What’s Left of the Left?

IN SEPTEMBER the Australian published a series of articles by contributors explaining what it means to be “Left”. Quadrant Online asked seven writers to respond and their contributions appeared as an online “Left Forum”.

Quadrant Online is both the internet home for Quadrant which allows us to republish some essays from the magazine online, and also a place for opinion, reviews and discussion articles which are not published in the print edition. As in this case, the magazine’s online presence allows us to respond quickly to intellectual discussions and to increase the influence of writers who publish with us.

When our Left Forum appeared, the general reaction, on the Left side of the internet, was that we had committed an act of lese-majesty. The Left does not like being critically discussed. One horrified internet site opened a discussion which elicited 326 responses. Few of the bloggers had even bothered reading the articles. The Left is quite out of touch with dissent.

The writers we asked to contribute were chosen to offer a diversity of opinion and approaches. What is represented here is not an attack by The Right on The Left, but commentary from authors who, in varying ways, represent views that dissent from the almost overpowering Left orthodoxy.

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MERVYN F. BENDLE

THE LITES ON THE HILL

THE SERIES of articles published by the Australian on “What’s Left?” has provided a valuable insight into the Left in Australia. In this piece I will look closely at the feature article that opened the series, “A New Light on the Hill” (September 19–20), by Tim Soutphommasane. I will then review several of the articles that followed, illustrating the way in which various personal agendas, ideologies, obsessions, and fantasies cluster together under the umbrella of so-called “progressivism”.

Soutphommasane, a member of the ALP, is a freelance journalist and political theorist, the author of Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation Building for Australian Progressives (2009), and of various articles in the Griffith Review, AQ: Australian Quarterly, and the far-Left neo-Marxist journal, Thesis 11. His work perfectly expresses the central postmodernist belief that the world is basically a text and that the essential task of modern politics is to compose and sell to the electorate a persuasive narrative—“a convincing story that engages followers’ values”, as he explains in his Australian article. Consequently, he applauds Kevin Rudd for his “embrace of a new narrative”, based on the trashing of the legacy of the Howard government.

In his own contribution to this task, “Surrendering Nationalism” (Griffith Review, 2007), Soutphommasane condemns the Howard government for its “strident exclusionary nationalism”, that fanned an “inflamed national consciousness”, indulged “the politics of fear”, and “fed off the insecurity and prejudices of the electorate”. In this article, Soutphommasane operates under the erroneous conviction that the Australian Left was once committed to some form of progressive nationalism, chiding its present representatives for indulging an “insouciant cosmopolitanism” that led it to “surrender the terrain of national values and patriotism”, as if the Left ever occupied that terrain.

While this basic historical error about nationalism, patriotism and the Left both drives and undermines Soutphommasane’s entire project, his work also maps out clearly the fundamental crisis that self-styled “progressives” like himself face as the Left exploits its political ascendancy throughout the country and across the globe.

In short, the Left has no idea what it stands for or why it is in office, beyond pursuing and indulging the perquisites of power. As Soutphommasane laments in the Australian, whether it is fading New Labour in Britain, the emerging Obama Nation in America, or the ominous Rudd Ascendancy in Australia, “a quick survey of contemporary Left-liberal politics reveals a wasteland” in the realm of political ideas. Indeed, the very best the Left can come up with as a unifying value is “equality”, understood in various incompatible ways, from the comparatively straightforward nostrums of “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcomes”, to the more obscure “equality of conditions”, and “equal power to participate in the social life of the community” (with “social life” presumably referring to politics and not “party-time”).

Allied to that ill-defined notion at the core of the social democrat “narrative” is the notorious oxymoron “social justice”, manifest in either its vague “welfarist or capabilities” mode beloved of some Blairites, or as the abstract “theory of justice” proposed by John Rawls in America.

