Today, Tim Dunlop opens the batting on reforming the left, and Cathy Bannister has more thoughts on the Lasch factor in John Howard’s victory in the culture wars.
REFUGEE NEWS
In Naming the minority, a new group, Australians Against Racism, spruiked for donations to fund televsion advertisements on refugees and received a big response from Webdiary readers. The website is now up –australiansagainstracism where the ad can be previewed. Organiser Eva Sallis warns that “a quite serious virus is being circulated purporting to be related to this project in some way – if you receive a message that is blank but comes with an attachment, do not open the attachment, regardless of its name, and regardless of whether or not you recognise the address/name of the sender. This virus sends itself to everyone on your address book.”
REINVENTING THE LEFT
Some late night thoughts on what to do
By Tim Dunlop
First things first: cheer up. Despite appearances, the time has never been better for the left – call it what you will – to get their ideas out and win the hearts and minds of the ordinary punter.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks; in the clear and present glow of the so-called war on terrorism; in the aftermath of a third consecutive Coalition victory; as neo-liberal policies fail to deliver to the majority a better, more secure life; as the gap between rich and poor increases; and as poverty persists in a time of economic growth, people will be more receptive to alternative solutions and new ways of defining a common good than they have been in a long time.
Mainly, they are looking for ways to operate as a society again.
New opportunities
For thirty years we’ve had pushed down our throats that there is no alternative to the all-against-all policies of the neo-liberals; that private is always better than public; and that me is always more important than you. Part of the reason this agenda has made headway is that we’ve also had pushed down our throats a straw-man image of the left as the proponents of big, coercive government; as non-respecters of individual rights and identity; as tax and spend cowboys and as advocates of social control.
This has been done by dangling before us the false dichotomy between the individual and the collectivity and insisting that we have to choose between the two. The neo-liberal right characterise this as choice between big government and individual freedom, between bureaucracy and entrepreneurialism, between you deciding what’s best for you and the government telling you what’s best for you. No wonder anything vaguely left looks unpalatable. But the truth is, there is no such choice to make.
The truth is and if you want to live in a society again you’d better start thinking about the logic of this – the individual is society and society is the individual. They are indivisible. Or if you like, they are interdependent.
In the coming world recession, people are going to notice that the welfare nets and protection policies put in place after the 1930s depression and in the aftermath of World War 2 have been dismantled. And they aren’t going to like it. As unemployment, which the neo-liberal whizz kids never really solved anyway. rises, insecurity and uncertainty are just going to increase.
It is also going to increase as people realise that some of our most basic presumptions about what governments do no longer hold. Basic, life-supporting services water, electricity, communication have been sold out from under us to private firms with private aims.
We’ve already seen on-sellers like One-Tel collapse in the telecommunications industry. Wait till you see what happens when the same sorts of players go belly-up in the soon-to-be fully privatised power industries (bankruptcies are happening in the US as we speak). Wait till our water supplies are threatened by profit-driven operators. Wait till you see the last of our productive topsoil blown away or turned to salt under the onslaught of relentless land clearing, driven by deregulated rural industries.
The public are ready to listen, but they are going to want to hear more than vague promises and empty catchphrases. We used to talk about projects like the Snowy Mountains Scheme; now we talk about a knowledge nation. The abstract has replaced the concrete. But solutions in the abstract are not good enough.
We clever-dicks on the left who claim to care about society should be making a case now. We should be offering good, hard-headed analysis, identifying the areas of concern, discussing with people the need for public policy that is designed not to further the purity of a particular economic orthodoxy, but to protect people from the worst excesses and ongoing failures of the market. Because even the market purists will tell you, markets always fail.
Getting back our nerve
We have to re-enter the fray and stop being bluffed by propagandists at the Centre for Independent Studies, the various business lobbies and most of the economics commentators in the media. This means joining political parties, joining interest groups, participating in public discussions, writing articles, writing books, (reading articles and reading books), organising grass-roots events, protesting, standing up for what you believe in. It means collective action, not individual whingeing, and it means knowing who the real threats are.
There is fertile ground on which the left can make its case. Many Australians have never completely bought into the individualist rhetoric that so pervades American society. They have always seen government action and collective action in general as part of the solution, not the intractable enemy of the good life. They have always organised themselves effectively, whether it be into industry-based unions, the CWA, the PTA, or into more informal interest groups.
