I have spent seven years of my life in the United States and much of my writing has been influenced by the US.

Indeed, some years ago I wrote a memoir titled Unrequited Love, in which I compared my disillusionment with America to Australia’s ongoing attempts to win favour in Washington.

I wrote that book during the first Trump presidency. Since his re-election, Trump looms over us unlike any previous American leader. His return to office has undoubtedly strengthened climate-change deniers, and the two most prominent Liberal Party dissidents, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Andrew Hastie, are clearly influenced by Trump policies. At right-wing rallies, one sees people wearing Trump/MAGA caps, as if the boundaries between our two countries have disappeared somewhere in the Pacific.

Other than brief interludes during the prime ministerships of Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, staying in the shadow of the US has dominated Australian foreign policy. While stressing an independent line on some key issues, the Albanese Government is determined to maintain ties to Washington, despite the vagaries of the current administration. But while most Australians are uneasy with Trump, the cultural influence of the US has never loomed larger.

As the global balance of power shifts, with the inexorable rise of China and the growing importance of countries in our region such as India and Indonesia, our cultural elites seem unable to shake their fascination with Washington. Fascination with the US may be one of the few areas that unites both right and left.

The impetus for this piece came from a long article by Julia Baird in The Monthly promoting this year’s Boyer Lectures. The Boyers were initiated by the ABC in 1959 as a central contribution to Australian intellectual life and have traditionally been delivered by a person of some eminence. This year there are five speakers asking whether Australian democracy is imperilled.

As Baird writes, democracies are in decline across the globe with the rise of authoritarian rulers, often claiming to maintain free elections and civil society while increasingly restricting the space for dissent. Of the five speakers, three have close connections to the US and, not surprisingly, the yardstick for comparison appears to be Trump’s America.

All five speakers are impressive and there is a welcome diversity of positions, ranging from former Nationals leader John Anderson to Indigenous lawyer Larissa Behrendt. But it is striking that nothing in Baird’s long article suggests an interest in how democracy is faring outside the Anglosphere, although the decline of democracy in our region — India, Thailand, Indonesia — is surely worth some attention.

Ironically, Gerard Henderson, who can always be counted on to attack the ABC, has criticised the program as “leaning decidedly left” [The Weekend Australian October 4/5]. He also echoes the ambivalence towards Trump of the Murdoch press, which seems to fluctuate between admiring his denunciation of “woke” politics and disapproval of his disregard for democratic process.

But the ABC has form: after all, it killed off the declining warhorse, Q & A, on Monday nights in favour of Planet America, perhaps the most irritating show on their entire network. For all its faults, Q & A did at least mean debates about Australian issues received 50 minutes of airtime, which is now gone.

The clearest symbol of our bond to the US is the AUKUS agreement. There is mounting criticism of AUKUS, usually focused on its cost, its unreliability and the chances that it ties us irrevocably to American hostility to China. But there is also a cultural cost involved, namely the revival of the idea that we should look to the powers of the North Atlantic for our security and a corresponding disinterest in our region.

There is a dangerous nostalgia to images of three white men — even if Morrison, Biden and Johnson have all been replaced since the original announcement — proclaiming an alliance which seems to totally ignore the geographic and geopolitical realities of Australia’s position in the current world. Our disregard for Asia is symbolised in the decline of language study, with declining enrolments in languages in both schools and universities.

While the focus of much of our diplomatic and development policies has been on the Pacific and southeast Asia, the Albanese Government appears to place greatest weight on our relations with an increasingly idiosyncratic US and a declining Great Britain. The prime minister’s last visit to Britain, and his obedient audience with the King at Balmoral, only underlines the extent to which the political mainstream identifies with the Anglosphere.

But even this is not sufficient to satisfy the Opposition, who have attacked the government’s break from US support for Israel, instead lining up with a range of other Western democracies in recognising a Palestinian state. I am not sure why the Opposition needs to have a spokesperson on foreign affairs when their position seems to be based on agreeing with Washington on every issue of substance.

The Opposition is presumably supportive of close ties with Britain, even if it criticised Albanese’s attendance at the Labour Party conference in September. There were once prominent republicans in the Liberal Party, most notably Malcolm Turnbull, but it is hard to imagine any republican enthusiasm among what remains of the parliamentary party.

Albanese has now ruled out any moves towards a republic; in his first term he created a minister for the republic, but that has now been quietly shelved. There is a certain irony in the abandonment by Labor of the republican goal, as every year increasing numbers of Australians have no family ties to Britain, but I think Albanese has read the room quite correctly. Any referendum for a republic would almost certainly fail, not because most of us think of King Charles as anything but an amusing anachronism, but because there is no agreement on what could replace the present arrangement, which, in ways Gilbert & Sullivan could have dreamt up, places our head of state 17,000 kilometres away, with a rather dubious history of meddling in our politics.

Were a republican referendum to be held, I suspect the “no” case would find it easy to win by invoking the spectre of Trump, however carefully the proposal would make clear that an Australian president would not have the political power of the US president. But among the various ways we might calculate the effect of Trump on Australian politics, perhaps we need add the throttling of the republican agenda.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.