As Soutphommasane has to point out, Rudd himself has little or no grasp of the ideological tradition of social democracy, and mistakenly has invoked economists like John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson and John Kenneth Galbraith, probably channelling Economics 101 from the 1970s. Nevertheless, despite Rudd’s limited grasp of the intellectual history of his own self-proclaimed political allegiance, Soutphommasane commends him for “articulating the foundations for a renewed Australian social democratic Left”, as if Rudd is part of the solution and not part of the problem.

And this, of course, reveals the central problem with social democracy and the Left generally, as Soutphommasane reluctantly is forced to concede—for them, it is only about power and the rise of “a new, professional political class drawn from the ranks of advisers and apparatchiks”, committed only to “the art of campaigning to win and stay in government”, and characterised by the “bland yet affable, intelligent yet uncontroversial, poll-tested, sound-bite-spouting, professional politicians” that blight our television screens with their inane policy pronouncements.

Ultimately, there is an almost tragic aspect to Soutphommasane’s naive belief that Rudd and the ALP are on the verge of revealing to the social democrats of the world a new ideological vision that will empower them through the twenty-first century. He doesn’t recognise that the logical conclusion of his own analysis of the bankruptcy of social democracy is not that a new “narrative” or “story” has to be cobbled together so that “progressives” can hold political power and impose their various agendas upon the people of Australia and the world. On the contrary, the only conclusion that can be reached was arrived at decades, even centuries ago, by Locke, Jefferson, Burke, Mill, Hayek and others, who saw, first, that politics had to be based on fundamental principles—“inalienable rights”—about human beings, and not on ideological narratives that can be composed by an advertising agency and marketed to a befuddled electorate; and, second, that the state is not intrinsically an enabling or empowering entity that can be used as an instrument of “social justice”, but rather is an inherently burdensome and even deadening presence in the life of a free society.

Consequently, the correct direction to be taken by all those who want to facilitate the fullest flowering of human potential is not to embrace Kevin Rudd in the absurd guise of an ideological messiah, but to condemn and contest the rise of a professional political caste and to work tirelessly to limit the reach and power of the state.

While Soutphommasane’s contribution displays some degree of thought and effort—however misguided—the article by Julia Gillard, “Indignation at Injustice Drives My Politics” (September 21), is quite superficial.

Indeed, the only conclusion that can be drawn from it is that the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia is a shallow, condescending narcissist. As the letter writers and various commentators have pointed out, her attempt to paint herself as a-battler-who-has-risen-from-her-humble-origins-to-high- office-without-ever-forgetting-the-little-people is simply a laboured, cliché-ridden, self-serving piece of propaganda, without even a hint of an interesting idea or original vision. Someone should have taken her aside and explained, “It’s not about you, Julia, it’s about Australia’s future.” The best that can be said is that her effort made all the rest of the generally pathetic articles seem less awful.

Even the Lunatic Left itself was appalled, with Guy Rundle declaring on Crikey (September 25) that “it seems obvious that the real purpose [of the series] is to make the Left look rather bereft of ideas”. Indeed, he believes the plot is even deeper than that, so that when the Australian runs a similar series on “What’s Right?” it will wheel out “more impressive theoretical guns”, than this dismal collection, “thus giving the impression that the Right has more intellectual firepower, which was the purpose of the exercise all along”—which is Rundle’s way of saying that if the people at the Australian really wanted intellectual firepower from the Left they would have asked him for an article.

In his article, “Marxism Holds the Key” (September 25), John Sutton, the national secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, declared that “a Marxist analysis of the world provides the best understanding of the way the world works”, and followed Gillard in recounting his own life story as evidence that he too feels some sort of noble and mystical attachment to his working-class roots. He also evokes the memory of “great communist leaders such as Pat Clancy and Stan Sharkey”, and claims that “we need a fundamental realignment of power in our society”, presumably towards people like Clancy, Sharkey and himself, an outcome that is being arranged under Gillard at the moment.