As political scientist Ian Marsh points out, “The Directory of Australian Associations lists 6000 individual groups in over 700 categories, though this listing concentrates mainly on national-level. More specific directories provide more numbers – for example, 1,200 environmental groups nationwide, 2,450 ethnic community organisations in 107 ethnic communities, 1,500 business groups and 1,200 welfare groups in South Australia alone. The welfare sector as a whole is estimated to embrace some 37,000 organisations ranging from large umbrella or special-purpose groups to local, self-help or community organisations.”
Australians are all for collective action and defining a common good, but to work with this tendency, the left really has to reinvent itself. So let’s get a bit self-critical.
It’s the grassroots, stupid
The basis of all democratic action is that it has to take the people with it. The democratic left (a tautology as far as I’m concerned) is committed to the people or it is nothing. This doesn’t mean big government, coerced involvement, or over-riding individual rights and choices, though this is how it will be portrayed by those in the thrall of atomistic market approaches that delight in pitting all against all. It does mean finding better ways of designing collective responses that don’t disparage and seek to over-ride peoples individual choices. Unfortunately, the singular achievement of the left in recent years has been to let itself get annoyed by, and even hostile to, the ordinary bods for whom it should be working.
The left has lost faith in the ordinary people
At one level this lack of faith has manifested itself in the bully-boy tactics of the Labor factions as they have preferred factional yes-men (generally men) over representative members of communities as political candidates. Fortunately, after election loss number three, there is some evidence of Labor recognising this. Lindsay Tanner said recently, “The real issue is why our membership is so small and uninvolved. Empowering and expanding our party is the prime organisational challenge. The place to start is to get the members electing their state presidents and state executives. It’s about changing the party’s culture.”
At another level, the left or more accurately, a fairly vocal faction within the left has decided that there is, not so much the deserving and undeserving poor, but worthy and unworthy constituencies. Increasingly, it seems more concerned with those at a distance (cultural or geographical) than it does with those living in the same street, or suburb, or city.
I call it Sting Syndrome or the Bono Effect, where organising a concert against the devastation of the Amazon rainforest or in favour of the cancellation of third world debt is seen as worthier and certainly sexier than, for example, writing a cheque for some youth centres in Dublin or a drug rehabilitation centre in Manchester. In Australia we might say analogously that the Tampa refugees are seen as more worthy of our time and concern than the people who live in a rural town devastated by the loss of business and industry arising through deregulation of agriculture and loss of services. It’s the former and not the latter that gets the compassionate left writing letters and switching their votes away from Labor.
Sometimes the distant and remote are better at igniting our compassion than the close and familiar. Now, this is not altogether a surprising thing, nor is it entirely undesirable. There is something to be said for filtering our benevolence through the sieve of distance or detachment. Arguably, this is one of the unrecognised achievements of the welfare state.
Michael Ignatieff has written of the poor on the streets of London, noting that “their needs and entitlements establish a silent relation between us”.
“As we stand together in line at the post office, while they cash their pension cheques, some tiny portion of my income is transferred into their pockets through the countless capillaries of the state. The mediated quality of our relationship seems necessary to both of us. They are dependent on the state, not upon me, and we are both glad of it. We are responsible for each other, but we are not responsible to each other.”
Such mutual independence supported by collective responsibility through state institutions seems like a good thing to me.
Perhaps, then, as the capillaries of a welfare state are blocked or severed by new paradigms of assistance like work-for-the-dole or mutual obligation, we are subtly forced to confront a relationship that is no longer mediated by the state, that is now too overwhelming, and that, in short, causes familiarity to breed contempt. I’m really just thinking out loud with this, but there must be some reason for the rise of what we might call the indignant left, that group who hold so many of their fellow citizens in the type of contempt that makes them unworthy of serious consideration and often times, subject to angry dismissal.
Perhaps this faction of the left, especially its educated, well-travelled and successful members, find it easier to relate to matters beyond the level of the nation state. Their basically sound instinct to universalism may, then, actually act as a deterrent to local engagement. It’s worth thinking about as we are more and more confronted by the reality of an interconnected world.
