Sometimes you can better understand what’s happening around you by first looking further away.

I have been following, with ever increasing disgust, the US presidential election – I was going to say “circus”, but that word carries a connotation of amusement or entertainment. While it is still possible to make jokes about what is going on in the US campaign, it is too awful for real amusement.

Yes, there are many differences between the USA today and any other country at any other time. But the commentators who have noted parallels between official US politics today and politics in Germany in the early 1930s are not mistaken.

Before he was in power, did Hitler announce that he would make his religious scapegoats wear an identifying symbol in public? Donald Trump has already proposed that, and nobody with serious power in the United States has suggested that this means he can’t be president.

Trump has said that it’s okay to torture prisoners – not to extract information from them, but simply because he doesn’t like them and thinks they deserve it. Again, no problem.

In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater suffered one of the worst presidential election defeats in US history, because he was seen as too right wing by most voters. Goldwater’s politics haven’t changed, but today his criticisms of the wing running the Republican Party appear to come from its left.

As the Republicans have moved right, the Democrats have faithfully followed, consistently maintaining a distance on the Republicans’ left that can easily be measured by anyone possessing a microscope.

Most of Hillary Clinton’s real positions are to the right of those she advocated when she lost out to Barack Obama in 2008, and even if she now makes the occasional verbal concession to Bernie Sanders, that will be totally irrelevant when she becomes president.

My point here is that there is a significant gap between official, electoral, politics and the views of a large part of the population of the USA. Just think of how little police murders of Black people have figured in any of the presidential debates, while the pressure of mass protests has resulted in a (very) few of the murderers being charged.

The US powers that be are attempting to persuade everyone else that their personal welfare is somehow connected with persecuting migrants from Latin America or Syrian refugees or some other “danger”. The only disagreement about this in the US ruling class is over how rapidly they can get away with doing it.

Of course, nothing so reactionary as that could happen in Australia. Except that we already have concentration camps for refugees, and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, or without even telling the prisoners what they are “guilty” of.

In terms of right wing scapegoating, our closest approximation to Donald Trump is probably Pauline Hanson. But Hanson, unlike Trump, remains on the edges of electoral politics. It would be nice to think this is because Australian politics are more civilised, but that’s not the reason.

It’s because the two major parties are already carrying out the policies that Hanson and Trump stand for.