The link between the Left and radical egalitarianism is made explicit by Dennis Glover in his effort, “Eternal Quest for Equality” (September 22), which evokes Norman Cohn’s epic work on The Pursuit of the Millennium (1972) and the revolutionary millenarians of the past. Perhaps he had in mind the dreadful denouement of the “egalitarian millennium” under Thomas Müntzer, the crazed peasant leader and Apocalypticist who was elevated into “a giant symbol, a prodigious hero in the history of class war”, by communist historians in the twentieth century. Certainly he believes the Left enjoys “moral superiority and inspirational force over all the alternatives” and he calls for passion and “character”, while deploring the Labor technocrats who “survive too long for their own good”.

The leftist academic David McKnight exalts the “Left’s family values” in his article (September 23), although by “family” he seems to mean something like “Cosa Nostra”. Channelling the proceedings of a recent conference at Deakin University on “New Political Visions for Australia”, he also makes it clear that, for the Left, any such visions must be completely dictated by humanity’s subservience to Nature, conceived as a wrathful god righteously chastising the wicked West for its consumerism. Consequently, he advocates unnecessarily increasing the price of energy to make expensive forms of “renewable energy” more competitive and minimise the use of the otherwise cheap fossil fuels that have underwritten the development of modern societies. The idea seems to be that the gigantic pieces of clockwork spinning slowly in the paddocks of Australia will be more than enough to sustain our future as a technological society.

McKnight’s effort shares with the last of the articles, “Past Another Turning Point in History” (September 26–27) by Robert Manne, the peculiarly academic conceit that the Left can be diverted away from its core ideological orientation—based on statism, moralism, resentment, tribalism, wishful thinking, and opportunism—towards what they themselves perceive to be more appropriately progressive principles. For example, McKnight correctly observes that “the Left has typically not defended the family”, but naively believes that “defence of the family can be a key aspect of a renewed Left”. He also notes that “cultural diversity has long been a buzz word for the Left”, but again naively claims that the Left can be drawn to pay proper attention to “the need for social cohesion and the common good”. Such aspirations are sheer wishful thinking: the Left has no interest in either the family or social cohesion—indeed it regards such values as reactionary, discriminatory and oppressive of any number of novel forms of interpersonal (inter-species?) relations and eccentric forms of social life.

Manne’s blind spot is his belief that the Left has actually learnt something from the excesses of fascist and communist totalitarianism and that it is now reconciled to the central role that must continue to be played by the market constrained by moderate forms of statist involvement. Consequently, he believes the Left is ready to be guided by neo- Keynesians like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and will turn its back on the voices of the Lunatic Left such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. Again this is absurd: leftists would crawl across a mile of broken glass before they would read Stiglitz or Krugman, while they would queue for hours at Gleebooks in Sydney or Readings in Carlton to buy the latest turgid effusions by Chomsky or Klein, with which they would then berate their students.

Overall, this series of articles does indeed reveal the bankruptcy of the Left, but not because of any cynical plotting by the Australian, as Rundle alleges in his demented conspiracy theory. Rather, the Left is intellectually bankrupt simply because it has long known it has no need for ideas of any sophistication. Those, like McKnight, Manne and Soutphommasane, who waste their time with their special pleading for theoretical rigour, are blind to the horrific reality that all the Left is about are simplistic ideas and slogans, jealousy, resentment, opportunism, and a lust for power and personal advancement.

Mervyn F. Bendle is a senior lecturer in History and Communications at James Cook University.

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JOHN DAWSON

THE LEFT: MORE EQUAL THAN THOU?

IN HIS ARTICLE “Eternal Quest for Equality”, Dennis Glover argued that the Left’s “moral superiority” lies in its “radical egalitarian political tradition”. He challenged social democrats to “appeal to this moral and political impulse on an emotional as well as rational basis”, in pursuit of a “fairer, less selfish, more uplifting, better future”. This, he declared, is the Left’s eternal “dream, a light on the hill, a set of better angels”. But what does he mean by “egalitarian”?

