What went wrong? (Part 2)

Continued from What Went Wrong?

Part 2 – When Institutions Became the Enemy

At the end of Part 1, I was left with a question that was considerably more disturbing than the one with which I had begun.

I had started by wondering what went wrong.

But after watching the political changes in Australia, I found myself asking something much more fundamental:

Who was government actually working for?

Perhaps it was time to look across the Pacific.

Because while Australia was experiencing its own political retreat, something extraordinary was happening in the United States.

In 2008, I had watched Barack Obama become President and allowed myself to believe that America might be entering a new political era.

Less than ten years later, Donald Trump was elected President.

And suddenly the optimism that had accompanied Obama’s election seemed like a distant memory.

Trump did not merely promise to change government.

He promised to disrupt it.

His slogan was “America First”, and there was nothing inherently wrong with putting the interests of American citizens first. Every government has an obligation to its own people.

But there is a profound difference between putting your citizens first and deciding that international cooperation itself is somehow a weakness.

During Trump’s first presidency, the United States began withdrawing from or abandoning a number of international commitments that had taken years to construct.

In 2018, the administration withdrew the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council, arguing that the organisation was biased and ineffective.

The same year, Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA – an international agreement negotiated with Iran and other major powers to constrain Iran’s nuclear program. The United Nations Secretary-General described the agreement as a major achievement in nuclear non-proliferation and diplomacy.

Then there was climate change.

In 2017, Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. The formal withdrawal process was subsequently initiated and took effect in November 2020.

And in 2020, as the world was confronting a global pandemic, the administration announced that the United States would withdraw from the World Health Organization.

There was something profoundly symbolic about that decision.

The world was facing a disease that knew no borders.

A virus did not care whether you were American, Australian, Chinese, British or Iranian.

It did not recognise national sovereignty.

It did not stop at customs.

It did not care about political ideology.

Yet at precisely the moment when international scientific cooperation was arguably most important, the world’s most powerful democracy began distancing itself from one of the principal international organisations responsible for global public health.

The proposed WHO withdrawal was not completed during Trump’s first term, but the intention was unmistakable.

And that was the thing that concerned me.

These weren’t isolated political decisions.

They seemed to represent a philosophy.

International institutions were no longer necessarily viewed as instruments of cooperation. They were increasingly portrayed as obstacles to national sovereignty.

But institutions exist for a reason.

• They are imperfect.
• They can be bureaucratic.
• They can be inefficient.
• They can make mistakes.

Of course they can be criticised.

But there is a difference between reforming an institution and weakening the principle behind it.

The United Nations can be criticised.

The WHO can be criticised.

International treaties can be renegotiated.

Climate agreements can be improved.

None of that requires us to pretend that international cooperation is unnecessary.

Because the alternative is a world in which every country says:

We’ll do whatever we want.

And history has already shown us where that can lead.

But it wasn’t only international institutions

The changes inside the United States were perhaps even more concerning.

Scientific and environmental advisory bodies were weakened, altered or disbanded.

Expertise increasingly became something that could be politically inconvenient.

And the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy – an institution intended to bring scientific expertise into the heart of government – was left severely depleted during the early years of the administration.

Then, near the end of Trump’s first term, came something that received considerably less public attention than it deserved.

In October 2020, Trump signed an executive order creating what became known as Schedule F.

The proposal would have changed the employment status of potentially tens of thousands of federal workers, making it easier to remove employees in positions considered to involve policy-related work.

The argument was that government needed greater accountability.

Perhaps it did.

But there was another way of looking at it.

A professional public service is one of the great safeguards of democratic government.

Politicians come and go.

Public servants remain.

They provide institutional memory.

They understand how government actually works.

They can tell ministers that something is impractical, unlawful or dangerous.

They can say:

“Minister, you cannot do that.”

That can be inconvenient.

But it is also one of the reasons we have a professional public service.

If public servants begin to believe that disagreeing with a government could cost them their careers, then political loyalty can gradually become more important than professional expertise.

And that is a dangerous road for any democracy.

Schedule F was introduced too late in Trump’s first term to be fully implemented and was subsequently revoked by the incoming Biden administration.

But the idea did not disappear.

It would return.

And that, perhaps, tells us something important about where American politics was heading.

Then came COVID-19

And then the world received the ultimate test of government.

A pandemic.

This was no longer a theoretical argument about climate agreements, international organisations or bureaucratic reform.

A virus was killing people.

Governments had to make decisions based on evidence.

Scientists had to be heard.

Health authorities needed resources.

Testing needed to be organised.

Medical supplies had to be secured.

Governments had to communicate clearly with frightened populations.

And leaders had to accept something politicians don’t always like accepting:

Sometimes the experts know more than you do.

The United States struggled badly.

By August 2020, the Government Accountability Office reported more than 5.5 million cumulative COVID cases and approximately 158,000 reported deaths. By October, excess deaths from all causes had reached at least 237,000 above expected levels.

There were continuing shortages of testing supplies and personal protective equipment.

Federal oversight bodies criticised weaknesses in the response and called for urgent action.

There were problems with testing.

Problems with supplies.

Problems with data.

Problems communicating changing health guidance.

And, perhaps most damaging of all, the pandemic became entangled with politics.

Science became political.

Masks became political.

Lockdowns became political.

Vaccines became political.

Even the simple act of believing medical experts became, for some, a political statement.

That should never happen.

Science doesn’t belong to Democrats or Republicans.

A virus isn’t conservative or progressive.

A microscope doesn’t vote.

A hospital doesn’t belong to one political party.

And yet America’s response to the pandemic became deeply divided along political lines.

The consequences were enormous.

By early 2021, the Government Accountability Office was reporting more than 486,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States.

Of course, no president could have prevented a pandemic.

No government could have saved every life.

That would be an unfair standard.

But governments can prepare.

They can listen.

They can cooperate.

They can respect expertise.

They can communicate honestly.

And they can recognise that protecting their citizens sometimes requires working with the rest of the world rather than turning away from it.

That was what disturbed me most.

I had spent part of my own working life preparing Australia for a pandemic.

I knew that good government meant preparing for events that might never happen.

I knew that expertise mattered.

I knew that institutions mattered.

And I knew that governments inherited knowledge from the people who came before them.

Watching what happened in America therefore felt strangely familiar.

It was as though the very things I had come to believe were essential to good government were being treated as obstacles.

Institutions were becoming the enemy.

Experts were becoming the enemy.

International cooperation was becoming the enemy.

And the professional public service itself was becoming something that political leaders wanted greater control over.

Perhaps this was the real transformation.

Trump did not invent the anger that brought him to power.

He understood it.

He understood that millions of people felt ignored by political institutions.

He understood that many Americans believed their government no longer worked for them.

And he gave that anger a voice.

But there is a profound danger when people who have lost faith in institutions are persuaded that the solution is to destroy the institutions themselves.

Because once the guardrails have been removed, there is nothing to prevent the next driver from taking the car wherever they want.

And perhaps that is where my original question comes back to haunt me.

I had once believed that changing governments could change the world for the better.

Now I was beginning to wonder whether something much more fundamental had changed.

Perhaps we had stopped believing that government was a public trust.

Perhaps we had started treating it as a prize.

A prize to be won.

A prize to be used.

A prize to be protected.

And if government becomes a prize rather than a public trust, then democracy itself begins to change.

Which brings me to the question I have been avoiding.

If governments in both Australia and the United States were increasingly serving political interests, powerful interests and wealthy interests rather than ordinary citizens…

What happens when the people finally stop believing that democracy belongs to them?

To be continued…