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.
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