Is Glover’s egalitarian ideal universal equality? If so, it is indeed a dream. There can be no equality between me and Gary Ablett, between my newsagent and Rupert Murdoch, between David Hicks and John Howard, between Kath and Nicole, or between Kath and Kim for that matter. The human beings who inhabit this planet are not equal; not physically, mentally, morally, or in any other respect—and vive la différence. A world of equality, if it were possible, would be more nightmare than dream, since the only way to achieve it would be to tear down the best to the level of the worst—the only way to achieve equality between me and Gary Ablett would be to cripple him. We must trust that this is not what Glover has in mind.

Does he mean, then, that every member of society should be equal in material wellbeing? If so he can do no other than advocate that all wealth be redistributed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. If this is his ideal I’ve got good news for him. It has been tried, and one of the “progressive” experiments continues, in North Korea.

Or would Glover reject the North Korean model as extremist? If so, what criteria would he apply to determine when the “moral urge to equality” had “redistributed” enough? He acknowledges that “the hopeless squalor of working-class life in the early industrial revolution, which motivated Marx, Engels, the Chartists and others to invent modern social democratic politics” is no longer a problem. He disingenuously attributes the workers’ improved lot to his socialist heroes and then surmises “that if they were to step out of a time tunnel into present-day Manchester and see how the proletariat lives, they might think their revolutions had succeeded”. (He doesn’t seem to notice that the workers’ lot improved in Manchester generations before it improved to anywhere near the same standard in those countries that implemented the policies of Marx and Engels.) “But,” he continues, “I suspect that before long they’d be agitating for more change … the impulse towards social equality and progress through political action will likely never disappear.” Which begs for an answer to the question: Is the Left’s “egalitarian impulse” motivated by a desire to elevate the workers, or the desire to bring down the capitalists, whose free enterprises were the source of the unprecedented improvements in everyone’s material wellbeing?

By advocating “redesigned markets to harness economic efficiency to social ends”, Glover tacitly recognises that free workers and businesses trading on free markets create wealth efficiently, whereas workers and businesses marching to the drum of central planners don’t. But how does he expect to “redesign” and “harness” freedom? To what extent are his centrally planned “social ends” going to control the workers and businesses, and how much freedom will survive to produce the wealth he wants to “redistribute”? And in what way will the harnessing of those who produce wealth to the needs and whims of those who don’t, make a society “better”? And what is “fairer” about such a society?

When Australians take pride in calling themselves egalitarian, what sort of equality do they have in mind? From the beginning, Australians invoked egalitarianism to distance themselves from that remnant of feudalism that was the British class system. The concept of inherited social status enshrined in law is an anathema to the Australian psyche. We would have no lords of the manor here, and if we were to doff our hat it would be to recognise achievement rather than aristocratic lineage. In this sense we are a classless rather than an egalitarian society. What are the political implications?

The equality that must be defended is equality before the law—the equal right of every individual to advance his or her life and pursue happiness in liberty, including the liberty to earn or produce property, and to keep it. But contrary to Mr Glover’s view, this sort of equality would prohibit one class of Australians being “harnessed” to provide a free ride for another.

John Dawson is the author of Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

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BILL MUEHLENBERG

WHITHER THE AUSTRALIAN LEFT?

WHEN I FIRST settled in Australia some twenty years ago, I wrote a major article on the Left in Australia. I spent a month or more trawling through all the leftist publications I could find (the internet was not an option back then). After this lengthy period of research, I wrote a large piece summarising my findings (a shorter version of which appeared in the August 1990 IPA Review).

The Australian has published a six-part series on the Left. It is interesting to read these articles in the light of what the Left was saying twenty years ago. The bottom line is that little has changed. These recent pieces are all united by the usual collection of clichés, platitudes and ethereal thinking.

