The Liberal party is trapped in a death spiral
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Several months ago, liberals and conservatives celebrated the centenary of ‘fusion’ – the moment in 1909 when the Protectionist party and Free Trade party buried their differences, and combined to fight the rising Australian Labor Party, which had given the world its first genuinely Labor government. Despite attempts to regard the Liberal Party that emerged from that fusion as the forerunner of today’s mob, they ain’t – and the fact that Australian historians refer to conservative parties as the ‘non-Labor’ forces for shorthand recognises the signal fact of our history, that the broad middle of the Right is a coalition of forces and, at its worst, simply a cloud of atoms pointed in roughly the same direction. In the UK, the Conservative Party arose from the aristocracy, the church and the universities, the Liberal party from the bourgeoisie, the North, and non-conformist protestant sects. Each has rolled over into something else – and the Tories have made a fresh and audacious move – but they’ve always maintained a social base, and an articulation of a philosophy immanent within that base. In Australia, the non-Labor parties have always been a shadow of Labor, defined by it. Even out of power Labor has been in power, courtesy of the harvester judgement and the IR system, the transition of people like Hughes and Lyons, the DLP, and decades-long state governments in NSW and Queensland. Contrary to the overly consensual model of Australian history expressed by Paul Kelly’s (or Gerard Henderson’s?) notion of the ‘Australian settlement’, the issue has never been settled. The Right waged relentless war against the system in the 20s, and had another crack in the 50s. What looked like a settlement was simply victory by Labor in keeping the Right out of power, even when they were in power. The Liberal Party we have now was founded in part out of a perception that (occasional tilts notwithstanding) the right could not fight and win a class war in a country founded and dominated in its modern form by the working class – albeit one with possibly the most politically cautious, conservative and downright corrupt leaders in the world. Though Menzies and the old UAP crowd would rapidly take control, the wellspring of the Liberal Party was a genuinely liberal middle-class – or ‘moral middle class’ in Judy Brett’s phrase. Often ex-serviceman and women, the party was founded in the same spirit that swept the Attlee Labour government to power in the UK – that if post WW2 society simply resumed the ways of the 30s, much of the sacrifice would have been in vain. Effectively, the Liberal Party has been running off the energy of that ursprung ever since – through the years of Menziesian* nation-building, Fraser’s continuation of the nascent multicultural project. Howard’s decade got the last revs from that by reversing it, its expansive notions of Australia refashioned as a resentful and defensive carping about exclusion and division. By doing that Howard got a few years that might have been denied the party – but he gunned the works, and burnt out the electrics. The party had used itself for fuel. That desperate last strategy had managed to obscure what was happening – on its centenary year, the non-Labor party was undergoing fission, not fusion. Consider what Fusion was. It was not simply an arrangement between two groups, not a coalition. It was a recognition that one entire political framework – empire versus free-trade, restraint on capital versus its expansion – had been superseded. Protection was not simply a series of measures to protect local industry – it was an idea about what a society should be, in which social relations held economic relations in place, limited their purview. Free trade was the idea that economic relations should be allowed to reconstruct social relations (which for free traders chiefly meant that it would rive out rent, and rentiers). The rise of socialism and Labour parties from the 1890s simply instituted a whole new political division, by energising real social forces – labour unions that had once been isolated unified and collectivised, parties giving them political expression, a doctrine of social transformation. That division in turn died in the 1970s, with both the political defeat of socialist experiments, and the emergence of deep contradictions which made it unworkable. Labor simply took over what should have been the Liberals’ historical role – neoliberal reconstruction – and badged it as a form of modernisation, making it part of a distinctive progressive package, and leaving the Libs with nowhere to go but populism with a use-by date. But now politics has re-divided. The hitherto small information/cultural producer class has become a force in its own right, cutting across old economic class divisions and old affiliations. You can see this in a whole lot of processes – the way in a seat like Higgins for example, one can anticipate a lot of people who would vote Liberal in a Liberal-Labor stoush, flowing to the Greens, even with an, erm, interesting candidate like Clive Hamilton. Socialism in its 20th century form is over, and the question is no longer framed by private-public, worker-company divisions. Increasingly the