Robert Reich, Secretary of State for Labour under Bill Clinton, has suggested, for instance, that the new class (whom he calls “symbolic analysts”), detach themselves from the rest of the community. “Will our current and future symbolic analysts,” he asks, “lacking any special sense of responsibility toward a particular nation and its citizens share their wealth with the less fortunate of the world and devote their resources and energies to improving the chances that others may contribute to the world’s wealth?
“Here we find the darker side of cosmopolitanism. For without strong attachments and loyalties extending beyond family and friends, symbolic analysts may never develop the habits and attitudes of social responsibility. They will be world citizens, but without accepting or even acknowledging any of the obligations that citizenship normally implies.”
The frequency with which this group (I know, loosely defined) champions the cause of global issues but has little time for the local lends some weight to this proposition. It often amazes me to hear the blase way in which universal governance is invoked as a solution to all problems when national institutions remain unconsidered, and what’s more, apparently impervious to serious reform.
Maybe all of this is way off track, I dont know.
Whatever the reasons, however, there is a shrillness in how the notionally left confront the conditions of their fellow citizens. whether those citizens are the actual losers in the economic race or merely those who aspire to be winners, and this shrillness is disastrous in trying to win support for alternative programs and approaches. You can’t bully people into accepting your ideas. You can’t expect them to take you on trust if you don’t trust them and you seem more concerned with the romantic distance than the quotidian foreground . You actually have to provide ways for people to involve themselves in the public arena in ways that make a difference for them.
Ways and means
Traditionally, this focus was provided by the Labor Party itself, but the key practical question might actually be quite a big one: does the Labor Party continue to be the vehicle through which progressive reform is made, or does there need to be a new mainstream left party built from the ground up? Regardless, opportunities for alternatives exist and they must be investigated.
Look at it this way. You don’t think for a moment that people actually like or admire John Howard, Tony Abbott and Peter Costello do you? You don’t think they like being pushed around by more-or-less unaccountable business as the functions of government are increasingly outsourced and privatised? You don’t think they enjoy the fact that their quality of life has become directly proportional to their income? They don’t.
But they have to live in the world; they have to survive from day to day. So if the only alternatives given them are market based, individualistic, reward-the-rich-reward-the-ruthless sorts of policies then that is what they are going to be forced to work with. Too often, those on the left don’t recognise this and they develop a blame-the-victim attitude and dismiss people as either too lazy, ignorant or selfish, when in fact they are just trying to survive as best they can in the circumstances available to them.
The left used to recognise this and they’d go after the real culprits, the real elites who pull the purse strings. Or rather, what we might call leftist presumptions about the balance between the role of the state, the market and the individual were more common. Under such presumptions, institutional solutions based upon egalitarian principles were much more the norm and more forthcoming. Today the left seem more interested in blaming what they see as the narrow-minded rednecks and aspirationals they find lurking behind every bad thing that happens.
Repeat after me
But all this guff about aspirationals is just that. Repeat after me: there is no aspirational class. It’s part of the wedge and we shouldn’t fall for it. It plays into the hands of the conservative right as they try to convince people, that is the thinking, compassionate, potentially inspiring left, that the vast majority of Australians are an inward-looking, insular, me-too bunch of disengaged swinging voters only on the look out for their own selfish ends. If we swallow it, then there is nothing to fight for, the game is lost, and we might as well pack up and move to Nimbin (circa 1970).
Unfortunately, the Labor Party in particular has velcroed itself to the idea that it must must appeal to aspirational voters, when in fact this is just a marketing term that serves the purposes of the underlying neo-liberal agenda. It serves to convince us that there is large body of people who are merely self-interested, inward-looking and consumption oriented. Of course, this describes all of us at some time or another, but it shouldn’t be used to define us.
Like many of these terms, aspirationals has just enough truth in it to make it believable. But if we start acting like it’s the whole story – as Labor has shown every indication of doing since the election – then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: politicians, the media and the various policy elites start to offer only those approaches that fit the narrow parameters of the definition (cue Mark Latham). The debate (and perceived solutions to various problems) can then only be offered within that framework. We have to reject the framework from the beginning.
But there was Simon Crean, ten seconds after being elected leader, doing a listening tour of the western suburbs of Sydney because, nearly everyone assures us, this is where Labor lost the election and it lost here because it didn’t get the aspirational vote. We, the ones committed to something more than market outcomes, really have to call their bluff on this one. Fortunately, there is some indication that this is happening.