There is very little that is concrete here, just the usual moral rhetoric and the usual buzz words: equality, social justice, fairness, diversity, and so on. And what also binds these articles together is the usual leftist reliance on the state. For the most part, the state, not the individual or the family or the community, is generally viewed as the ultimate saviour. Thus in the end, expanding government is what we are left with (no pun intended).

While others will examine these articles in greater detail, here I wish to simply utilise broad-brush strokes. One way to proceed is simply to outline the ways in which Left and Right differ. Thomas Sowell has nicely summarised the major differences between the two in his many works, especially in three important volumes: A Conflict of Visions (1987), The Vision of the Anointed (1995) and The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999).

Sowell argues that the Left and Right operate from fundamentally different premises. These premises really amount to differing worldviews, with differing ways of looking at the world, at man, and at man’s predicament and possible solutions. Thus the foundation, or vision, on which political ideas are built is hugely important.

The two main visions Sowell discusses are what he calls the constrained and the unconstrained visions. The constrained vision (the conservative worldview) acknowledges that there are limits. There are limits to human nature, limits to what governments can do, limits to what can be achieved in a society. The unconstrained vision (the radical or leftist worldview) tends to downplay limits. Mankind is seen as more or less perfectible; social and political utopia is to a large extent achievable; and evil is not endemic or inherent in the human condition, and therefore is able to be mostly eliminated.

The conservative vision tends to reflect the Judeo- Christian understanding that mankind is fallen, is limited, is prone to sin, and cannot produce heaven on earth, at least without the help of God. The Left-liberal vision, by contrast, tends to see the human condition as innocent, malleable and perfectible, and tends to think that utopia on earth is achievable under the right social conditions.

Edmund Burke may best exemplify the former vision, with the American Revolution one of its main fruit. Rousseau may best exemplify the latter vision, with the French Revolution a key expression of it. Sowell argues that on the whole, the conservative vision, being much more closely grounded in reality, will usually produce better outcomes for those intended to benefit by them, than those of the leftist vision.

These basic differences are nicely illustrated in the Australian series. There is plenty of utopian vision here, but little of realistic substance. And when they do start to offer some tangible proposals, it is interesting to see how centrist they become. In other words, the more down-to-earth and practical they want to be, the more rightward they tend to go.

What also should be pointed out is that in some respects the Left and Right do not differ so much on what they consider to be ultimately important. Both want to see such goods as justice, tranquillity, national wellbeing, and so on. Where they differ, as Sowell and others have pointed out, is how to best achieve these ends, and what can realistically be attempted.

Both for example favour equality, but the Left tends to favour equality of outcome, while the Right favours equality of opportunity. And are bureaucrats, ruling elites, social engineers and expanding state powers the answer, or are individuals, mediating structures (such as church, family and community) and free markets best placed to achieve social goods? That is where the differences emerge.

The Left does not have a monopoly on moral concerns. It is not just Julia Gillard who is “driven by indignation at injustice”. Conservatives are also incensed at injustice. It’s just that the Left so often seems to be highly selective in where its outrage is directed. America, capitalism, globalism and the West in general tend to be its targets. At the same time, they seem silent on the mega-injustices of such things as Soviet communism or Islamo-fascism. Some of us might be more persuaded by their rhetoric if they were a bit more consistent in where their moral outrage was sprayed around.

The truth is, the enemies of the Left usually in fact turn out to be the best guarantors of genuine social goods, such as freedom, opportunity and prosperity. The things the Left tends to press for are often at odds with such goods.

Also of interest is the decidedly secular tone of this entire series. Given that fact, it is interesting to recall the title used in the very first article: “A New Light on the Hill”. Whether the author or subeditor realised it, this is of course taking us back into history, especially religious history. The phrase was first used by the ancient Hebrew prophets when describing what life would one day be like when Yahweh puts an end to evil and suffering, and establishes his universal kingdom. The early Puritans and American founding fathers also utilised such terminology as they expressed their hopes of what sort of place that new land was to be. In both visions there was an overwhelming spiritual reality which lay behind the terminology.

