Other politics and public ideas
The case for political renewal
One of the Coalition’s main arguments for re-election is that they have current experience in government, while Labor doesn’t. It’s not a novel argument: it’s simply an Australian version of Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s rationalization for their indefinite continuity in power.
In his article Let’s use this election to raise the quality of the politics we get, Ross Gittins warns against the “better the devil you know” notion that keeps many voting for the incumbent government. The longer a government stays in power, Gittins reminds us, the worse they get. “They get lazy and complacent. They worry more about helping their friends and less about keeping the rest of us happy”. He goes on to write that “they develop a sense of entitlement. They think they own the place and it’s their own money they’re spending.”
He also warns about the cynical but common view of politicians that they’re all a pack of self-interested liars, a justification people use for distancing themselves from political engagement. But our parties do have different policies: “Who we vote for in this election will change where we end up in 10 years’ time”.
Exporting democracy
What does Australia have in common with Belgium, Luxembourg, Costa Rica and Uruguay?
Compulsory voting, or, as E J Dionne from the Brookings Institution calls it “universal voting”.
He and Rosalind Dixon from the University of New South Wales were on Saturday Extra last weekend, discussing the possibility of universal voting as one way to rescue America from its path of democratic decline: Could Australia save American democracy? (22 minutes)
In comparison with the US, voting in Australia is not only compulsory; it is also easier. People are encouraged to enrol, there are established facilities for postal and absent votes, and there are always plenty of polling booths. Dionne described measures used by Republican state administrations to suppress people’s voting rights, and the sheer unpleasantness and inconvenience people often experience in voting in he US – no democracy sausages, no cake stands run by the Anglican ladies’ auxiliary, just intolerably long queues.
In Australia we have not experienced the extreme voter-suppression moves used by America’s Republicans, but the Coalition has attempted to make voter ID compulsory, as a means of discouraging the most marginalized and socially-disconnected from voting. And as the ABC’s Matt Garrick points out, in remote parts of the Northern Territory the Australian Electoral Commission has achieved only 70 percent voter registration.
Dionne and Dixon also covered the way universal voting transforms a country’s political culture. As Dionne said, when everyone, or almost everyone, turns out to vote, “politicians can ill-afford to ignore any single eligible voter”. More basically universal voting transforms voting from something we may or may not do in a political market – akin to deciding whether to go to the pub or not – to the status of a civic duty.
There was some inconclusive argument about whether universal voting generally favoured the “left” or the “right”. But there was agreement that because extremist right-wing groups and conspiracy theorists – Q’Anon, anti-vaxxers, “replacement theory believers” – are generally highly motivated to vote, universal voting should dilute their influence.
Dionne is co-author, with Miles Rappoport, of 100% democracy: the case for universal voting.
Social media – a re-erected tower of Babel
We generally interpret the story of the Tower of Babel as a lament about tribalism, but it is also about the fragmentation of social relationships – “people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension”.
That’s the perspective of Jonathan Haidt writing in The Atlantic: Why the last ten years of American life have been uniquely stupid. It’s a comment on social media – not so much on social media itself, but the way we use it. He writes:
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.
Social media has “both magnified and weaponized the frivolous”, and in doing so has chipped away at trust in the public sphere. It has given voice to holders of extreme or whacky views, drowning out the voice of reason, contributing to political polarization, and weakening the power of democratic institutions.
His ideas to solve the problem of what he calls “structural stupidity” raise difficult issues for everyone who values the principle of free speech but who also misses the civilizing institution of the public forum with its shared norms of what constitutes civilized discourse.
Ukraine – war’s political whitewash
One of our readers, annoyed by the western media’s Manichean presentation of the combatants – Russians bad, Ukrainians good – has brought to our attention a Jacobin article by Branko Marcetic: Whitewashing Nazis doesn’t help Ukraine.
His article is mainly about the neo-Nazi militia group known as the Azov Regiment, that was officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard in 2014. The Azov Regiment has come to media attention in recent days, because they are based in Mariupol, and are mounting a tough resistance against Russia’s brutal attempts to subjugate the city, possibly using chemical weapons. Some media, including those that have been critical of it in the past, have whitewashed the Azov Regiment – suggesting that they are really not as bad as we once thought – and others are portraying Azov and other Nazi groups as tiny fringe movements.
The reality is that Ukraine does have a significant extreme right-wing movement. (In view of Ukraine’s history, shared with some other countries formerly in the Soviet Bloc, it would be surprising if it didn’t.) Marcetic’s main concern is that the west’s tendency to look the other way is helping legitimize far-right movements the world over, and is building up the far-right’s political legitimacy in Ukraine itself.