For instance, Tim Colebatch, economics editor of The Age, offers this analysis: “If you were reading Sydney columnists such as Sally Loane in The Sydney Morning Herald, you would think the election was won and lost in Sydney’s western suburbs, where Labor lost by being mean to the rich and too nice to refugees. Sydney people are richer, we are told, and even in the western suburbs, they have “aspirations”. Hence they react against Labor when it proposes to switch grants from rich schools to poor ones, or when, in 1998, the Victorians running the party’s economic policy proposed to remove the tax break for four-wheel-drives and focus its income tax cuts on low-paid workers. The facts, however, show the opposite.
“Labor’s best result in Sydney in the past three elections was in fact in 1998, when it won a huge swing in “aspirational” western Sydney, averaging 5.6 percent. The swing to Labor in 1998 exceeded the swing to the Coalition this time in all but four of western Sydney’s 15 seats. It is a myth to think Labor has to win Sydney to win government.”
Tom Morton, writing in the SMH, also points out the marketing origins of the notion of an aspirational class: “As Crean travels westward, the sirens of spin will be whispering to him still, intoning their seductive mantra that the ALP’s salvation lies with the aspirational voters. Let’s hope he plugs his ears because the whole notion of the “aspirationals” is a con job. There is no new aspirational class. It’s a product of the fevered imagination of the marketing gurus, a slick repackaging of the upwardly mobile lower-middle class.”
More importantly, he expands on why it is such a shallow concept and why it will ultimately only serve the purposes of the market-obsessed right-wing elites and the me-toos in the Labor Party and notionally left organisations like the Whitlam Institute: “Aspirational politics assumes that our hopes are purely private hopes. Its acolytes project a Thatcherite me first set of values onto the lower-middle class, assuming that they will prefer private schools for their children, private hospitals for their health care, private housing estates fenced off from the lower orders from which they’ve only too recently escaped. Charlotte Thorne, a British social commentator, puts it this way: if you believe in aspirational voters, you believe that people will vote for prosperity, for growth, but not for redistribution.”
And as Morton says: “Yet redistribution is ultimately what any social democratic party such as the ALP must be about; and not just the redistribution of wealth, but the redistribution of hope.”
How we do it is as important as what we do. The constraints new programs have to work within are not those provided by neat catch-phrases and market-derived sub-categories of citizens like aspirationals. Actually, constraints arise for precisely the opposite reason. It is the fact that society does not fall into neatly homogenous groups of like-minded factions who can be singled out for particular messages that complicates matters. The difficulty begins when we recognise that all groups are heterogenous and fluid and that the programs that work for some will not suit others and they might not even suit tomorrow those they suit today.
Thus the problem is procedural and the left must commit itself to those procedures ways of governing and making decisions that allow for constant revision and self-supervision: it requires institutional design that recognises this heterogeneity and fluidity and works with it not against it.
So our starting point is all wrong. The aim should not be to provide programs that purport to overcome particular deficiencies. Society is not a problem for the left or anyone else to solve.
The aim should be to join with all groups to the extent possible and find through discussion what points we share in common. Any imposition of a pre-formed program is necessarily going to isolate those to whom it doesn’t apply or who object to it. The only process that makes sense in a plural democracy that wishes to honour that plurality and not constrain it is one that allows solutions to emerge through consultation, not one that presents pre-digested prescriptions from on high.
In the early stages, how you arrive at an outcome is more important than the outcome itself. People have to believe they are being listened to. This means letting as much variety into the conversation as possible, a dictum that shouldn’t be too onerous for those who claim to support free speech. But free speech without institutional means to convert it into action is pointless.
Fortunately, work is being done and it is helpful if those who are concerned keep up with what is being said. In fact, there is a breath-taking amount of work out there, locally produced and from overseas, and although it is not possible in an article like this to enunciate and analyse every option, I can at least point to some of the work being done so people can look for themselves. So here’s some (only a few) examples, not all of which I would endorse by any stretch, but all of which are worthy of our attention.
Some sources of new ideas
Within the Labor Party, Carmen Lawrence, Kevin Rudd, and Lindsay Tanner are all talking structural reform of the party, which is good. Lawrence has a website, Rudd is all over the media, and Tanner wrote a book a few years back called Open Australia which is worth a look, particularly his comments about factions. There’s also Mark Latham’s ongoing output, but in particular the book he co-edited with Peter Botsman called The Enabling State. I’m no fan of third way prescriptions, but there’s a lot of really thoughtful work here and it is worth a look.
