Voice campaign illustrates stunning intellectual failure by the left

 

Peter Strempel, 30 September 2023 

It used to be that that the political left in Australia ran intellectual circles around the right.  Perhaps the Overton Window has shifted so far right that the nominal left today is as intellectually bereft as any conservative grouping was 40 years ago.

Consider a standard socialist critique of representative democracy and its corporatist impulses to suborn ‘peak’ representative bodies to advise it: unions and employer groups are good examples.

The critique is that joining such bodies is almost immediately an ‘embourgeoisement’ of its members, who are drawn into a technocrat-bureaucratic paradigm that offers them personal advancement and privilege the same way that membership of the bourgeoisie (often also called the middle class) ties you to the neoliberal political economy.

This makes you more representative of your newly found socio-economic class interests than the people you supposedly represent, so the argument goes.  In the case of the Voice, it might be argued, what evidence is there that this is not exactly what happened to all previous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representative bodies?  That argument could well conclude by asserting that this every embourgeoisement of First Nations representation is the biggest reason for the continuing failure to ‘close the gap’ and address First Nations problems more positively.

So, if you know this argument, you know you have to overcome it if you are to win the Yes campaign for the coming referendum by putting forward a strong counterargument, internally consistent, and with the unarguable integrity of sincerity.  Moreover, any strong counterargument to the left critique of embourgeoisement should have naturally served as the basis for easy rebuttals of all the No campaign misinformation and outright lies.

But no such argument emerged.  Not from unions.  Not from the ALP.  Definitely not from the Greens, who certainly like arguments, though most often not any useful ones.

What conclusions are supported by this failure of intellectual capital in the ALP? 

‘Albanese’s ALP never intended to win the Yes campaign.’  I can’t quite bring myself to believe that possibility.  It would require re-casting Albanese and a significant number of ALP figures as precisely the conspiratorial numpties the News Corporation would have us believe in.  Nothing quite so childish, concocted by such a feckless lot of naïve provocateurs, has ever been the truth.

‘Neither unions nor the ALP any longer value any socialist critiques of political economy, nor any intellectual critique of any kind.’  I could persuade myself of that possibility.  It’s not a comforting thought.  It would mean all our major parties are now anti-intellectual conservatives, and unions are merely anachronisms that serve only to protect rent-seeking claims by already privileged memberships.

A corollary of these considerations is that the No campaign is less about defeating the Voice than it is about defeating Albanese’s ALP, and more about a long-running pathology by Rupert Murdoch (and now Lachlan) to destroy any force that doesn’t acknowledge and pander to his interests.  After all, the puppet spokesperson for the No campaign, Peter Dutton, has only ever used rhetoric trialed first on Sky News, and has seen his own polling approval drop even as the intended No vote appears to be swelling.

I have no doubt at all that despite their nominal support for the Yes campaign, the Greens would actually welcome a Labor defeat, for the sake of the Schadenfreude (another pathological reflex).

Yesterday I argued the case that the Albanese ALP miscalculated that its own increasingly conservative, bourgeois ‘values’ are not shared nearly as widely as its members assume, mainly because of an increasing wealth disparity within Australia the ALP refuses to acknowledge and address, despite such a mission being the very reason the party came into existence.

Today I argue that it is also intellectual failure on the nominal political left that leads the ALP to assume it has support for issues it simply doesn’t understand politically any more, rather than in terms of its own socio economic class interests.

Perhaps the two issues are actually two sides of the same coin.  It takes a loss of intellect—both attention to salient details and analytical skills—to fail to understand a widening gulf between the entire political class, including the media that feed off politics, and the people that class pretends it represents while serving only its own interests.  Once that intellectual failure is no longer even questioned, it becomes less surprising to see aspirational politics become no more than just more undignified and counterproductive mud wrestling.

Voice failure is one of arrogantly assumed values

 

Peter Strempel, 29 September 2023 

The almost certain defeat of the Voice referendum can be blamed on many factors, from the continuing Murdoch family project of destroying democracy to the mean-spirited selfishness of John Howard’s ignorant and ‘silent majority’.

But that would be to propose nothing can ever be done about such influences, and that wouldn’t be true.  What is true is that the Albanese ALP and the rest of the Yes campaign hasn’t done anything at all to counter these influences.

Instead, this alliance of, perhaps, well-meaning but quite privileged people assumed that many others not thus privileged automatically share their views.  Their Weltanschauung.  Their socio-economic prejudices and sensibilities.  Their bourgeois values.

But increasing numbers of Australians do not.  Because the ever increasing disparity in wealth and privilege that has been accelerating relentlessly since the 1980s, powered by an unchallenged neoliberal political economy, has failed to keep up with the embourgeoisement of those who don’t benefit from supporting that political economy.

