Public ideas
The poverty of wokeness
Australia is divided into two tribes. One is “rural, outer suburban, male-dominated, less-educated, older”, has cancelled Woolworths because of its woke attitude to Australia Day, and has firm views on the meaning of January 26. The other is “wealthy, more-educated, professional, inner-urban”, shops at Woolworths, and also has a firm view that January 26 is Invasion Day.
These confected tribal divisions are described in Crispin Hull’s post the not-so-irrational conspiracy. They’re not Hull’s classifications, but they are his interpretation of Dutton’s endeavour to bring Trumpian politics to Australia. Dutton will stand up “for the working battlers who are interested in the cost of living rather than social causes”. He will defend their interests against the campaign of the “political class and elites” who seek to “denigrate and cancel our national day”.
Francis Fukuyama wrote of the right’s attempts to characterize “the left” or “progressives” as comprising people whose concern is solely with woke issues, while they ignore the real concerns of ordinary people – “battlers” and “aspirationals” to borrow the Coalition’s labels. He wrote:
The more extreme forms of political correctness are in the end the province of relatively small numbers of writers, artists, students, and intellectuals on the left. But they are picked up by the conservative media and amplified as representative of the left as a whole. Identity: contemporary identity politics and the struggle for recognition.
The most explicit form of this classification is exhibited by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has defined his state as “where woke goes to die”. He will protect Florida’s citizens from those on the left who are conspiring to take America down a path that ignores the interests and established values of ordinary people.
Hull reminds us that such thinking and misrepresentation is not only by the right. Many on the left are into conspiracy theories. Imagine a cabal of fossil-fuel companies, government and big business, conspiring to stymie action on climate change, a united force of evil under the banner “capitalism”.
Nick Gruen has drawn readers’ attention to an article by Geoff Shullenberger The poverty of anti-wokeness in the politically conservative magazine Compact. It’s a review of four works on identity politics, with a warning that trying to define constituents in terms of identity leads nowhere, and distracts from the hard work of dealing with real problems, be they on the agenda of the left or the right. He concludes:
The fact that the right and left alike are currently mobilized to assert competing claims to victim status points to a bitter truth: Identity politics isn’t going anywhere. Appeals to identity to extract limited concessions from power will likely be deployed more than ever in the years to come by members of all political factions. This is especially true as long as America lacks both an economic settlement that benefits ordinary people and a compelling account of shared national purpose. Wokeness, in mistaking some of the particulars of American history for a metaphysical condition, has helped make the past decade of politics particularly toxic and futile. Anti-wokeness, in confusing symptoms of America’s degradation for causes, has failed to offer any real alternative.
Particularly directed at the left or progressives is an Atlantic article How October 7 changed America’s free-speech culture by Conor Friedersdorf. Many on the left have signed on to a package of moral judgements, based on people’s identities rather than their actions, leading to some mind-boggling public stances. Thus a violent extreme right-wing movement, grounded in religious-based authoritarianism and misogyny – Hamas – finds supporters among those on the left. In a further logical twist it becomes OK to ignore the suffering of Jews, because they are part of a privileged white elite: in view of this imbalance anyone inclined to sympathize with the Jews in condemning Hamas’s brutality on October 7 should be cancelled. And then there is the implicit suggestion that a microaggression, such as an offensive remark to someone of non-binary sexual identity, ranks in moral equivalence to a deranged thug throwing a hand grenade into a shed of terrified concert goers.
Friedorsdorf is describing the situation in the USA, where political polarization seems to be more extreme than in Australia – so far. But the situation here could deteriorate. For example, writing in Inside Story, Frank Bongiorno reports that “The government’s hostility to Hamas is taken for granted everywhere except among the unhinged populist right, whose extremism nonetheless now often finds a platform in parts of the commercial media”.[1]
Friedersdorf’s concludes his article with advice for all liberal democracies:
Shortsighted factions on the identitarian left, the establishment center, and the populist right continue to attack liberalism, despite its record of helping humans coexist and prosper. The liberal approach is the only practical, anti-authoritarian, nondiscriminatory way to peacefully resolve America’s most heated political disputes.
These writings tend to confirm the finding in Rebecca Huntley’s well-researched 2017 work, Still lucky, revealing that contrary to some popular views, Australians are remarkably united around most important public issues. There is hope that Dutton’s Trumpian efforts to divide the country may not find fertile ground.
1. See Bongiorno’s article Gramsci’s message for Anthony Albanese, also marked in this section of public ideas. ↩
Gramsci’s advice to Labor – it’s the culture stupid
A half-century ago, when I joined the public service as God’s gift to public administration, I was trying to argue my idea of a policy proposal with my boss. He was dismissive, arguing that my idea had no precedent, but as an annoying young smartarse I had anticipated that response, noting that the government had done something similar in 1948. His reply was “but that’s when the opposition was in government”.
Such was the attitude in 1972, at the tail end of 23 years of Coalition government. Labor = Opposition, Coalition = the natural party of government.
That attitude persists in a milder form. Notice, for example, the way journalists refer to the government: if it’s a Coalition government it’s usually “the government”, but if it’s a Labor government it’s usually “the Labor government”. It’s as if the adjective “Labor” is somehow synonymous with “acting”, “temporary”, “transitional” – a short-term convenience like the rental while your car is being repaired after a breakdown.
When a party is established as the natural party of government its life is easy, because everyone knows it will do the right thing: it doesn’t have to explain its policies. To quote Frank Bongiorno in his Inside Story essay – Gramsci’s message for Anthony Albanese:
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to explain how power and culture work in capitalist societies. The “common sense” of the ruling class – coinciding with its interests – comes to be seen as that of society as a whole – the “national interest,” to use some contemporary parlance. Conservatives apply Gramsci’s ideas faithfully in their relentless efforts to dominate culture. Their success in the recent Voice referendum was testament to such efforts.
The challenge for this government, as it has been for previous Labor Commonwealth governments, is to turn that culture around.
Labor will know it has succeeded when journalists no longer add the adjective “Labor” when referring to it in government, and when public servants start to think of the Coalition as “the opposition” – assuming it survives such a cultural transition.