For great analysis of infrastructural problems and why market solutions are sometimes no solution at all, a must read is Waters Fall by Christopher Sheil. A book like this is important because, firstly, it is written by someone not adverse to the market, but who shows in a clear-sighted way the limits of such an approach. In the same vein, Privatisation: sell off or sell out by Bob Walker and Betty Con Walker is good.
It’s been around since 1994, but Work for All: Full Employment in the Nineties, by John Langmore and John Quiggin is worth studying. In fact, virtually everything John Quiggin writes is worth reading three times, and you can access it easily at his stupendous website at quiggin
My argument is that the left ultimately needs to look at reasonably major institutional reform and `Im attracted to the ideas presented in the field of what is called deliberative democracy. On this topic, Deliberative Democracy in Australia by John Uhr is important (if a little dry), while a great introductory book is Deliberative Democracy and Beyond by John Dryzek. Both these guys are at ANU.
Two other more recent books that outline important and innovative approaches to institutional reform are Don Edgars The Patchwork Nation and When the Boat Comes In by Boris Frankel. Edgar argues cogently for a more regionalised structure for government, where, as much as possible, those actually affected by decisions whether they be about schools, training, or community services are involved in the process.
Frankel is looking for alternatives to the neo-liberal prescription in the name of policies that serve a common good rather than market profit. He suggests the formation of a number of new institutions that could move us towards what he calls a new Australian settlement. Included in these are a national Investment Fund; a Incomes Commission; a National Environmental Sustainable Development Commission; a Reconciliation Authority; A Federal Regional Commission; and a National Development Commission to replace the Productivity Commission.
Actually, I’m not thrilled by settlement approaches, so if you want to read some broad theory on alternative approaches the collection called Contesting the Australian Way edited by Paul Smith and Bettina Cass is well worth a look. For a more traditional liberal approach to institutional reform that nonetheless recognises the necessity of non-market solutions, see Beyond the Two Party System by Ian Marsh.
None of these theorists are out-there weirdo lefties who want to bulldoze everything we do now and replace it with a radical overhaul. Certainly some of their ideas would move us in directions substantially different from the ones we operate with at the moment, but so they should. The thing is, they offer thoughtful and doable alternatives worthy of serious attention.
Build it and they will come
Politics isn’t just about good ideas and wishful thinking. It is about perception, agenda setting, and the art of the possible. So dominant are the rights prescriptions in all the forums of influence the parliament, the parties, the media that alternatives are going to have to fight to be heard. Consequently it is more important than ever not to get sucked into non-debates and non-issues and to stay focussed. But as I’ve said, the signs are not good.
Already the Howard government has opted for tactics rather than policy for the coming year. It is wedging Labor on workplace relations, immigration, and the role of unions. Instead of calling their bluff, Labor is falling for it. So is the media who keep wringing their hands about the domination by Howard’s policy agenda. The usually highly intelligent Mike Seccombe said on The Insiders program on the ABC (1 Dec) that John Howard is some kind of genius in getting people to play on his turf.
Note to all journalists who think this way: then stop talking about Howard’s agenda. As Bob Ellis commented during the election, journalist after journalist talked about Labor’s policies being overshadowed by other issues and not getting any traction, but it is the journalists themselves who choose what is overshadowed and they then spend time lamenting their own decision. It’s idiotic. It reflects less on Howards genius than on journalists insularity.
Perhaps it reflects an even deeper disconnect, to use the American expression: that between the citizens and what we might call the political class (yes, all highly problematic terms). It is significant, it seems to me, that Seccombe was speaking on a show called The Insiders. As the title recognises and acknowledges, there is an insider stratum of commentators who get to decide what is discussed and who consequently get to invent the story that is told about our political life. This stratum we might call them the coordinators are a major structural impediment against new thinking.
But a significant section of the left isn’t even thinking about all of this. It has instead transformed itself into the indignant left, and is more concerned with talking to itself about how morally pure it is than offering an achievable and popular way forward that honours the very things they think are important. It uses what they construe as the ordinary persons wrong thinking on matters like immigration as a way of explaining to itself its own estrangement from the electorate. Its not us, it’s them. And once again we are back to talking about divides and two nations and aspirationals, la de dah.
