Public ideas
Joseph Stiglitz on political polarization
Last weekend’s Global Roaming on the ABC was given to a discussion with Joseph Stiglitz on political polarisation. The discussion was mainly about how the US has become polarized, but the process he describes is one we have seen in many countries, and is playing out in Australia but with less vehemence.
Although America’s divisions are along several cleavages – education, location, opportunity, what they call “race”, income and wealth – they have a common economic source. That source is to be found in the 1980s, when Americans abandoned the last of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and embraced Reagan’s small government and deregulationist agenda, based on trickle-down economics.
In what should be a warning to Australia, Stiglitz specifically mentions capital gains tax concessions introduced by the Reagan government. Concessions that favour capital gains contribute to the accumulation of financial wealth, widening wealth inequality, in all its dimensions. Concessions that privilege wealth accumulation have more permanent effects than other measures, such as income tax cuts, that privilege the well-off.
Subsequent administrations could have reversed these economic distortions, but they were nervous about doing so. He is particularly critical of the Clinton administration for its policy of appeasing those who were opposed to public spending and regulation. By giving in to those interests it allowed a worse problem in inequality to accumulate.
Here again he has a warning for our Labor Party: the longer it takes to deal with the economic forces dividing a country, the more likely it is that those who are left behind will turn to a Trump-like populist.
Stiglitz notes that Australia has three important protections against the emergence of a Trump – compulsory voting, preferential voting, and an independent electoral commission. But while they may give us some leeway, they do not, in themselves, halt the emergence of a group who feel disrespected, disempowered, and left behind by the elites of Washington or Canberra.
His advice for Kamala Harris and the Democrats, and by extension for a social-democratic government seeking re-election, is to claim the high ground in the public imagination. In America that is to frame the social-democratic agenda in terms of freedoms, as Roosevelt did, particularly freedom from want and freedom from fear. That’s essentially a framing of JS Mill’s ideas on liberty, in terms familiar to Americans. He notes that Harris is already using that language.
He wants the left to take back the word “freedom”. The left have allowed the right to frame “freedom” in terms of the freedom of corporations to deprive wage-earners of economic freedom, of gun owners to deprive others of freedom from fear, and so on. These themes are developed in his book The road to freedom: economics and the good society. (The title rings a bell – didn’t some Austrian write something about The road to serfdom?)
It is coincidental, perhaps, that Richard Slotkin, in his book A great disorder: national myth and the battle for America, writes of a similar re-framing of the American discourse. His historian colleague Eric Foner reviews his work in the London Review of Books: In need of a new myth. A country needs to be held together by a myth, “a popular tradition that embodies core social values”. He identifies two possibilities for America:
One, which would turn the clock back to reconstitute the “cultural Lost Cause”’, would be a disaster. The second, whose elements have not yet coalesced, would unite the country in favour of a tolerant, more equal tomorrow, in effect linking racial justice with greater economic equality.
That cultural lost cause, Foner suggests, is the America that was supposedly endowed to the “white” man.
In Australia we are not so burdened with America’s history of slavery and the broken promise of Reconstruction, but we have our own “cultural lost cause”. It’s Australia as the paradise of the mediocre. It’s a people who lack the confidence to forge their own way in their own region, who are afraid of their country’s 50 000-year history, who cling to once-powerful powers and the symbols of a long-departed empire, who dismiss learning and science, who are content to dig up stuff out of the ground for cleverer people to fashion into useful products, who hold the common wealth in contempt (unless they can wrangle a subsidy or a tax break), and who aspire to own a fourth investment property and accumulate a multi-million superannuation balance.
Migration in hotter times
In the US election, and in recent European elections, immigration has become a major issue, particularly for parties on the far right who exploit people’s fear of the stranger, and the notion that people from other cultures, with different skin colour and appearance, will displace supposedly homogeneous native populations.
Even those less inclined to such extreme ways of thinking are concerned about the impact of immigration on housing prices and on government services such as schools and roads.
In case we’re thinking immigration pressures can be contained by building walls or turning around boats, we need to look at immigration pressures in the context of climate change.
As the planet heats up, many more parts of the world are going to become too hot for people to live in safely, increasing the pressure for people to move.
That’s the warning from sustainability campaigner Jonathan Porritt, interviewed on the ABC’s Science Show:One billion people at risk as temperatures rise. (26 minutes)
Porritt, author of the report Migration in hotter times: humanity at risk, warns of the pressures to come:
2023 showed us, in countries all around the world, the deeply damaging impacts of climate change today. By 2050, those 2023 extremes will be seen as mild, with an increasing number of scientists warning that future impacts could lead to as many as 1 billion people being forcibly displaced.
He doesn’t offer novel solutions, but he does ask us to think about the inseparable linkage between climate and migration. He is dismayed that elections have been going ahead without people even mentioning the way migration pressures and climate change are related.