What is remarkable about this series is the fact that there is not one religious or spiritual reference to be found anywhere. God is entirely left out of the picture, and the heaven on earth which the leftists want to create will be one entirely constructed by human efforts and mortal hands.

Of course we have been there and done that. Modern history is replete with such secular visions of a new earth. We have seen one bloody example after another of such coercive utopians in action. And lest anyone doubt the bloody results of such experiments, they simply need to consult the now classic work, The Black Book of Communism.

But it is not just the fact that the desire to build heaven on earth sans deity is bound to fail, and lead to bloodshed, but the very vision of what the Left is seeking to achieve (justice, peace, harmony) in fact can ultimately only be achieved by divine help anyway. These qualities happen to be God’s attributes.

To seek to bring heaven to earth without the author and source of such values and goods is an exercise in futility. It is as C.S. Lewis warned (in The Abolition of Man):

You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that our civilization needs more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

So while some of the aims and goals of the Left may be morally laudable, the question remains as to whether the worldview of the Left, and its proposed remedies and polices, will in fact usher in these sorts of goods. Fortunately we have history on our side here, and the verdict is not favourable.

In sum, the Australian Left does not seem to have changed much from when I last analysed it in depth some two decades ago. The same rhetoric prevails, the same vague and intangible social visions are offered, and the same inability remains to see that individuals, rather than states, are best placed to make of life what we all want it to be.

Bill Muehlenberg is a lecturer in ethics and theology, Secretary of the Family Council of Victoria, and a regular contributor to Quadrant Online.

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JOHN MUSCAT

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE LABOR PARTY?

A MOMENTOUS event in our national affairs has all but gone unnoticed. The political party which for over a hundred years was known as the Australian Labor Party has ceased to exist. True, our Prime Minister and his parliamentary majority belong to an organisation bearing that name. But this organisation has little in common with the party which bore the name for so long. From the ashes of Labor has arisen the Rudd Ticket, a crucial turn in the professional Left’s final victory over mass labourism. 

Those inclined to dismiss this as a piece of hyperbole should pause to consider the transformation of Labor’s internal structures under Kevin Rudd. Today the ALP is an empty shell, a development signposted by a series of actions gutting the party’s lingering mass party traditions:

• On becoming Prime Minister, Rudd immediately ended the century-old practice of caucus electing the ministry, thereby drawing immense power of patronage into his hands. This decision substantially diluted the power of caucus in Labor’s organisational structure.

• Increasingly, preselections in winnable seats are awarded by the Prime Minister’s office or a select committee of factional chiefs acting at his behest. This practice finishes off whatever influence local branches still had, again shifting the balance of power away from caucus to the leader. Many new MPs owe their seat to the Prime Minister rather than to their rank and file.

• It’s now common to preselect candidates who aren’t even party members when they are chosen, as with many of the “celebrity candidates”. Again, these MPs owe their posts to the leader rather than to their rank and file, or even to the Labor Party itself.

• At the most recent ALP national conference in July- August, the tradition of a prescriptive platform was junked in favour of policy chapters couched in general terms, open to wide interpretation. This was perhaps the most far-reaching change of all. The power of the conference, formerly the party’s supreme policy-making body, has been hollowed out. Consequently, formerly powerful units that derived their authority from the conference, like the national executive, were also disembowelled.

What caused the disintegration of Labor’s democratic structures? Was it the work of Rudd the rightwing usurper, or was it, rather, an inevitable consequence of contemporary leftism?