I said in a Webdiary article during the election that the Two Nations theory, the endless hand-wringing about an elite/popular divide, was a distraction from the main game, a Clayton’s issue that just plays into the hands of the conservatives. I say it again.
Enough with the endless analysis of who is and isn’t an elite; of what we mean by aspirational; of how John Howard has tricked everyone and how everyone except us is a racist troglodyte anyway. The games afoot and the real game is to make your arguments humanitarian care, public education, public health, fair taxes, sustainable future, value-added manufacturing, institutional reform while the neo-liberal world is falling apart around our ears. Build a better democracy and they will come.
Its time to wake up and smell the cafe latte.
tinota@primus.com.a=u
MORE LASCH
Cathy Bannister threw Christopher Lasch’s ideas into the continuing “elite” debate in Blaming Lasch. Here’s her rethink.
Cathy Bannister
Since I wrote that piece the other day, I’ve been wondering whether I’m just shooting the messenger. Robert Manne has been writing about the elite-ordinary divide for several years now. Mark Latham, with his emphasis on social capital also subscribes. Of course, the gnashing classes (or the right wing media who purport to speak for ordinary people) make incredible use of it. There must be something which resonates in the Lasch theory, even if logic is flawed.
What rings true is the Lasch description of that social grouping he terms ordinary people. Yes, there is a stereotype of middle-class and lower-class Americans, and Australians, which is not in the least flattering. Yes, it’s creditable there is a social malaise causing large groups of people at best to feel dissatisfied, at worst, to struggle economically and socially.
However, from there Lasch executes a few logical leaps Barishnikovian in their nimbleness. When he named the cause of the societal malaise as the (evil) Elites, and defined them, not as government, or academics, or the media, or business leaders (as does Chomsky) but as anyone with a dissenting opinion, completely without proof, and then described the consequences of this social divide (apparently, Armageddon), he and Mr Reason parted company. Lasch’s conclusions are both moralistic and completely devoid of any scientific rigour whatsoever. His is just another conspiracy theory. Lasch, conveniently, regarded science as the domain of the Elites.
For the theory to work he would have needed to demonstrate that the people who conform to this stereotype not only feel powerless in the face of the elites, but they feel more powerless now than ever before. The assertions that Western Society is suffering social and spiritual malaise, and moreover that this is directly the fault of the Elites would need to be demonstrated using replicable scientific techniques before it is given credence, not just stated as fact. Finally, every other potential cause of this social condition needs to be identified and discounted before Lasch’s theories can be accepted.
This is not to say that a scientifically unproven theory is invalid. Of course, it may be. But Lasch’s work is shrill, judgemental and counterintuitive, none of which stand in the theory’s favour.
There is at least one genuine, statistically demonstrated socioeconomic divide, that between country areas serviced by farmers and suburban fringe areas, and the suburbs and inner city areas. Country people have borne the brunt of the lifting of tariffs and withdrawal of state, government, bank and business services from the regions. While it would need to be demonstrated in some replicable form, this particular malaise seems to have clear causes which have absolutely nothing to do with the Chardonnay-swilling leftist elitists. Unless, you refer, as did Robert Manne in his 1998 essay “The Two Australian Nations”, to the monetarist elite, who are a completely different kettle of fish.
You can see how Laschian language is regurgitated by the gnashers. Lasch’s term “talking classes” was the inspiration for the “chattering classes”. Elites, ordinary people, the whole Laschian kit and caboodle has been swallowed whole and spewed up by the likes of McGuinness, Zemanek, Ramsey, Divine, Bolt. This Wednesday’s Bulletin contained an Les Carlyon piece, described as rapier sharp by Alan Ramsey, was nothing more than one-handed chest-beating. I’ve read it several times now, and the only information I can glean from it is “We won, so we must be right, nyar-nyar-nyar.” It’s not worth even trying to argue with that.
It is interesting to substitute any other minority group for the elite into any piece of text by any of the above. It makes the prejudice abundantly clear.
