Donald Trump’s second presidency will do greater than shatter America’s politics. It is going to expose a deeper betrayal: the lie that equality and human rights may very well be justified by prosperity.
For many years, we have now clung to the comforting phantasm that morality and markets should not solely aligned, however a commerce — that granting rights would unlock wealth, that equity would safe development, and that inclusion was the value of development. This was the progress fable: the assumption that values might thrive as long as they paid their means.
However Trump’s return will tear aside this phantasm. Justice was by no means the failure — it was the sufferer of methods that demanded it serve an financial function. The betrayal was by no means about both the achieve of common rights or a perceived lack of privilege — it was in regards to the discount that made equality conditional.
The progress fable diminished justice to a transaction. In America, values are marketed as an funding: gender fairness boosts productiveness, racial justice unlocks potential, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion drives innovation. Rights are now not ideas; they’re methods. However justice can’t increase GDP and dignity can’t be monetised. These had been fabrications, equality was the Glad Meal you order to get the toy.
When prosperity did not materialise for huge swathes of America, when cities crumbled, jobs vanished and wealth pooled in unreachable arms, the blame fell on the values purchased, not the system that bought them. Trump weaponised this disillusionment with devastating readability, providing an excellent darker discount: abandon justice and equity, and prosperity will return.
Globally, the betrayal performed out on a bigger scale. Human rights turned instruments, instrumentalised to legitimise financial methods that widened inequality. When globalisation faltered, these values had been discarded as simply as they’d been embraced. Trump’s presidency accelerates this betrayal, reframing the UN as an impediment to sovereignty and justice, as a luxurious in laborious instances. Values that after legitimised world commerce at the moment are sacrificed to a brand new financial order of leverage and energy.
The identical betrayal now repeats itself within the guarantees of expertise. AI, automation and digital transformation are hailed as the subsequent nice progress, a power to liberate humanity from routine and create boundless alternative. However expertise doesn’t liberate; it replaces. It consolidates energy within the arms of those that management it.
Like globalisation, technological progress is bought as a common good whereas deepening inequalities, inside and past borders. Trump’s America will champion this narrative, racing towards technological dominance whereas discarding the values that had been imagined to information progress. The betrayal stays unchanged: justice is instrumentalised after which deserted when it’s now not handy.
There has by no means been a pure connection between justice and prosperity — that is the lesson America affords. The methods that tied them collectively did so to legitimise themselves, to not uphold values — that is the mirror Trump holds up.
Societies that tether their legitimacy to prosperity or their values to outcomes set themselves up for collapse. A society that treats equality as a method to an finish, reasonably than an finish in itself, breeds resentment when the promised finish doesn’t arrive. A society that justifies rights via development loses the ethical basis that makes it cohesive. Values should stand alone, not as sacrifices, however as shared commitments that outline what a society believes in, even when it’s examined. Justice just isn’t a technique. Equality just isn’t a transaction.
Trump’s second presidency will tempt us to desert our values totally, to border equality as a burden we can’t afford and equity as expendable. However the betrayal was by no means about equality. It was in regards to the methods that instrumentalised it. Justice was by no means meant to justify itself via outcomes. It was meant to outline who we’re. This isn’t simply America’s reckoning. It’s ours. And for Australia, which has at all times loved a bipartisan dedication to equity, we should maintain to our tradition.
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