Australian democracy must learn from the nightmare of the super-citizen

Is human nature suited to democracy?

As the fourth estate goes into overdrive at the prospect of Donald Trump finally facing an indictment in one of four criminal investigations into his anti-democratic behaviour in the lead-up to his election and during his presidency, you’d have to wonder.

“An indictment in New York would mark an extraordinary turn in American history, making Trump the first former president to face a criminal charge,” the AAP intoned, before quoting a CNN pundit who said the prospective indictments were a “shocking event”.

Susan B Glasser in The New Yorker expressed her ambivalence clearer: is charging Trump “ultimately a good thing or a bad thing for the country”?

If your chronically dishonest uncle was finally indicted for his decades-long habit of fiddling the books, would you find it extraordinary? Would you be shocked or filled with any emotion other than relief that a crooked man was finally getting what the rule of law promised?

In what way does the subject being a former US president — and among the Republican frontrunners to reclaim the White House in 2024 — change this straightforward assessment of the rightful relationship between crime and punishment? Unless you think former leaders aren’t like everyone else but are instead super-citizens who deserve more rights and privileges but none of the responsibilities.

Obviously, support for super-citizens runs counter to what small-d democrats say about their principles, which are that “no one is above the law” and “all people are created equal”. But with the progressive punditry buzzing around like fan-flapping gossips at a provincial French court, horrified and scandalised in equal measure that one of their own — someone rich and powerful! — could finally face accountability for their actions, where does the disconnect lie?

The problem is awe. An emotion unique to humans, awe involves dread and even fear mingled with veneration, reverence, devotion and the “inclination to subordinate one’s own interests and goals in deference to those of the powerful leader”, as psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt write.

A perceptual sense of vastness, such as the presence of someone with immense prestige, can provoke awe, as well as a diminished sense of self and a heightened sense of connectedness with others, which can lead people to accommodate their previous view of the world to better align with that of the leader’s.

We know Trump provoked awe in followers such as his former attorney Michael Cohen, who subsequently told Congress this led him to “do things for [Trump] that I knew were absolutely wrong”.

Is awe of Trump’s power and amoral talent at vengeance causing some in the American media to also run scared, sacrificing their democratic values?

Certainly Glasser’s suggestion that equal justice and the rule of law should be replaced in Trump’s case with a utilitarian calculation — one allowing baseless claims that investigations into the former president may be politically motivated — suggests this is the case.

What lessons does this next stage of the slow-motion car crash of American democracy have for Australia?

The main one is to avoid creating super-citizens. As we see playing out in the US, super-citizens are the bitter harvest of a democracy left too long to rot. Their creation stems from the “soft corruption” problems that researchers identified as undermining Australian democracy more than a decade ago, and that the federal ICAC and other integrity measures must be structured to fix.

These regard campaign finance and transparency reforms that ensure our representatives are working for us and in service of democracy itself, rather than further privilege the wealthy powerbrokers who donate to their campaigns and expect in return legislation that entrenches their fiscal and other advantages. It is this corruption, with its implicit validation of the “some animals are more equal than others” framework, that creates super-citizens, whose privilege can then be maintained by awestruck media pundits and their readers.

Luckily we still have time to fix the vulnerabilities in Australian democracy, although there’s doubt we will. Last Thursday, a motion that would have allowed Australians to know who was having meetings with their representatives and when — so we could draw our own conclusions about the impact such lobbying has on the decisions Parliament makes — was defeated.

Labor and the Coalition were on the side of super-citizens.