As Michael Thompson argued in Labor Without Class (1999), Labor’s apparatus hitched itself to the social movements of the 1970s and has drifted away from its working-class roots ever since. The campaign against WorkChoices shouldn’t be mistaken for a reversal of this trend. To some extent the drift was a function of unavoidable social and economic change, but the party’s internal culture drove the process forward, particularly in its stubborn adherence to 1970s leftism during the Howard years. Rudd just formalised reality, which explains the almost complete lack of resistance to his moves.

By the time of the 2004 federal election, it was obvious that Labor’s internal structure was in crisis. On the one hand, party forums were dominated by union officials representing ever smaller proportions of the private sector workforce and out of step with the new economy unleashed by market-oriented reform. On the other hand, the branches were packed full of progressive middle-class activists whose cultural and economic priorities were remote from the concerns of most Australians. If Labor were ever to return to office and stay there, something had to give.

For Rudd, the resolution of Labor’s crisis meant the dissolution of Labor itself.

The Rudd Ticket isn’t conventionally Left, and many leftists would cringe at the suggestion that it is. Free of party constraints, however, Rudd’s pragmatic style disguises backroom links to various extra-party groupings laying claim to modern leftism. These are naturally drawn from tertiary-educated circles.

First, there are the political technicians like staffers, pollsters, market researchers, media advisers, policy boffins, lobbyists and public relations flacks. Second are the social and welfare activists, invigorated by global warming and the financial crisis. And third are the progressive academics who dominate policy agendas in fields like environmental science, preventive medicine, human rights, family policy, work-life balance and industrial relations.

Evolving into a finely honed instrument for sifting and reconciling the often competing agendas of these groupings, the Rudd Ticket specialises in packaging them for public consumption. Behind the familiar techniques of spin and media manipulation lies an assumption that, more than ever, social relations are played out in the media universe.

This notion was big in the cultural studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. For the political technicians, values and mores in today’s media-saturated world, extending to social networking sites and the blogosphere, are more likely to be shaped by the imagery and antics of pop culture than traditional sources like nation, family and religion. Hence the Rudd government’s predilection for celebrities and television chat shows. When opportunities arise to fuse media management with the institutional interests of activists and academics, the dividend is political gold.

This is how a government of the “Left” tries to persuade working people that carbon dioxide is pollution; that an emissions trading scheme is in their interests though it will devastate jobs for minimal environmental gain; that childcare subsidies and short-term maternity leave are a boon although many prefer full-time homemaking; that a centralised industrial relations system protects them while it stifles unskilled and low-skilled job creation; that they must catch the train and live in flats instead of their dream homes in the suburbs; and that, despite the absence of any evidence, higher taxes will deliver better health and education services.

John Muscat is a lawyer, ALP member and co-editor of The New City, a web journal of urban and political affairs.

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ANDREW NORTON

 

THE LEFT SENSIBILITY

MOST INTELLECTUALS are on the Left, but leftism is not at its core an intellectual doctrine. This conclusion about leftism from the series in the Australian will surprise some. Radical left-wingers are famous for their arcane doctrinal disagreements, opening them to the Judean People’s Front versus the People’s Front of Judea satire of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Yet if the Australian’s “What’s Left?” contributors are correct, underlying it all is a consistent Left sensibility.

Author and Labor speechwriter Dennis Glover argues in his contribution that “social democracy is only the most recent manifestation of a radical egalitarian political tradition that stretches back to the birth of Western civilisation. This makes social democracy in essence a moral impulse rather than a technical program of reform.” It is a reaction against “inequality, injustice and stupidity”. Glover acknowledges that the squalor which motivated nineteenth-century socialists is largely gone but, with “infinite varieties” of social ills, agitation will continue.

In her article, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard explains that her social democracy comes from experience and emotion rather than doctrine. The Labor leanings of her family were held “instinctively”. She tells us that she still feels “a sense of indignation” about her father missing out on higher education because he could not afford it. It “angers” her when “talent is wasted and power and privilege are misused”. Consistent with her non-doctrinal approach, however, she insists on pragmatic methods to achieve her political goals.