divisions is between knowledge frameworks – people inside the new global economy, often working mainly with information, who see the world in terms of systems, networks, processes, global entities, as part of a single humanity on the one hand, and those tending to be in the old world of more local, parochial, and fixed ideas of morality, work and social order. Farmers, sections of the old middle class, the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ etc – people increasingly excluded from the cultural and financial mainstream. That division now runs smack down the middle of the Liberal Party, which is why the party is on the verge of ceasing to exist as anything other than a shell – and leading to the real possibility of real recombination of the non-Labor forces. Faced with such dilemmas, parties are lucky if they get people who are smart, resourceful and agile, such as David Cameron or Barack Obama. The Libs have Malcolm Turnbull and Nick Minchin. Turnbull simply lacks the political skills to solve this – he’s the equivalent of a colour-blind interior decorator. It was simply a category error for him to imagine he could reshape the party, and lead it at this juncture, a mistake about himself. Minchin is smarter, and a better politician – and delusional, seeing a fundamentally new politics of humanity and nature through the prism of the Cold War. Whether that is simply because of his limits as a thinker, or a Lear-like self-indulgence at the end of a career matters less than his great error about what he’s doing. He thinks he’s preserving the conservative core of the party, even at the price of going backwards in election ’10. In fact, he is trapping it in a loop, whereby the marginal and excluded increasingly determine its direction, until it becomes unsellable to the mainstream of 21st century Australia. At which point even the Liberal Party will realise that it’s dead. On the centenary of Fusion, nothing expresses non-Labor’s dilemma more that, even when marking its history, it cannot learn from it. *I have a feeling that the correct pronunciation of this word would be Min(g)usian, due to some rules of Scots phonology I have forgotten. |
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13 Comments
Nice work Sophie?….
I suspect the byline should read Guy Rundle.
Without an effective opposition, kevin could get a bit too smug ,pass me the gag bag ,no?
I think you might be overstating it a bit, the libs do look as sick as labour did in the mid 50s , but they will recover.
The fight as to Who is the BetterGenuine .. lib/con party, Labour or the Libs ,will continue. Both partys have always had to look out for their own extremist fringe, this time its the far right stuffing the liberals, last time it was the pinko left stuffing labour.
Howard was even at the very end very popular its just that Kevin was the shiney new model and so even more popular.
An interesting and plausible analysis of the breakdown of political loyalties, applying as much to Labor as to the non-Labor axis, as information modes and accessibility drive new class relationships and constituencies. Future political representation and divisions would develop much more rapidly with the sort of electoral reform that would remove the protection of the major parties provided by single member electorates and exhaustive preferential voting. Opening the system to enable preferences to be withheld from some parties (“two-party preferred” — what if I don’t prefer either of them?), and opening up representation to smaller constituencies, would be a small step leading to the emergence of the new politics Rundle predicts.
Excellent, Guy. I asked you for a piece on the Right and you’ve come through in style (whether or not it had anything to do with my request).
“What looked like a settlement was simply victory by Labor in keeping the Right out of power, even when they were in power.” — very true
“… Fraser’s continuation of the nascent multicultural project. Howard’s decade got the last revs from that by reversing it … The party had used itself for fuel”
— interesting idea, so in other words Howardism rode a wave of social de-Fraserism rather than its traditional identity as not-Labor, since Labor had stolen its thunder on economic reform.
One thing you left out is the demise of the Democrats, which was often mistaken for a party of the Left — including by a lot of its own members and senators, which is what led to its demise.
Ever since the capitalist bourgeois groups moved away from the radical Left side of the French revolutionary council and over to the Right side (once they had successfully removed the wealth from the aristocracy), the Right has had a dual character. It was a fusion almost from the start, a marriage of convenience between the anti-authoritarian liberals — who oppose excessive government power and believe private enterprise is the engine of society — and conservatives — who aim to preserve the status quo even if they have to use an all-powerful police state to do so.
They often want the same things, but for fundamentally different reasons. There aren’t even very many Liberal Party members, even senior ones, who understand this. That’s why Fraser (liberal) takes such a dim view of what the modern Liberal Party became under Howard (conservative-authoritarian).
