In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
By Emma Shortis
Fri 13 Nov 2026 01.00 AEDT
Photo: The White House/Flickr
Australia and Vanuatu may be very different countries, but we share a common future. For decades, our partnership has been built on a commitment to peace, stability and prosperity across our region.
The extraordinary results in the US midterm elections have exposed just how risky Australia’s approach to US relations has been and left the country on the outer, according to international relations expert Dr Emma Shortis.
The scale of the Democratic victory in the midterms is still sinking in. The return of the southern, formerly slave-holding states to the Democrats could signal a new era in America. There remain many bridges to cross. But the election of the first Black Senator in Mississippi since 1874 is a watershed moment. And that moment could also mean a radical change in the role the United States plays in the world.
This week:
Nina Simone wrote “Mississippi Goddam” after the murder of four Black girls by a white supremacist terror bombing in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. But as this history of the song in the PBS American Masters series outlines, it was also about the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In his last campaign ad, Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom stood in front of Evers’ house and observed that he “was killed in his driveway because he refused to accept a Mississippi where some were denied the right to vote”.
This week, Colom became the first Black Senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. As this beautiful piece in Mother Jones puts it, Colom’s victory “literally rewrote the history books.” And he did it in truly stunning fashion. As this piece in the Mississippi Free Press notes: Colom “flipped Forrest County, a once reliably Republican County named for Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest” [emphasis mine, because, Goddam]. Colom didn’t win there because all of that happened in the distant past. He won because that history is a lived reality – because the Trump administration was attempting to bring back a pre-Civil Rights era, segregationist America. As another piece in the Mississippi Free Press noted, “this historic feat comes just six years after Mississippi retired its old Confederate-themed state flag.”
The Civil War never really ended. But it has now entered a very new phase.
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That is not to say that history is cyclical – it isn’t. But it can illuminate the present. And one thing American history teaches us is that the backlash to rights being gained by others is as swift as it is violent. Mississippi has not had a Black Senator since Reconstruction because the back(white-)lash against Reconstruction was so effective. Trump rode the wave of a similar, racist backlash all the way to the White House.
So what does that mean now? Well, Trump just made Stephen Miller his Chief of Staff. That doesn’t necessarily make Miller more powerful (it’s not like his predecessor Susie Wiles was holding him back). But it does send a very clear signal of what is to come. Trump is stewing – he’s already walked back his always very temporary concessional attitude about the result. And as Jeet Heer writes in The Nation, Miller is “the most zealous white nationalist in his entire administration.”
All inflection points are moments of both profound opportunity and terrible danger. This is no different.
Despite – or perhaps because of – that danger, the opportunities opened up by this moment are truly extraordinary. As I wrote last week, the United States might (might) be on the brink of a profound change in the role it plays in the world. Our American colleagues and friends have been working towards this moment: in some remarkable timing, Matt Duss’ new edited collection A World For All: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy has just been released.
Listening to newly elected representatives talk about what that new world might look like is deeply moving. I’ll leave you with this interview of Michigan’s newest Senator Abdul el-Sayed, in which he says that the United States should be “the first among equals to uphold international law”. Just imagine what that world might look like.