In case the terminology seems arcane, embourgeoisement is a process quite similar to that which turned Anthony Albanese from a housing commission kid into prime minister, by opening a path, via the bourgeois institution of the ALP, to re-shape the lower class kid into a middle class man and upper class leader.  Similar paths are offered in the private sector and the nominally non-political public service.  Offering a small but rising share in the wealth of a society gradually instils the concerns, values, and prejudices of the socio-economic cohort who are the beneficiaries.  They absorb attitudes and unwritten rules as norms that may not apply to others, which are reinforced by consumer culture, and the mass media (old and new).  That is embourgeoisement: a temporally longitudinal project creating supporters for neoliberal political economy, even if those supporters aren’t directly aware of exactly what they are supporting.

And so, we have thoroughly bourgeois (or ‘middle class’, if you like that terminology better) people like the prime minister, progressively-minded professionals, and media content creators, assuming their own conceptions of ethics and political ‘norms’ apply to a great many more people than have actually been successfully embourgeoised.

People who may be resentful of what appears to them to be patronizing and demeaning rhetoric and behaviour by and apparently self-appointed cognoscenti, and becoming thereby susceptible to all the worst instincts and reflexes played to by misinformation, disinformation, and populist fascist sentiments peddled not just by shadowy online groups, but quite openly by Coalition MPs, politicians even further to the right, the News Corporation and even Nine Entertainment.

When the Uluru agenda was first announced—all of it, not just the statement from the heart—its champions should have known what enemies they faced, what opposition they would have to address, and what they needed to do to persuade potential allies.

Their failure was to be so complacent and self-satisfied as to not recognize how deeply underprivilege now runs in Australian society, and how violent the resentment is growing to being patronized and lied to by self-serving politicians or spokespeople obviously better fed than the people they preach to.

For a nation to go along with an idea proposed as visionary leadership, the nation first has to have faith in its leaders, not be daily confronted by ever new revelations of corruption and abuse of privilege.  A corrupt leadership class breeds contempt for imposed rules and order altogether.

But that isn’t even the worst problem faced by the Yes campaign.  Albanese’s ALP can still claim some moral high ground on public sector corruption, but not on hubris and arrogance about supposedly shared values.  No one in the ALP has done anything to bring the party or its policies closer to lived lives and experiences outside its own comfortably embourgeoised demographic.

The Yes campaign has been no exception.  It preaches to the converted and fails utterly to understand or address the lives and concerns of the growing number of Australians living outside its own socio-economic demographic.  Instead, people like Albanese still treat voting trends towards Greens and Teals as if they are temporary shifts, and fail to act against really baleful influences like the Murdoch propaganda machine, as if it were really only bad press rather than a collective private sector political actor.

You could probably say of Albanese, and every other Yes campaigner, they are ‘nice’ people.  But you couldn’t go so far as to say they are smart political operators, not deluded by believing their own bullshit and their own prejudices.

If that doesn’t change in the ALP, it must prepare itself for even greater disappointments after the failure of the coming referendum.

News Corp drives ‘no’ campaign, not Dutton

Peter Strempel, 12 September 2023 

Paul Bongiorno is a thoughtful and informed commentator, one of only a handful, now, who are worth reading.

Yet even he illustrates a blind-spot in news media that is trashing Australian democracy: the baleful influence of the Murdoch family’s News Corporation.

Personifying the Voice referendum no campaign as Peter Dutton’s doing is inexplicably wrong-headed.

In May last year, then WA premier Mark McGowan labelled Dutton as an extremist at odds with Australian mainstream views, and as ‘not that smart’. 

It’s an assessment easy to come by given Dutton’s performance.  More than that, it’s also quite easy to connect the dots between the far right commentariat of News Corp and Dutton: they set the talking points and Dutton repeats them.  Easy politics for a clueless man.

Put another way, Dutton appears to have no policy positions of his own, and just goes along with whatever makes its way to the top of the bilepit at Sky News after dark.

From that perspective, it isn’t Dutton at all driving divisive and hate-mongering politics.  It’s News Corporation through its various outlets, including especially in regional Australia

In June 2021 the ABC reported that a new deal by News Corp would see its Sky News ‘metropolitan-based channel’s daily news coverage, as well as its evening line-up of conservative commentators like Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny, Paul Murray and Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin’ reach seven million free to air regional viewers through the Southern Cross Austereo network.

In Australian cities, Sky News comes as part of a Foxtel subscription package.  Why is it free in the regions?  Because News Corp has correctly identified that to be successful in its political campaigning, influencing regional voters is a winning strategy.

It exposes News Corporation not as a news business, but as an overt political actor with an agenda loosely identified as right wing populism, quite likely because governments of that stripe are likely to assist corporate profitability by lowering corporate taxes, offering more tax loopholes and subsidies, and dismantling or blocking regulations relating to ethical, legal business practices.

Opposing the Voice is less about racism, though racism plays in populist politics, than it is about undermining politics with any hint of progressive ambitions.

In sum, it would be fair to say the no campaign is driven by News Corp, not the creaky, undisciplined LPA/NPA/LNP axis, and on the understanding that divisive politics takes the spotlight off corporate misconduct and profitability.

So, I think Bongiorno may be right in aggregate, but either blind or too cowardly to call out the real power behind the no vote in the coming referendum.