This overlong article was more for the oped page of a Fairfax paper than for the qick, smart, newspages of Crikey. Peter Isaacson
(Tory) “parties are lucky if they get people who are smart, resourceful and agile, such as David Cameron”
This would be the same David Cameron with a revolving dog in his backyard (domestic wind turbine) and solar-panelled pants. Trendy Dave will probably fall into power (no thanks to the Conservative Party’s qualities) and will no doubt revert to his Tory rootstock.
We’ve just seen the local Cameroon, Turnbull, shafted by Abbot and Minchin. This is effect exactly what I said the Liberals had to do to survive. The implosion occurred because Rudd is colonising them with AGW legislation. The Libs would just be an appendage to Rudd’s corporate ALP state. The Right knows the AGW ground is shifting fast, both politically and scientifically, so it’s worth the gamble. Step 1 is to crush the Turnbull Cameroons. Step 2 is to reject AGW. It’s the only way to survive. As for Rundle’s notion that the Cameroons are “modern” and the rest dinosaurs, just watch. Capitalism feels threatened by the bogus AGW revolution and will smash it. The new social formations of the info age will be co-opted by capital and /or marginalised. They are in no sense a serious challenge to capitalism’s power. Pity, but let’s not be deluded by Rundle’s comforting tale of transformation. Ironically, the AGW cult could inadvertently deliver electoral power to the currently shambolic Right.
I argued this case in more detail in reply to Rundle’s blog preview of this article earlier:
Frank Campbell
Posted November 26, 2009 at 11:46 am
The alternative view, which I’ve mentioned before in Crikey comments, is that the Right fears capitulation to the ALP on AGW means extinction for the Lib/Nats. Turnbull’s head has been turned by Cameron, the Greener-than-thou, solar-panelled Old Etonian. It’s just pompous rhetoric to say there’s a schism in the Right based on “how the world is viewed and interpreted.” And the theatrical assertion that ” politics is, in the last analysis, epistemology” is pure tossery. The Right is still the Right. It’s just badly rattled.
The hard Right is correct, from its point of view, to reject the vast, jerry-built AGW Trojan horse which Rudd is ushering through their ramparts. Turnbull will end up a vassal, reduced to carping and qualifying Rudd’s revision of corporate capitalism. It’s possible that the Right could temporarily split into a hard Right and a weak Centrist party, the latter dependent on the ALP.
The ALP’s “solutions” to AGW are nothing more than very expensive gestures. They won’t make a skerrick of difference to global warming. The expense will be borne by all consumers, but disproportionately by the working class. No surprise there, given that the “modern” ALP is a vehicle for middle-class managerialism. Rudd will be our Very Dear Leader. There’s nothing that Rudd, the Supreme Bureaucrat, would like more than to direct the evolution of capitalism. For the control freak, AGW is the perfect excuse.
This scenario depends on the fate of the AGW hypothesis. The science is far from “settled”. Rundle, yet again, dismisses all opposition to AGW as “Stalin-Lysenko” quack-science. What a fool. If only it were that simple. There are several possible explanations for the current global warming apart from human C02 emissions. It is already starkly obvious that the temperature plateau of the last decade is not mere “noise”, so any claim that CO2 has a direct and immediate correlation with average global temps. is simplistic at best. The hacked University of East Bumcrack (oh yes it is: “climate science” is Cinderella, remember?) emails attest to the anxiety felt by AGW scientists on the observational threat to their paradigm.
The AGW cult is expensive but also irrelevant. The ramshackle schemes concocted so far will not significantly curtail CO2. AGW may not be proven, but it is a serious risk. The sight of Rudd standing under a stationary wind turbine last week summed up the fatuity of his response. Later the same day he invoked the November heatwave as evidence of AGW. Rundle thinks that 10,000 wind turbines in Bass Strait will solve the fossil fuel problem. Rundle and Rudd: two tossers with but a single dick.
The AGW cult is genuinely dangerous. Fascism is spreading like a weed. Savonarola Hamilton suggests the “suspension” of democracy. Censorship of both AGW deniers and sceptics is normal. Bernard Keane frets because some old weatherman spoke to an industry group the other day…wherever you look, free speech is denied. What are you all afraid of? Since Australian CO2 won’t drop ’til 2033, why the panic? If Prince Charles is right, then it’s all over anyway. Methinks you protesteth too much.
