Lots of talk this week from shellshocked Romney supporters threatening to take their bat and ball and flee their socialist dictator, relocating to Australia.
The ever-erudite Australian social media responded with good humour:
The traditional "Great White Hope" of right-wing extremism, America is an experiment too big to fail - a jealous-green light on the hill from which no disgruntled and echo-chambered right-winger can afford to flee.
There is nowhere to go.
The moderate left will always (and perhaps increasingly) have Canada.* Will have Scandinavia. Might settle for England. The already hollow neocon refrain, "Go to Russia then, comrade", empties further as it has morphed over the years into the anaemic libertarian "Go to Canada, eh."
*Canada's own ideological struggles notwithstanding - she seldom falls to her southern neighbour's right.
But the glistening international postcard-impression of Canada (for which we may at least partly Blame Canada, or at least its marketers) is one of egalitarian abundance. Of polite nationalism. Of government of substantial, but not thuggish, size. RCMP, not KGB. Poutine, not Putin.
Anyhow, the desired rhetorical mode is one of martyrish, self-imposed exile, not of exclusion. The wounded right needs its equivalent of "Fuck this, I'm going to Canada," more than its tired "Fuck off to Canada." It needs somewhere dramatic enough to be a hyperbolic statement - a sacrifice. After all, nobody really moves to Canada (not even Baldwins). But it must be somewhere which nonetheless can seem a safe harbour in dire ideological straits.
Here is where the exceptional exceptionalism of the American right flounders. The oasis they seek of a First World Christian democracy, to the right of post-2008 America, is an elusive dream - finding such a place is an Escher-like uphill climb. It's Malkovich searching for himself through his own portal.
Bafflingly, though, they light upon the Commonwealth/Turnpike of Australia. Remote, exotic, familiar-from-their-cousin's-gap-year, reliably American, Australia. On hearing the idle threats of the American right to move to Australia, we laugh until Vegemite comes out our nose, attracting amorous nearby drop-bears to the scent. This tweet could not be more perfect as a super-cell of misapprehensions:
Do they perchance think our citizens offer a comforting level of capital sexism?
Do they find kinship with our hatred of immigrants?
Are our views on gay marriage charmingly untainted by progressivism?
Does our propensity to observe a fiercely counter-scientific echo-chamber for right-only consumption make them feel at home?
At its heart, Neel's misguided tweet is rightly offered up to the world for chattering consumption and ridicule. It is a light and fluffy momentary diversion. But the unanswerable question, which chills and damps my mirth, is this: what if the mass exodus declared by the American right targeted Australia not because of ignorance of the differences they can't see, but because of similarities we can't?
What if they're right, even a little bit?
Most unsettlingly, could this perhaps be the "President" to whom Kristen Neel referred?
