When respect and restraint go, whither goes democracy?

For those following the now seemingly irreversible destruction of American democracy over the past six years, the confected kerfuffle in Australia’s Parliament last week over the threat of foreign influence in our elections was eerily familiar.

Americans didn’t learn until after the 2016 election that Russia was targeting their democracy by helping Donald Trump to win the US presidency. Now, as the leaders of Australia’s two major parties face off in Parliament just months before a federal election, each was accusing the other of being — or harbouring in their ranks — a “Manchurian candidate”.

As always, and importantly, a basic check of such claims reveals them as farce. Both the ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald were quick with the fact that there’s no daylight between the approach of both parties when it comes to China. ASIO says both sides of politics have been targets of foreign influence operations, which in the next five years will supplant terrorism as Australia’s biggest security threat.

That should be the end of it.

But it won’t be. Not if the pattern of democratic decline in other Rupert Murdoch-infested democracies is any guide. Instead the stoush will become just more fodder for the mill of hyper-partisanship that, while a boon for clicks and ratings, brings democracy to its knees.

Why does hyper-partisanship spell death for democracy? Because it is just another word for tribalism, the intensely emotional loyalty that, while (relatively) harmless when applied to football teams, makes the peaceful transfer of power — one of democracy’s many gifts — impossible. How can you happily hand over power, and the resources to which it gives access, to a tribe you’ve been convinced has no legitimate claim to hold it? And whom you don’t trust to use it in the national interest and not against you?

The short answer is you can’t, which is why the transfer of power to then president-elect Joe Biden in January didn’t happen peacefully — and almost didn’t happen at all.

Indeed, as the authors of How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, explain, democracies rely on two basic norms to function: respect and restraint. Respect requires parties to “accept one another as legitimate rivals” and (I would add) as victors. Restraint imposes a moral expectation that those granted the awesome powers of government will act lawfully and use them only to serve the public interest, not partisan or personal ones.

In his book Insurgency The New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters says America’s democratic unravelling began with tensions inside the Republican Party between the more educated and socially moderate leadership and the religious and working class majority. Such “hard-hats” resented the way the “blue-bloods” hogged party leadership positions, dismissed the negative impact of globalisation on jobs and belittled conservative “values” (read: racial and gender-based prejudices).

Whatever the cause, the alliance at Fox of former Richard Nixon staffer Roger Ailes and billionaire Murdoch provided a legitimating platform — amplified by the internet — for those breaking every rule of the civilised debate democracy needs to function. The reliance on facts and reason over lies and passion? Gone! The prohibition of ad hominem attacks? Gone! The requirement of consistency? Hasta la vista, baby!

Which takes us to now — not just in the US but here in Australia where we are experiencing a partisan prodrome that if not treated will flower into the hyper-partisanship that destroys democracy.

A government behind in the polls politicising national security to serve its own partisan — not the public — interest. The prime minister’s willingness to pour scorn on the heads of the alternative government by suggesting the deputy opposition leader is a traitorous Chinese stooge, despite knowing that he’s not. The partisan divide between mastheads in reporting the story, with Murdoch’s The Australian working hard to keep it alive with Monday’s headline “Albanese rightly tested on China and national security concerns” while the rest of the media, having heeded the unusual public warning of ASIO chief Mike Burgess that the beat-up is “not helpful for us” have ceased reporting at all.

Our democracy is under attack by a foreign adversary and through the corrosion caused by our own political divides. In both cases, the answer is the same: we must resist the forces that divide us and stand together as Australians.