Why are Australians so interested in the US midterms?

For good and ill, news media executives have a highly developed instinct for a story. They live and die by it. So why do they think these midterm elections in the United States are such a huge story as to warrant rolling television coverage and continuous online updating, as well as acres of previews and prognostications?

As it turned out, it was indeed a story of historic magnitude, a blue wave sweeping the Democrats to power in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

But that is not why, in the lead up, news executives were treating this as a story of monumental significance. News executives are no better at telling the future than the rest of us.

They treated it as a huge story for many reasons, but one is overwhelmingly more important than the others: drama.

This is not just a political story. It is a story of Shakespearean proportions: unrestrained power, greed, vulgarity, and crudity all contained in the person of one man.

In the tradition of Shakespearean drama, the question arose: would voters punish Donald Trump for his hubris and excesses, or would they once again succumb to his toxic charm?

At this level, it had elements of a morality tale, with consequences not just for the US but for peace, prosperity and the health of democracy across the world.

Yet, in the United States, it was much more. There, the drama centred on one big question: could its institutions hold up?

On election day, The New York Times published two articles focused in different ways on this question.

Ken Burns, who made the celebrated documentary on the American Civil War, wrote:

There have been three great crises in American history: the Civil War, perhaps the defining event in our history after the Revolution itself, the Great Depression and World War II. These events tested our republic and our resolve in fundamental ways, but the centre always held. As we go to the polls today […] people are rightly concerned whether our institutions are at a breaking point.

The Times also reported a speech given last month by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is regarded as the most restrained member of the liberal minority on the court.

She said that as recently as 2017, “nobody in America thought the court was in the pocket of any one group or any one party or any one anything. The court had a kind of legitimacy. And when the court has a kind of legitimacy of that kind, it helps to create a stable country.”

The clear implication was that since then, the court had come to lack that kind of legitimacy as a result of having been stacked by Trump appointees.

So much for the judicial branch of government.

The fragility of America’s executive branch of government had also been exposed as Trump stacked senior positions with cronies, the most spectacular of which was the appointment of Elon Musk as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The executive branch’s willingness to go along with Trump’s excesses was starkly illustrated by the notorious killings, raids, seizures and deportations by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

This, plus Trump’s threats to use ICE agents to crack down on illegal voting, raised the spectre of whether there would be armed stand-offs between ICE agents and state law-enforcement officers at polling stations.

And hanging over it all was the once unthinkable question: would the counting of votes and confirmation of the results be completed peacefully and according to law?

After the insurrection in Washington on January 6 2021, it could not be taken for granted.

And then there was uncertainty about what might happen in the aftermath, should the Republicans lose control of Congress.

Would Trump accept the result? As it turned out, it seems he has, but questions remain.

Will he continue to govern by decree, as he has done by using executive orders for the whole of his second presidency? To what extent will he be able to bypass Congress and, in effect, marginalise the electoral process? Will he use the presidential veto to stymie a Democrat-controlled Congress?

And finally there is the question of political contagion and its consequences for how Trumpian politics taint the way politics is done in Australia.

We have already seen plentiful examples.

Culture wars about so-called “wokeness” have spread from the United States, where Trump’s contemptuous approach to diversity, equity and inclusion programs in universities and government agencies has become a staple of right-wing politics in Australia, as have border protection issues.

Even the hijacking of popular music and entertainment for political purposes has been copied here. One Nation has been warned by the ABC to cease and desist featuring the Bluey cartoon figure in a series of violent political cartoons. The Trump campaign is being sued for US$10 million by Neil Young for using his hit Rockin’ in the Free World at its campaign rallies.

And then there has been the copying by Pauline Hanson and One Nation of Trump’s blacklisting of news media he doesn’t like.

So to the news value of drama can be added the news values of magnitude, impact, consequence, anxiety, negativity and uncertainty, which touch not just the realm of ideas but the realm of material wellbeing.

How long will the US-Iran war go on? How high will fuel prices go and for how long? What will this do to inflation and interest rates? Will Australia be hit with more tariffs in Trump’s trade war? Is the great and powerful friend Australia has thought it has had since the second world war still great, powerful and a friend?

Perhaps in the light of these midterm results, the world can take some solace from the aphorism often attributed – without evidence – to Winston Churchill: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”