Photo by Laurin Steffens on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
How did you feel when Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, removed aid from the poorest people on the planet?
It is a pretty searching question, right? Both for Americans and for those like Britain and Australia who are proudly America-adjacent.
The words, however, are not mine.
Rather, they belong to an erstwhile Conservative British prime minister, Sir John Major, who delivered a searing 2025 Sir Edward Heath Lecture last week. Ted Heath, too, had been a Conservative PM.
Sir John used the occasion to pose what might be the "major" question for this terrifying historical crux.
How so? I'd wager that the answer to Sir Major's ostensibly narrow question provides an answer to a much wider set of tests going to how resolutely liberal democracy stands against the resurgent competition - populist authoritarianism, military aggression, nativism and "barbarism".
That is to say, what you think about axing USAID operates as a surrogate marker for a deeper public shift in which the citizens of nominal democracies seem prepared to give up on the civilisation project imperfectly pursued since WWII, quietly surrendering values like diplomacy and rules and the concept of universal human dignity.
In his address, Sir Major quantified what sitting prime ministers in his country and ours, steadfastly avoid - the fast-widening gap between what we say we stand for in the West, and what we will stay silent on to ensure smooth relations and serve political self-interest, even in instances of racism and the denial of human rights.
Individually as voters, and officially through our governments, our response to Sir Major's question goes a long way towards explaining the rise and burgeoning confidence of lawless bullies like Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin.
In this, the age of impunity, Sir Major invites us to consider whether we are different from Trump's Americans or merely distant.
For example, if you were unmoved by the epic callousness of his administration's new assault on the least fortunate - its "One Big Beautiful Bill" of tax breaks for billionaires while cutting welfare, you had probably been fine with the earlier closing of USAID.
Unperturbed, still, as USAID's shuttering brought credible predictions of countless preventable deaths (climbing into the millions) - many of them children - in the world's most wretched, war-ravaged regions.
Musk's cheery chainsaw massacre of USAID - the leading global provider of foreign development assistance, including clean water, healthcare, and vaccination against lethal diseases - thrusts him and the toxic administration he served onto the moral trajectory of history's more lethal.
The West's response? Silence. Worse, fawning praise, undignified crawling, pre-emptive capitulations, gushing obedience. Yes, we will spend more on defence, Trump is assured, guaranteeing (by the way) that we, too, must cut foreign aid budgets, and even welfare programs at home.
Sir Major followed his rhetorical question with several more.
"Is barbarianism now acceptable if the barbarian is strong enough, or the victim without friends?" he asked.
"Can it be that our world is so exhausted, politics so tainted, self-interest so predominant that it has abandoned compassion?
"Is might now right? Has the law, human decency, and political morality been cast aside?
"Or is it, perhaps, as simple as this: that our world is now beginning to elect leaders concerned only about national self-interest?
"If so, if politics leads countries to hunker down in their own little trenches of interest, ignore reason, bypass diplomacy, forego enlightened self-interest - then heaven help us all."
Heaven, indeed. It is galling to witness the stunning overlap of people who simultaneously hold to Heaven as a core belief, while actively denying the most fundamental point of Jesus Christ's example: his life stood for nothing if not for care, compassion and respect for the poor, the sick, those cast out to the peripheries.
Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" is a vulgar billionaire's thumb in Christ's eye.
Along with pumping billions into his deportation program, it slashes funds for things as basic as food safety-net programs, green energy, and healthcare, while cementing stonking tax cuts for the mega-wealthy.
This is the country with which Australia shares so many values?
The country that breaks international law without hesitation and re-drafts a felonious former president who had fomented a violent denial of his election loss.
A president who openly uses high office for self-enrichment, vilifies migrants as rapists and murderers, deploys his country's military against political opponents, and commits nearly three times as many dollars to its Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation police than to the FBI.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who had decried Trump's immigration agents "parading around masked in unmarked cars and snatching hardworking people off the streets ... just to meet indiscriminate arrest quotas," called the OBBB America's "ultimate betrayal".
"Seventeen million people just lost health care, 18 million kids just lost school meals, 3 million Americans just lost food assistance, and US$3.5 trillion ($5.2 trillion) was added to the deficit, all for a tax cut to Trump's billionaire donors," he tweeted.
As he puffed triumphantly on a cigar after the OBBB passed by four votes, Republican Congressman Troy Nehls gave his answer to a version of Sir Major's question.
Did it concern him that Americans would lose their health care?
"Oh well, just some Americans, that aren't Americans, and that is the illegals," he said.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.