Public ideas
What do we learn from history – or do we have to re-learn at great cost?
“Are we so limited as human beings that we need to see the catastrophe before we can imagine it?”
That’s a quote from Irish writer Fintan O’Toole, at an Adelaide Writers’ Week session, Have we learned nothing from the twentieth century, edited and re-broadcast as a Saturday Extra segment last weekend. (33 minutes)
Besides O’Toole, Geraldine Doogue’s other guests were Anatol Lieven of Georgetown University, Ben Macintyre of The Times, and the ABC’s Laura Tingle.
The discussion was free-ranging, but three themes emerged.
One is that we tend to be frozen in standardized interpretations of the twentieth century, and therefore have a certain deterministic view of how this century will play out.
Another, captured in the quote from O’Toole, is that we have to re-learn, at great cost.
And a third is that right-wing strongmen such as Putin, Trump and Johnson find in historical accounts enough ingredients to fabricate their own history – the Russian empire, great America, Britain’s glory. Those strongmen thrive on a perceived loss of greatness. They also thrive on people’s reaction against the developments of the twentieth century, a century that saw the relative decline of the so-called “white race”, the loss of male privilege, and the assertion of people with different sexual preferences.
Much of O’Toole’s contribution was about institutions. In classical Burkean terms the “right” was the defender of institutions, but the “right” that emerged from the late twentieth century has been contemptuous of institutions, particularly government. Institutions matter, and in that context O’Toole stressed the need to encapsulate the learning of the twentieth century in institutions and laws. For him the main learning is:
Democracy cannot be stable in societies that are not moving towards economic equality.
Liberalism and the “Liberal” Party
When foreigners look at Australian politics they are often puzzled to find that a party properly described as conservative-reactionary calls itself the “Liberal” Party. Surely this is some Orwellian misnomer.
There are, however, historical associations with Lockean liberalism in the Liberal Party. The ABC’s Gareth Hutchens asks Why are voters abandoning the Liberal Party? What does liberalism stand for today?. In his search for answers he delves into the party’s history, finding that many of its founders in 1944 were most strongly attracted to the philosophy of the British Liberal Party (later to become the Liberal Democratic Party), a party that was genuinely based on liberal principles. Our Liberal Party’s founders specifically rejected the adjective “conservative”, and seriously considered the name “progressive”.
Hutchens’ article is mainly about the shifting ideological alignment of the Liberal Party, including its turn to neoliberalism from the 1980s – a radical economic philosophy quite at odds with conservatism. Labor, too, has taken on much of the neoliberal agenda: a bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism may be one reason voters are abandoning both the traditional parties – the Liberal Party faster than the Labor Party.
He suggests it would be “instructive to ask Australians what they think liberalism stands for, and what it would take for them to vote Liberal again”.
His article should be a welcome contribution to the domain of public ideas, because he is writing about ideology, which can almost be a term of abuse. For example we often hear an argument being dismissed by the statement: “but that view is based on ideology”, as if there is something dirty or unwholesome about public ideas. Many of our universities in their schools of economics and politics have emphasized public choice theory as the dominant political model, a theory that applies to politics a non-ideological marketing model that has more to do with the competition between Coles and Woolworths than to the world of public ideas.
The Liberal Party’s factions today
Hutchens’ article is a history of the Liberal Party’s shifting ideology over time. For a contemporary account Sydney Morning Herald National Affairs Editor James Massola has an article How Morrison’s shattering defeat gave Dutton a seismic shift in factional power providing a who’s who of the factions in a parliamentary party that has lost most of its centrist representatives. The Liberals’ factions are more fluid than Labor’s, and they tend to be more ideological, but those ideologies do not fit into any neat binary classification, such as “wet/dry”, or “socially progressive/socially conservative”. Rather they cut in all ways that can be imagined. Massola’s article reveals all the complexity and instability of the dying days of Stalin’s regime in the USSR.