What I want to know from AGW cultists is the following: what are you going to do and say if the AGW hypothesis crumbles? Go on, be honest. Spell it out.
The right has always lived on shaky ground, its part of the reason why they’re so anxious. Religion is finally and inevitably yielding to rationality especially in the west; check out the rise of atheism and the liberalising of the major churches. Wealth is once again is being concentrated on the very few. Hence, the shrinking of the middle class, the expansion of the working poor. Let’s just hope the next revolution comes quickly and it’s bloodless, or has it already started?
@Frank Campbell
We’ll have a human population living in a cleaner more sustainable environment well poised to deal with the end of oil. This will assist us in existing long enough on this planet so that humanity can evolve into a more reasonable species. One that will be capable of leaving this planet before it becomes inhabitable; on latest evidence is about a billion years. By the way, the average life span of a species is about 200 million years and we’re about 100 thousand years old, so let’s at least try to make the average.
Guy - good as usual but could you do something about the verbosity & verbal pyrotechnics?
Cut, cut & edit, less is more.
Phil: “the shrinking of the middle class, the expansion of the working poor”…hmmm, sounds like Karl to me, and closer to 21stC reality than Rundle’s infotopia…
Phil post 2: The world is being pack-raped 24/7. The AGW millenarian cult has distracted greens from the real, shitty world. In saving “the planet”, they lost the plot. That’s why even Green voters are frustrated by The Cult. The Cult is driven by urbanites whose green action is limited to abstractions and donations (whales, whatever…). I’ve never seen any Rundle plant anything, study anything environmental, or combat plundering Extractives or rednecks. The pink tossariat is no better than the Murfax ideologues. They know everything in general but nothing in particular.
Frank Campbell must be lost for words. There is a very long queue waiting to answer the question: “What are you going to do if….?” At the head of the queue are the 150+ year old Darwinian evolution “cultists”, waiting for that hypothesis to collapse. They’ve got a helluva long time to wait.
AGW “cultists” are still trying to find a decent method to measure global air temperature to account not only for the seeming disparity between CO2 levels and expected immediate temperature rise, but also the disparity between the seeming current temperature plateau and continuing sea level rise. It’s inexplicable. But sure as shooting there will be an explanation and the queue will get one notch longer, not shorter.
If you really want instant gratification, start following the Liberal Party.
Hugh: Never lost for words. Galling, but there it is.
Invoking evolution is one of the hardy perennials of the climate “debate” (I use the term loosely). How absurd is it to compare evolutionary theory, time-tested by observation and a myriad theoretical intersections, with current climate science. Even its practitioners admit it is still in nappies. It could hardly be otherwise. Accurate measurement is in many instances only 10 to 50 years old. Climate isn’t weather- we need far longer observational data sets than that. And no one is seriously doubting global warming post-1975. I taught that to engineers as a juvenile academic myself in the late 70’s. Global cooling had as many adherents then incidentally. To believe that a trace gas caused recent warming strains credulity (water vapour for instance is far more significant than CO2), but science often strains credulity. What has been established is a correlation between CO2 increase and increasing global average temps. So there’s a plausible hypothesis. The levelling of temps post 1999 has weakened the correlation, but no one knows what caused the hestitation. The hacked emails from the Univ of East Bumcrack tell us that how frustrated climate scientists are by their inability to explain the hitch. But aside from that, we can’t even predict short-term climate. We don’t even know what the recently observed oceanic oscillation indicators mean…there’s a pattern, but how to explain it? The plain fact is that climate science is groping- improving but still a nascent science. The nappies will have to be changed for a few decades yet. None of this implies we should not take AGW seriously. The current ETS doesn’t take AGW seriously. It exports the problem and admits there’ll be no local CO2 reduction before 2035. 26 years away. King Charles III will have been on the throne for about 20 years then, but maybe he won’t bother- as he thinks the game is over in July 2017. So the science is rudimentary and the politics insane. Meanwhile the Rundlesque tossariat, which is deeply ignorant of almost everything, not least climate science, lanbasts “climate lunatics”, just as the Albrechtsens do in reverse. Denialism is as much a cult as Belief.
For an interesting case study of pontification by the ignorant, check out Germaine Greer’s and M. Devine’s analysis of Black Saturday.