Trump’s not a ‘fascist’, but the world is in trouble

Lunch With interviews follow a certain formula. The journalist and the subject meet somewhere of the subject’s choosing, share a meal and have a wide-ranging conversation.

But as I plan my lunch with Robert Manne, the famed Australian public intellectual and La Trobe University emeritus professor of politics, it quickly becomes clear that formula is not going to work. As a result of throat cancer in 2016, Manne had surgery to remove his larynx. It saved his life – and left him unable to speak in more than a whisper. Even to do that, he needs to press a finger over the small silicon valve in his throat.

Robert Manne has had throat cancer and needs to touch the silicon valve in his throat to speak.Credit: Joe Armao

It’s nearly impossible to hear him with any kind of background noise, so a Melbourne restaurant at lunchtime is out. Instead, we decide on Japanese takeaway from Shimbashi Soba, a Japanese cafe near the Collingwood office of Schwartz Media, whose conference room we’ve commandeered for the occasion. Schwartz Media owns Black Inc, which has published Manne since 2000 and whose founder, Morry Schwartz, suggested his latest book, Robert Manne: A Political Memoir.

I pick up mixed tempura and miso soup for Manne and sashimi and multigrain rice for me, and we settle into the Schwartz conference room to discuss the recent Donald Trump victory, the war in Gaza and Manne’s history of public feuds with, well, just about everyone at The Australian, for starters.

Oh, and the upcoming end of the world.

A few years ago, he told a Bendigo Writers Festival audience that if the United States elected a true climate change denier as president, that would be the end of hope to avert the worst climate disasters. And now that Trump has secured a second term?

“Drill, baby, drill is the end of climate change action for America, and therefore for a large part of the world,” Manne says. “There’s no chance that serious action will be taken. I don’t think most people understand what the problem is, really. Trump doesn’t understand it. Literally, he was asked about it in one of his debates, and he said he’s all in favour of clean water and clean air as if it’s the old kind of environmentalism. He doesn’t know what it’s about.”

Donald Trump on the night of the US election at Palm Beach Convention Centre, Florida.Credit: Bloomberg

And because Trump doesn’t understand the catastrophic impacts of climate change and won’t act to mitigate them, Manne is not feeling particularly hopeful about humanity’s ability to face and conquer its most existential threat.

He came to environmental activism after reading Tim Flannery’s 2005 book The Weather Makers and came to believe that if meaningful action isn’t taken on climate change, not a lot else will ultimately matter. It’s one of many topics on which the one-time right-wing editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant has drifted to the left. His 2005 collection of his essays from 1977-2005, called, fittingly enough, Left Right Left, documents that shift of his worldview towards the progressive end of the political spectrum. But he says as he was personally becoming more small-l liberal, many were going in the opposite direction.

Tempura and miso soup from Shimbashi Sobi in Collingwood.Credit: Joe Armao

“Since the late ’60s, there’s been an incredible revolution, a cultural revolution, and people with education, [people who are] reasonably wealthy, support that revolution to do with gender, race, ethnicity and so on and so forth,” Manne says. “But I never thought that the majority of the citizenry does.” It’s these people who were turned off by the promise of the 1960s revolution and never bought into equal rights for women, LGBTQ people, minorities and other marginalised groups who delivered Trump his second term, he says.

“I’ve just started a Substack about this, called Thermidor, being the French Revolution moment when things turned back, Robespierre was guillotined, and the revolution began to backtrack. That’s where I think we are.”

To save you googling the name: The revolutionary French chucked the Gregorian calendar as well as the head of Louis XVI in 1793 and replaced month names with a more liberte, egalite, fraternite version of 12 months of 30 days apiece, plus some leap days to make the maths work out. During Thermidor, roughly mid-July to mid-August 1794, the people turned against their revolutionary leaders and agitated violently for a return to some pre-revolutionary ideals. Nor did the calendar itself survive the reactionary mood – Napoleon abolished it in 1806. The republic didn’t last either – Louis XVII was on the throne by 1814, give or take some Bonapartes in between.

Manne’s Thermidor Substack is a chronicle of the American counter-revolution, of which Trump is the head. But unlike many political commentators, Manne does not consider Trump to be a fascist, just an ultranationalist and a snake oil salesman. Are there parallels between the US and 1930s Germany, as some have said, or could that not happen?

“That could never happen,” says Manne. “Something else is going to happen, but it won’t be that.”

Sashimi with wholegrain rice from Shimbashi Soba.Credit: Joe Armao

Manne has devoted much of his life to studying and teaching the Holocaust and the Nazi regime, so he knows a fascist when he sees one. His maternal grandparents and paternal grandfather were murdered by the Nazis, and his paternal grandmother took her own life in 1938 in Vienna, just after Austria became part of the German Reich and Jews were violently attacked in the city.

