The most shocking thing about the selection of a homophobic House Speaker in DC, was not how long it took, nor even the three weeks of anarchy unleashed by the ambush of his predecessor.
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Although to be sure, that indulgent vandalism was a dereliction of duty especially as it mapped almost exactly with a sharp deterioration in the global security situation.
No, it was that the election of Mike Johnson confirmed that the novel Trump virus (2016-2021) had developed new sub-variants capable of jumping generations and inhabiting whole institutions. The Grand Old Party of Lincoln had unanimously chosen an election-denying former Trump attorney known for opposing abortion, LGBTQI+ rights and even divorce.
America is a liberal democracy - minus the liberalism and with a contested attachment to the democracy bit.
It is also fairly characterised as a gerontocracy given that Joe Biden will be 82 before commencing a possible second term, and his favoured rival, Donald J. Trump is just four years younger.
The democratic contempt of Johnson, 51, however, demonstrates that MAGA Trumpism has a ruddy future well beyond its namesake's caked-on visage.
This matters because, America matters - particularly to its allies even if isolationist Republicans can see no further than internal culture wars.
Johnson's eventual promotion, a shabby fourth-option denouement, frustrated Anthony Albanese's hopes of securing congressional backing for AUKUS to which Labor is now doctrinally wed.
While Capitol chaos meant no address to a joint sitting as planned, Biden threw a state dinner replete with the usual platitudes about our unshakeable partnership and common values of peace, human rights and international norms.
"Australia and America see the world in much the same way," remarked Secretary of State Antony Blinken at one point.
Outside though, those common values competed with sirens as adult Americans - 80 per cent of whom own guns - were as polarised as at any time since the Civil War. Divided by wealth, race, geography and politics.
Biden was briefed. A "live shooter event" was on foot in Maine. Multiple deaths.
But America's domestic carnage paled against Ukraine and the new hellfire of Gaza.
Globally, neither America nor Australia had held back since Hamas's murderous obscenities, expressing full-throated support for Israel's "right to defend itself".
This was the answer of choice for any question probing the thousands of civilian deaths in the Gaza ghetto.
But in the three weeks since October 7, the truest friends of Israel have not been the slavish barrackers, but rather those who knew the country's international support was exhaustible - that there were legal, political and moral limits.
Biden, nothing if not experienced, had counselled Tel Aviv to feel with its heart but act only with its head. Coming from Israel's great benefactor, this was enough to delay a massive ground attack and enable the first aid into the besieged enclave. But the pulverising aerial campaign continued.
Fatalities soared and a horrified West blinked. Decades of effort and money invested by the well-resourced Israel lobby in Australia, the US, the UK and Europe had constructed a formidable shield of influencers across political parties and within media.
Labor's right faction had been particularly unflinching in its binary assessment of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Yet that shield is cracking under the barrage not of Hamas's atrocities, but Israel's excesses.
Muslim ministers such as the right's Ed Husic and the left's Anne Aly might have been irritants when they complained about "collective punishment for Hamas's barbarism" but others in the government are less easily dismissed.
If relevant agencies warning of straining social cohesion and security implications has not been decisive, voter pressure has.
Powerful right faction ministers in seats across Sydney's west - home to large Arab and Muslim communities - have fielded complaints about the asymmetry of Labor's support for Israel as against silence for thousands of Palestinian lives lost.
Tony Burke's 100 per cent support for a council in his electorate which will fly the Palestinian flag while the crisis persists, signalled a widening concern within cabinet that a large section of the community feels second-classed.
The projection of Israeli colours on the Opera House is now viewed in Canberra as a "well-intentioned mistake" as one MP put it.
Attacked for urging restraint initially, Foreign Minister Penny Wong has now gone further calling for a "humanitarian pause" to allow adequate aid to flow.
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In a rare emergency session, the UN General Assembly has passed a resolution calling for an immediate "humanitarian truce" although Australia, Britain and 43 others abstained. The US and Israel voted against it.
Some 1.4 million Palestinians have been rendered homeless by the bombing according to the UN, 600,000 of which it is sheltering but they are hardly safe. Food and water is scarce and now communications are being cut.
As Israel stepped up its attacks on Saturday, Retno Marsudi, Foreign Minister of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, spoke by phone to Wong to emphasise "safe, sustained and unimpeded humanitarian assistance to save lives".
It was a reminder if any is needed that the world risks dividing as starkly as the US has done internally. On one side is the anglophone West, mouthing human rights but prone to a persistent Israeli exceptionalism. On the other, the global south, wearied by a century of pious lecturing and newly awake to fresh hypocrisies.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
