American-Australian Relations in Global Context since the 1990s (since early 18th century)

There are confused thinking on politics today in the United States and Australia. Recently, a critic wrote as an attack on my Australian sharing, of an American interview, of a noted American historian on Trumpism.

This social media person wrote:

Good to see that my Australian colleagues live in a ‘problem’ free society where they can pontificate – (in a non-religious manner:) endlessly about the affairs of the U.S.A. !!!

I read, in satirical style, a message that Australians should not commented on what is happening in the United States. I wrote back that the person had misread our intentions. United States is very much not isolated from our own affairs, since its modern nature of nationalism is a confusing mixture of thinking itself a world unique model of democracy, and yet an export of hermetic world power.

This is a thesis of even some the most **conservative** scholars in the United States. There is a recognition, among the educated classes, and in American and global thinking, that there are the liberal democratic and the hard right-wing republican models in competition.

From the widely-read literature of scholars, we can make several evidential points here:

1. In 2024, in the United States, Conservatism and Republicanism means almost the oppose set of beliefs.

From Kidder’s 2016 study:

Through participant-observation and interviews, I explore the conservative social identity of College Republicans at a midsize, midtier public university in the United States. Using the concepts of repertoires and frames, I analyze how individuals make claims to political social identities. Specifically, I show that symbolic appeals to the free market were an essential aspect of the conservative repertoire at my field site. Furthermore, the shifting and contradictory frames used by the College Republicans in this study demonstrate that their discursive political practices were not primarily about policy preferences; they were about affirming a conservative social identity. Understanding how stated policy preferences and identity intertwine in political talk has important implications for American democracy. (177)

2. The misunderstanding is deliberate strategy of American and other global forces of Neoliberalism and other far right thinking.

Gough (2020) explains this phenomena in terms of British Labour since 2015:  “…the aims of the far right in Britain in relation to capital, and the campaigns of Labour on its economic and Brexit policies.” (1)

3. There is a long 20^th century history in promoting these falsehood on both nationalism and domestic political models.

This history is not exclusive to the United States. Van Dyke (2013)  writes on the “… the relationship between the artist Ernst Bariach and the so-called conservative revolution” [in the early 20^th century German], … “Of particular interest are Barlach’s friendship with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, an antiacademic and antibourgeois writer who became a leading political thinker on the right, and an important essay on Bariach published in 1935 by the prominent “young conservative” art critic Paul Fechter…” (281). The key point van Dyke is making is that Bariach’s thinking was non-political and in many ways was naïve:

To characterize Barlach’s postwar politics as “moderately liberal, with conservative tendencies,” as Peter Paret has, thus seems apt. The sculptor’s letters, diaries, and essays, one can elaborate, are the products of an educated and thoughtful man who was repulsed by extremism and chaos, wished for both order and tolerance, and saw himself as a loyal subject of the nation, though he claimed to be unconcerned with the political affairs of state. They indicate his faith in legitimate authority – embodied, at different times, by the leaders of the DDP, Moses, and Hindenburg – and his conviction in the inviolability of Geist. (281)

Lafferty (2013) makes the connections of the British-American thinking through the mid-century work of Wyndham Lewis:

Wyndham Lewis’s 1937 polemical work, Count Your Dead: They Are Alive!, was written, I argue, as a contribution to the efforts of a distinct group of British and American “revolutionary conservatives” to reinvigorate political conservatism. Lewis saw himself and the group as striving to force mainstream conservatives to reexamine their principles in light of what Lewis portrayed as the “castor oil” being administered to European politics by fascism — castor oil being for Lewis a metaphor for political “truth.” My analysis highlights the crucial distinction in Lewis’s political thought between the conservative revolutionaries he admonished and the revolutionary conservatives he admired. (25)

The thinking carried through into American international policy after World War II, from both liberal global and American republican models. Mao (2012) wrote, from the United States:

During the 1940s, conservative leaders in the United States turned to the emerging Cold War in Asia both to condemn the moral bankruptcy of liberal globalism and to establish their own brand of anti-Communist internationalism. “Asia Firsters” such as Senators William F. Knowland, John W. Bricker, and Robert A. Taft evoked the specter of Yalta and Roosevelt’s betrayal of Nationalist China as a signature issue which extended far beyond the question of who “lost” China. Yalta served as a touchstone for the right’s ideological and political development during the Cold War. Focusing on U.S.-People’s Republic-Taiwan relations during the early and mid-1950s, this article traces how initial criticism of the 1945 agreements quickly evolved into practical legislative proposals that addressed executive overreach, legislative oversight, collective international peacekeeping, opposition to Beijing’s admission to the United Nations, and constitutional principles vis-à-vis active global interventionism. Although Asia Firsters failed to substantively change China policy, their approach was an inspiration for the most enduring American political movement of the postwar period. (132)

The added factor here is the emergence of a neutralising narrative which falsely spoke of “political consensus”. This was a transition from traditional conservativism to neo-conservative thinking (“New Right”). Although it had stronger American roots, it was not exclusively American. Toye (2013) speaks to the British context:

There has been much historical debate about whether or not there was a ‘political consensus’ in Britain in the postwar decades. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to what politicians said about ‘consensus’ at the time and what this indicated about the nature of political argument. This article shows that ‘consensus’ and similar terms (such as ‘the middle way’) were in use from the 1940s, but it does not assume that consensus existed just because some contemporaries asserted that it did. Rather, it examines how differing interpretations of consensus were invoked in political debate in order to advance a range of partisan agendas. It further shows how right-wing Conservatives from the late 1960s sought both to attack the consensus rhetorically and to reach out (in Keith Joseph’s phrase) to ‘the common ground’ that New Right policies supposedly represented. It concludes that Thatcher, as Conservative leader and Prime Minister, did not abandon the structure of consensus rhetoric so much as repopulate it with exclusively ‘national’ terms. (3)

McClennen (2006) shows that the thinking is very much a part of the Americanisation to which Australians experience today, and that international warfare is the key understanding in revealing the differences between the liberal global model and the American post-2016 republican model. McClennen opens his article, on how international warfare has shaped American higher education, with this quote:

The war has unquestionably brought a new level of scrutiny to our politically correct campuses. Once the initial years of the campus culture war had passed, the public decided that campus leftism was either beyond the reach of anyone who hoped to do something about it, or irrelevant. The war changed that. (Stanley Kurtz 2002, n.p) (43)

*****

I know where I stand, and have since my thesis of 1995. The Americanism, as the state of affairs in the world, is narrow thinking, and so is the thesis of a neutral and non-political world. It is ‘the wool to pull over the eyes’ of a fool population by the neo-conservative forces, that is the old New Right of the 1980s and 1990s, and now Trumpism.

REFERENCES

Buch, Neville Douglas (1995). American influence on Protestantism in Queensland since 1945. PhD Thesis, School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, The University of Queensland.https://doi.org/10.14264/189291

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:189291

Gough, J. (2020). Why the Labour Party Lost the British 2019 General Election: Social Democracy versus Neoliberalism and the Far Right. Class, Race and Corporate Power, 8(2). https://www.jstor.org/stable/48644421

Kidder, J. L. (2016). College Republicans and Conservative Social Identity. Sociological Perspectives, 59(1), 177–200. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26340173

Lafferty, D. (2013). Castor Oil for Conservatives: Wyndham Lewis’s Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! and “Bolsho-Tory” Politics. Journal of Modern Literature, 36(2), 25–43. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.36.2.25

Mao, J. (2012). The Specter of Yalta: Asia Firsters and the Development of Conservative Internationalism. The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 19(2), 132–156. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23613338

McClennen, S. A. (2006). The Geopolitical War on U.S. Higher Education. College Literature, 33(4), 43–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115386

Toye, R. (2013). From “Consensus” to “Common Ground”: The Rhetoric of the Postwar Settlement and its Collapse. Journal of Contemporary History, 48(1), 3–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23488334

van Dyke, J. (2013). Ernst Barlach and the Conservative Revolution. German Studies Review, 36(2), 281–305. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43555350

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Neville Buch

Professional Historian at Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc.

Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.

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