I keep being reminded of the Milton Friedman argument that it doesn’t matter that the foundations of a theory are rubbish, if it accurately predicts results it has validity. (Highly unlikely though it may seem, it is nonetheless a valid point.) But the converse is more true. Consider how the Lasch elite-ordinary gulf theory is applied. Invariably both in this country, and in the US under Clinton, it has been used to promote sheer populism, with no improvement of the social conditions Lasch railed against whatsoever. It is used extensively to champion one social grouping at the expense of another, which should ring warning bells.
Underlying Lasch’s work, and therefore also the gnasher’s bile, is the concept (a strangely warped Marxist concept) that populism is the only true democracy. “By the people, for the people” becomes “By at least 51% of the people, and probably not much more than 51% of the people, for those people alone, and everyone else can just sod off.”
Populism doesn’t work for the same reason as the local P&C board would be terrible at collectively fixing a cracked head gasket. To fix a car, you need a mechanic, and to run a country, you need a bunch of intelligent politicians who know what they are doing. Not a committee comprising the whole country.
Mark Latham believes in direct democracy (read, populism) on moral issues. I have a lot of time for Latham’s aims, at least the social capital theory is nice even if it falls down in the detail (in the same way Lasch does – and I won’t bore you by going into it here). But even populism restricted to moral issues only is flawed.
What happen when the majority decide they don’t want to pay taxes? What happens when the majority decide to persecute others? People will always argue that because the majority are the majority therefore have the democratic right to do whatever they damn well want, but there comes a time when it is not in the interests of the country to enact their morals. Look at what the populist regimes of Fujimori, Peron, Hitler (so popular that Austrians were overwhelmingly in favour of annexation), Mussolini, Venezuela’s Chavez and Bolivar before him, etc did for their respective countries.
Populism also ignores the fact that people will be influenced by what politicians say, thus sending the population into a spiral of influence. An interesting example of this is the opinion regarding boat people. In June 1999, a small boat containing asylum seekers sank and 5 were rescued by a passing yacht. This was reported on quite favourably, and there was even an extensive air search which failed to find any of the fifteen missing people.
In November 1999, Phillip Ruddock issued a warning to the population that there were in the order of 10,000 “illegal immigrants” in Indonesia, about to seek illegal passage to Australia. From that point onwards, the press coverage became less sympathetic, and Australians started to become openly hostile. More frightening rhetoric followed, and the hostility increased. And as the hostility increased, the government responded to it.
Lisa Hill, who at the time was a fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences (Political Science) at ANU, wrote in 1998 of the dangers of common sense policy and the dangers of anti-intellectualism. policy She concludes:
“A just and legitimate political order which seeks to operate complex, mass societies cannot and should not rely entirely on `common sense’ approaches to the business of governing. The idea that cutting off the single mother’s supporting pension will prevent teenage pregnancy might seem commonsensical but the advice of experts seems to be that it is simple minded and potentially hazardous to the welfare of mothers and children.
“The suggestion that slowing down immigration is a solution to Australia’s unemployment problem also seems sensible whereas this is by no means clear to the economists who have investigated the issue. `Common sense’ no doubt approves the rationalisation that Australians who weren’t present at the moment of invasion (or during the worst periods of Aboriginal repression) are not responsible for the miseries to which indigenous people have been subject ever since. Yet legal and moral consideration of ‘what is just?’ in mature liberal orders generally goes beyond examining physical or direct relationships of cause and effect. Indirect beneficiaries of invasion may indeed have some juridical or moral obligation to make amends to those who suffered by it.
“All of this is another way of saying that, although mainstream Australia may not like its intellectuals very much, it may need them if it wants a political order based on just principles and a sober approach to public policy.”
Lasch was fundamentally anti-intellectual. In a Laschian Nirvana, capitalism has collapsed, allowing people to find identities separate from their consumer status, the state has become redundant, people’s rediscovered religion has imparted on their lives a spirituality currently missing, everyone works together in city-sized collectivist groups, and no-one would feel in the least disenfranchised any more. Religion was vitally important in Lasch’s world – while he was not religious himself, he could see that religion gives cohesion to society. It’s difficult to imagine a view more cynical and patronising.
The only problem in Lasch’s Shangri-La-di-da would be dodging the droppings of passing pigs on the wing. I wonder what Lasch proposed doing with the evil Elites (who, let’s face it, would be bright enough to come and exploit this happy system of lawlessness for their own benefit). Guess they’d end up shipped to Nauru.
