that changed just before the 2020 elections, she wrote: “Republicans’ endorsements of violence suddenly leapt,” and again when “the false narrative of a stolen 2020 election clearly increased support for political violence.”

Khalil agrees: “The ‘both sides’ stuff is not quite accurate. The attacks on democracy are very much a far right phenomenon at the moment. They are the ones driving it.” She expects to see more of the Pelosi-style attacks, a single actor in a “leaderless resistance” movement, “part of a continuum of violence that they want to lead to societal change”, specifically “a society that privileges white people at the expense of others”.

Australia is powerless to prevent the collapse of US democracy. But we can learn from it. Khalil discusses the movement in Australia in her new Lowy paper, Rise of the Extreme Right. Australian extremists tried to infiltrate the Young Nationals and the Liberals in 2018; Australia is the world’s fourth biggest source of QAnon conspiracy materials. But she says, “I’m much more optimistic regarding Australia.”

To safeguard democracy, Australia needs to protect its electoral safeguards such as compulsory voting. And build on the success of its multiculturalism, Khalil says. She sees the Indigenous Voice proposal as a positive step.

Australia also must learn from America’s lapse into gross inequality, which has fomented deep discontent. Finally, “social” media is a magnifier of polarisation and an amplifier of hate. The US has failed to civilise it. Australia has made some efforts; it must do more.

The US congressional midterm elections are a week away. Enough is enough, yet it goes on.

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