Of all people in the world Australians should be acutely aware of these pressures. We know that many parts of our continent are too hot to support human habitation, and these are not only in our inland deserts: we might recall that in large parts of western Sydney in the summer of 2019-2020 people experienced temperatures of 50 degrees or higher for three consecutive days. We have been experiencing internal migration for more than a hundred years, and it is being accelerated by climate change. It’s a model for the whole world.
Can liberal democracy survive? Yes, actually
That’s the optimistic title of Martyn Goddard’s most recent contribution on his Policy Post.
Why is it, he asks, that throughout most western liberal democracies, “trepidation rules”.
The moderate Left is weak and in disarray; the moderate Centre Right is outflanked or captured by populist demagogues from the hard right and far right: Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Netanyahu, Johnson, Dutton.
…
Millions of ordinary people feel so alienated, so detached from those with power, that they just want to blow the place up. And so they turn to far-right populists who proffer ringing and simple answers to intractable problems that can only be resolved, if at all, by time and careful wisdom.
He searches through economic data, using a sample of eight western democracies, for an explanation. In fact, in terms of the main economic indicators – GDP growth and unemployment – material economic conditions have been good.
One development that stands out, however, is the rise of inequality. “Decades of globalisation have simultaneously boosted aggregate economic growth while wrecking the fortunes of swathes of formerly productive, prosperous communities.”
He goes on to write:
When large parts of a population see, upon good evidence, that the benefits of economic activity are denied to them and instead flow to a very few powerful, privileged and rich people, anger and resentment are likely to follow.
He notes that the countries that have seen the greatest rise in inequality have also been the countries with the strongest rise in far-right populism.
His analysis extends beyond basic indicators of economic welfare. He goes into housing affordability, trust in government, xenophobic attitudes to immigrants, and social isolation – problems with indicators that tend to correlate with indicators of economic inequality.
In the data he presents, Australia comes out comparatively well in comparison with other western democracies, particularly the USA. But even in countries doing well, there is unease.
There are many reasons for a sense of unease but it is difficult, from the available data, to see why people in many countries seem so much more susceptible than usual to conspiracy theories, generalised pessimism and the proffered solutions of right-wing populists and fabulists. The most obvious conclusion is that this palpable sense of unease is perhaps less about reality than about what we are being urged to believe.
We see that among our journalists, including ABC journalists, who urge us to believe we are going through a “cost-of-living crisis”, a convenient distraction by the well off who don’t want us to look too closely at structural inequality.
Goddard’s essay ends on an optimistic note, and it’s not just a journalist’s happy ending. In many countries people experiencing the offerings of right-wing populists are coming to learn that the populists’ simple solutions do not improve their well-being. The UK and Hungary stand out as examples of countries where people have experienced the letdown of right-wing populism. Perhaps the western world is coming to the point of peak populism.
Although Goddard includes Australia in his eight countries, he does not single out Australia for particular attention. A ringing defeat of the Dutton-led Coalition would confirm that we too have reached peak populism.
Loneliness, social media and radicalization
The organization Ending Loneliness Together has designated the first week of August as Loneliness Awareness Week.
Each year they present a set of indicators of social isolation, and of loneliness – “a subjective unpleasant or distressing feeling of a lack of connection to other people, along with a desire for more, or more satisfying, social relationships.”
You can watch a 4-minute ABC videoclip of an interview with Ben Smith, one of the four researchers who developed the most recent report. (There is a also a more comprehensive “deep dive” 2023 report.)
Unsurprisingly, if we are poor or uneducated we are more likely to be lonely. Being unemployed is associated with loneliness.
The research blows away some myths about loneliness. The loneliest are not the old. Rather its young people – aged 18-24 – who are most likely to report being lonely.
Unfortunately there is not a long time series of research on loneliness, but that finding looks disturbing. It doesn’t align with the recollections of older Australians who grew up in the days before cellphones and social media. For them high school, university, national service and the first real job were all periods of intense social interaction.
Smith believes that while social media facilitates communication, it does not necessarily fill our need for good quality relationships. Many people have an expectation that social media will help us develop social relationships, but it can leave us disappointed, exacerbating the sense of loneliness. There is evidence, contrary to any intuitive guess, that those who use more social media are lonelier than those who use it sparingly: one can have a large social network, but still feel lonely, Smith says.
This work by Ending Loneliness Together coincides with ASIO’s elevation of our terror alert level. Justin Bassi, of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and former National Security Advisor to Malcolm Turnbull, discusses the way in which isolated young people can become radicalized. Conspiracy theories and extreme views can be energized and amplified through social media. People are not meeting physically: they’re being revved up online says Bassi: “Seeing a trend”: ASIO raise terror threat level. (9 minutes)