His Jewish refugee parents never spoke of the horrors they and their families endured in Europe, trying to spare him from their trauma. “I think they didn’t want me to be burdened by their stark knowledge, which had the opposite effect and made me want to know,” Manne says.

The first part of A Political Memoir details the lives and brutal deaths of his grandparents during the Holocaust, written in emotive and heart-rending detail. But he says the process of discovering what happened to them was not difficult, as he knew their names and dates of deportation. As to the rest – vivid accounts of what life was like and the vicious Nazi death camps – he already knew most of it. “I’ve read about this all my life.”

As the son of Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, Manne has long been critical of Australia’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers – a position that has put him at odds with some on the left and the right. He spoke out in the 1970s against the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which angered many left-wing Australian intellectuals at the time, as they believed reports of atrocities in the communist nation were American propaganda. Between 1976 and 1980, he was president of the Victorian branch of the Indo-China Refugee Association, helping to advocate for and resettle Cambodians seeking a safe haven in Australia.

An Australian army vessel patrolling the waters near the Norwegian freighter Tampa in 2001.Credit: AP

To Manne’s mind, Australia accepting Jewish refugees during World War II, accepting Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees fleeing communist rule in the 1970s and ’80s and accepting Muslim refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan in the ’90s were all of a piece, part of a wealthy and generous nation’s obligations to help those who need it.

“It was clear that the Afghans, Iraqis and Iranians who arrived from late 1999 on Australian territory – most commonly Christmas Island or Ashmore Reef – had fled from regimes no less cruel and brutal than the refugees from the Soviet bloc and Indochina,” he wrote in his memoir. But it put him on an ideological collision course with his former anti-communist fellow travellers, who argued in the conservative media in favour of harsh treatment of refugees. By then, Manne’s politics had drifted leftwards – he resigned from Quadrant in 1997 after spectacularly falling out with the conservative editorial board on the issue of Indigenous reconciliation.

Although Manne was incensed by John Howard’s anti-refugee stance and the government’s confected “children overboard” outrage following the 2001 Tampa crisis, his view of Howard’s policy of boat turn-backs differs greatly from that of most refugee advocates.

“I am, amongst others, one of the voices arguing for generosity and asylum seeker rights,” he says. “But I was also amongst those people who said, in 2002, Howard’s policy is working. The boats are stopping, and we have to come to terms with that. I find it hard to say that because it meant arguing for humane treatment of the people of Manus Island and Nauru and in Australia, but not the reversal of the boats policy.”

This remains Manne’s view – he thinks Kevin Rudd’s abandonment of the turn-back policy was disastrous, with vessels returning to Australia during the Rudd-Gillard years in uncontrollable numbers. Although Manne thinks those who are currently on Nauru should be resettled in Australia, he says boats should continue to be turned back.

Manne’s position on Israel has also separated him from friends and colleagues, particularly those among the Jewish diaspora. He believes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is unconscionable, a view he has held for decades and that has only intensified.

He writes in A Political Memoir: “The vicious murder of 1200 Israelis by the dominant Palestinian group in Gaza, Hamas, that has been answered by the Israeli Defence Force’s destruction of Gaza with such astonishing cruelty that I feel profoundly ashamed, as a Jew, about the behaviour of the Israeli government and the level of support offered for its actions by the majority of the people of Israel and most Jewish leaders throughout the Diaspora.”

Manne tells me, “I have believed, since the 1970s, that if Israel holds on to the West Bank and Gaza that they are morally sunk. I wrote in the ’70s that Israel would become, in the eyes of the world, the new South Africa if it hangs onto the West Bank … and the question then becomes, how the process of annexation will take place, which is now beginning in Gaza and will continue.”

Manne believes a two-state solution is impossible, with Israel in the process of seizing territory in Gaza and the West Bank. I ask him when the current war will end, when Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to tell his people, “OK, we’re done.” Manne is grim. “In 10 years, when the West Bank is annexed, de facto,” he says.

This repudiation of Israel, or at least its current government, has put Manne at odds with many who agree with him on most other things. But he has never shied away from public debate and isn’t about to start now. His memoir includes accounts of numerous public feuds with those on the left and right.

I ask if he is nervous about dredging up past tiffs, and he shakes his head. But he is braced for blowback, particularly from some culture warriors in the Murdoch press. “I stopped reading The Australian years ago,” he says.

But he figures at least for a little while he’ll have to renew his subscription.

Robert Manne: A Political Memoir is published by La Trobe University Press and was released on December 2.

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