That said, it isn’t enough to disprove Lasch to expose Howard. Unlike some of the humanist commentariat, Howard’s vision in reality bears little resemblance to Lasch’s. He has simply pilfered the most potent images and symbols. It is possible that some of Howard’s anti-Elite rhetoric borrows heavily from what Thomas Frank has described as the secular religion of Market Populism.
Thomas Frank, writing in the Nation Magazine in 2000, speaks of targeting of the left-wing progressive elite, but this time by market theorists. By the late 1990s, the dogma of economic rationalism was accepted ubiquitously by every commentator in America. The market, comprising as it does individuals making independent purchasing decisions, has been equated with “the people”, making the market the perfect populist democratic decision maker.
He wrote:
“And as business leaders melded themselves theoretically with the people, they found that market populism provided them with powerful weapons to use against their traditional enemies in government and labor. Since markets express the will of the people, virtually any criticism of business could be described as an act of “elitism” arising out of despicable contempt for the common man. According to market populism, elites are not those who, say, watch sporting events from a skybox, or spend their weekends tooling about on a computer-driven yacht, or fire half their work force and ship the factory south. No, elitists are the people on the other side of the equation: the labor-unionists and Keynesians who believe that society can be organized in any way other than the market way. Since what the market does – no matter how whimsical, irrational or harmful – is the Will of the People, any scheme to operate outside its auspices or control its ravages is by definition a dangerous artifice, the hubris of false expertise.”
and:
“How did populism ever , become the native tongue of the wealthy? Historically, of course, populism was a rebellion against the corporate order, a political tongue reserved by definition for the non-rich and the non-powerful. It was a term associated with the labor movement and angry agrarians. But in 1968, at the height of the antiwar movement, this primal set piece of American democracy seemed to change its stripes. The war between classes somehow reversed its polarity: Now it was a conflict in which the patriotic, blue-collar “silent majority” (along with their employers) faced off against a new elite, a “liberal establishment” with its spoiled, flag-burning children. This new ruling class-a motley assembly of liberal journalists, liberal academics, liberal foundation employees, liberal politicians and the shadowy powers of Hollywood-earned the people’s wrath not by exploiting workers or ripping off the family farmers but by contemptuous disregard for the wisdom and values of average Americans.” (The Rise of Market Populism: America’s new secular religion, by Thomas Frank, The Nation magazine, October 30, 2000.)
There is more than a little resemblance between the Elite defined above, and that decried by Australia’s right-wing press and politicians. Frank’s defined concept, market populism, seems to underlie the Liberal Party’s economic strategies up to the point of the Shane Stone memo. In the hands of Howard (and his strategy team) market populism finds itself in a shotgun wedding with the Lasch theory as a very powerful propagandistic tool. Thomas Frank, again:
“Barbara Ehrenreich, one of its most astute chroniclers, points out that the backlash always hinged on a particular appeal to working-class voters, some of whom were roped into the Republican coalition with talk of patriotism, culture war and family values. Class war worked for Republicans as long as it was restricted to cultural issues; when economic matters came up the compound grew unstable very quickly. Lee Atwater, an adviser to Presidents Reagan and Bush, is said to have warned his colleagues in 1984 that their new blue-collar constituents were “liberal on economics” and that without culture wars to distract them “populists were left with no compelling reason to vote Republican.”
Clearly, the elite-ordinary rhetoric is being used as a smoke screen in Australia as well.
So, there you have it. That’s how he does it. The last thing that all you on the “elite” side of politics should do is accept the proposition that you are elitist, that this means you have shown distain for most of the population, and as such you have brought Howard on yourselves and should hang your heads in shame. Don’t buy into it: it’s unmitigated propaganda intended to silence you.
Again, I’m reminded of Muldoon’s last term in office. In 1984, a visionary by the name of David Lange completely blew the complacent populism of Muldoon out of the water, simply by appealing to the New Zealand population’s higher morals. (It may also have had something to do with an embarrassing Muldoon ad showing dancing cossacks taking over the map).
I’m not saying that I agree with everything Lange did, or that he was spectacularly successful thereafter (there is some suggestion that he was punished for breaking up the ANZUS treaty). However, he was an infinite improvement on Muldoon and set the moral standards for New Zealand thereafter. Labor, take note.