As Elon Musk launches his new America Party, we should all reflect on his concept of "evil" and how hollow it sounds, writes Dr. Alex Vickery-Howe.
FORMER American Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz has a new hobby. When he needs a pick-me-up, Tim checks on Tesla’s plummeting stock prices.
It’s an innocent activity. It’s harmless. Tim isn’t out there burning Teslas — which, incidentally, are perfectly capable of burning all by themselves or vandalising dealerships. Even so, for the gentle sin of schadenfreude, proxy vice-president and jilted "first bro" Elon Musk has dubbed Walz "evil".
There’s nothing evil about laughing at a fascist dork. Impolite? Yes. Vindictive? Maybe. But evil? Hardly comes close.
Musk’s buffoonish attempt to paint his political enemy in such absolute terms got me thinking about the nature of evil itself and what should qualify for such extreme terminology.
As I write this, the Trump Administration has a plan to rebrand catastrophic climate change a "good thing".
Not merely content with destroying the environment; raping the land ("drill, baby, drill!") and killing wild animals directly via "hunting" (also known as grown men hiding and shooting carnivores from a cowardly distance); or indirectly via deforestation, pollution and road carnage, President Trump wants to take his tyranny one leap further and pretend...climate change is a net positive!
Droughts, fires, floods and monsoons are now all part of making America great again. It’s a lie that only the stupid will embrace, but it’s also a denial of science, a denial of objective reality and a denial of human accountability. That, I believe, is evil.
Trump is also gleefully deporting immigrants without anything resembling a law-abiding process, including extraditing and then "losing" a Maryland father who was supposedly under the protection of the courts. Kilmar Abrego Garcia has no criminal record in the United States. Trump does. In the worldview of the felonious President and his spineless cronies, the courts are no longer legitimate. Military parades are no longer tasteless. Dictatorial power is all the rage.
Americans can now be taken off the street – regardless of their legal status – to be black bagged, handcuffed and paraded for the cameras. The footage of terrified people having their heads shaved en route to a maximum-security hellhole in El Salvador is a nightmare straight out of Hitler’s diary, and it is no longer hyperbolic to make that comparison plain. American residents are being enslaved for news stories. LA is occupied. That, I believe, is evil.
Lord Trump is also contemplating a third unconstitutional term in office. He actually calls it his "fourth term" because he still claims President Biden "rigged" the 2020 Election. That, I believe, is evil. It’s also a betrayal of America.
It fascinates me that Trump’s loyalists will rave about their "constitutional rights" when it comes to the Second Amendment and their precious right to shoot up schools, yet ignore the Constitution when it comes to the freedom of the press (that’s the First Amendment for those playing at home) and downright spit on the Constitution when it comes to respecting the judicial arm of government. That’s Article III, and it’s essential for the effective functioning of American democracy.
It dismays me that those same toadying loyalists who love their guns and accuse other nations – Australia most regularly – of being "slaves" to a "dictatorship" have utterly failed to notice that they have a leader who demands absolute loyalty, imprisons critics without trial and refuses to step down after his term in office expires. That, I believe, is evil. Palpatine did it with more subtlety.
The religious trappings surrounding the Far-Right are pretty evil, too. I’m not a person of faith but I have met many kind and principled Christians. Distorting a movement based on empathy and generosity to demonise racial and sexual minorities and to celebrate their "punishment", is evil wrapped in angelic wings.
And, when it comes to Musk, I believe using trusting animals for cruel and lethal scientific experiments is evil incarnate. His ego is indefensible.
There are many reasons why Trump and Musk ascended to the White House. Musk rants (chainsaw in hand) about "wokeism" and the "elitists". Coming from his mouth, it’s as hypocritical as a coal executive at a climate summit, or former-almost PM Peter Dutton kissing babies after cutting childcare funding, but there is a kernel of truth beneath the populist dross. Voter dissatisfaction among working-class people was real and foreseeable, and largely the fault of an elitist and out-of-touch Left.
If we are to move through this terrible moment in history, we must start with introspection, build towards reparation and resolve to heal the social and economic wounds caused by both extremes of politics. A failure to face our flaws honestly is a free kick to fascists. We should be beyond hubris and denial by now.
In an Australian context, this same hubris and denial became fuel for the Coalition’s election campaign, where Peter Dutton managed to position himself as the "Temu Trump". It didn’t work this time, but it may work next time if Labor proves unable to close the wealth gap.
A Left that fails to acknowledge the housing crisis, cost of living and economic disparity in favour of clickbait "culture war" clout is a Left that will land on the ash heap of irrelevancy beside the fading embers of the Harris-Walz presidential campaign. I hope Australia’s leaders have learned the hard lesson from America’s collapse. If not, the day may yet arrive where we’ll have to use "Prime Minister Ley" or "Prime Minister Taylor" in a sentence and that’s going to come with a little light chunder.
There are even harder lessons to be learned about sloganeering over substance, performative empathy over political action, and the consequences of a relatively new and spurious pseudo-leftism untethered from the movement’s traditional economic roots.
We have to make amends for our abandonment of working people. We have to examine our own ideological compromise and our pandering to destructive voices from within. The contemporary Left isn’t blameless. We did let people down. We did lose our way.
But evil? Let’s keep our heads straight. Evil has little to do with "the elitist Left" and "the woke mind virus", and nothing whatsoever to do with laughing at stock prices.
Evil is all over our newsfeed...
Musk is often the byline.
Dr Alex Vickery-Howe is an award-winning playwright and social commentator. He teaches creative writing, screen and drama at Flinders University.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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