Waleed Aly goes Trumpist

The slippery slide from anti-woke centrist to fascist dupe

Waleed Aly has a piece in the Nine papers celebrating Trump’s election as a victory over the intolerant forces of “woke”. There’s nothing in it that hasn’t run many times in the Oz, so I won’t provide a link. Instead, I’m reposting a comment I wrote for Quarterly Essay in 2022, responding to an essay Aly wrote with Scott Stephens. Checking my records, I found a 202 anti-woke piece in The Monthly, so Aly’s descent into Trumpism has been going on for a while

This image of a slave-owner’s statue being pulled down in Bristol was used in The Monthly article to illustrate the kind of woke politics to which Aly objects.

Uncivil wars - my response

The Quarterly Essay Uncivil Wars by Scott Stephens and Waleed Aly arrived in my email at the same time as two other pieces of news.

The first related to the removal of a mural painted by a Melbourne artist, showing a Russian and Ukrainian soldier embracing. It was not well received by Ukrainians who have suffered months of murder, rape and other crimes at the hands of Russian soldiers, and would have suffered more, were it not for the fierce resistance put up by Ukraine’s own forces. While this particular mural was (let us hope) an expression of a sincere wish for peace, it echoed the message of Russian propagandists (notably including Fox News contributors like Tucker Carlson) seeking to portray the two sides as morally equivalent.

Contempt for Putin and his murderous supporters is entirely justified. But a natural reading of the Stephens and Aly discussion of US politics is that such contempt should stop at the water’s edge, exempting people like Carlson on the basis that ‘bond that must exist between democratic citizens’. Certainly, that’s the implication of their view that Hillary Clinton’s description of millions of Trump supporters as racists was outrageous contempt, even though there is ample evidence that it was true.

More directly relevant to the essay was President Biden’s speech warning that US democracy was under threat from MAGA extremists. Republicans responded to the speech with attack lines that might have been drawn directly from the words of Stephens and Aly. Biden, they said, was fomenting division and accusing millions of Americans of supporting a fascist takeover. Those so accused could scarcely be blamed for resorting to violence.

But what led Biden to make such statements? It is hard to think of an American politician more steeped in the old-fashioned ways of consensus, learned from decades in the Senate. His election campaign was premised, in large measure, on his ability to work ‘across the aisle’ with Republicans. And even in his doom-laden speech, Biden was careful to claim that such Republicans still exist.

Has Biden suddenly fallen, as the analysis of Stephens and Aly would seem to imply, into a politics of grievance and contempt? Or was he, perhaps, responding to a series of events they don’t even mention (with the exception of a passing reference to the quite literal call to ‘hang Mike Pence’)? Somehow, the repeated attempts by Republicans to overthrow US democracy, of which the most dramatic was the January 6th insurrection, seem to have escaped their notice.

The desperate attempts at moral equivalence in this essay can be seen, not only on big points like this, but in more trivial pieces of bias. Stephens and Aly quote with approval, a report in Vox on the social psychology of threats. This reflects the fact that Vox is a serious publication, offering careful analysis from a broadly progressive, but not propagandistic, perspective. Yet when they want to denounce ‘tabloid’ partisan media, Stephens and Aly list “Fox, Vox, Sky, Vice, BuzzFeed and the Daily Mail”, carefully balancing rightwing propaganda outlets with titles that might be seen as leftish.

At a time when democracy is under threat around the world, the last thing we need is rightwing advocacy presented as ‘both sides do it’ centrism. But that is precisely what Stephens and Aly have offered us.

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