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.