Tim Soutphommasane, a young Australian social democrat with a recent Oxford political theory PhD, knows ideological history. But in his two articles for the Australian he too doubts that social democracy is founded on intellectual ideas. He acknowledges that no social democratic thinker has the status of Marx in socialism, Burke in conservatism, Mill in “progressive liberalism”, or Hayek in “libertarianism”.

Soutphommasane quotes Albert Metin’s remark that Australia had “socialisme sans doctrine”, socialism without ideology. But it might be more accurate to say that Australia has had social democracy with many doctrines: protection and free trade, nationalisation and privatisation, empire and republicanism, White Australia policy and anti-discrimination law. The Left sensibility can accommodate many different and sometimes contradictory policies, reflecting changing feelings about who is deserving of sympathy, and how they are best helped.

While intellectuals with the Left sensibility do not provide the impetus for social democratic political movements, they do perform an important role. There are thousands of social democratic books giving details of injustices and suggesting policies to correct them. These help determine what the Left sensibility means at any given point in time, even if they do not provide classic social democratic texts that are still read generations after they were written. These books also help give meaning to the political lives of social democrats.

In Soutphommasane’s romantic (his word) view of politics, social democratic doctrine seems to have as much to do with the movement’s psychology as its policy. He wants to be politically inspired by a new social democratic narrative, he sees “poetry in power”. He has a political impulse looking for an outlet.

For those of us who aren’t social democrats, this impulse explains why they never let us rest. The Left sensibility will always seek out somebody’s suffering, even where that suffering is, as Glover concedes, minor compared to past miseries. The impulse to fix and reform is always there, a hunger that can only ever be temporarily quelled. Like the capitalists they critique, leftists will always find another need to be satisfied.

The problem social democrats have is that they are in a competitive leftist impulse-satisfying market. As the dominant political force, they face the grinding daily realities of making the massive welfare state work, with all the compromises and trade-offs that involves. Today’s ministerial social democrats offer the Left sensibility eventual maternity leave and school renovations, worthy objectives perhaps, but no match for green plans to save the entire planet.

This is one reason why Soutphommasane’s articles have—despite an entrenched welfare state, despite federal Labor’s electoral success—a feeling of social democratic angst. What social democrats offer is too piecemeal, too hard to fit into a clear and coherent narrative, to offer an inspirational path to a better future. “What’s Left” is pragmatic politics, in which a social democratic prime minister can claim to be an economic conservative and a Keynesian big-spender, a critic of “neoliberalism” and the heir to Labor’s “neoliberal” economic reforms. For followers of political ideas, it’s a confusing mix. But for Labor, it might just be a winning electoral formula.

Andrew Norton is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. He blogs at andrewnorton.info.

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ANGELA SHANAHAN

MY PARENTS WERE WELSH, AND OTHER LEFT EXCUSES

THE AUSTRALIAN has been running a series in its opinion pages on the Left in Australia and, to be frank, I doubt regular readers have been awaiting each instalment of ideological exposition with nail-biting excitement. It has all been a bit “ho hum here we go again”. There are now so many areas where the Left is indistinguishable from the Right that these terms are pretty meaningless. Even the terms “conservative” and “progressive”, which are often employed to describe differences on social issues, don’t have a great deal of meaning. I have encountered too many lefties with whom I have more in common on the family and social front than plenty of so-called conservatives. I find the libertarian Right just as aggravating and immature as the didactic Left of my youth.

But two contributors interested me. One was Julia Gillard, the most successful of all the women in Australian politics and one of the more intelligent, whose portfolio is partly education. The other was David McKnight, who wrote about the Left’s approach to the family and other issues, matters that were previously outside the ambit of politics.

Julia’s explanation for being on the Left was rather disappointing, and just a little trite. In the first sentence she says that “My parents were Welsh”—cue the mel- lifluous male chorus singing “Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau”, gritty miners’ stories and How Green Was My Valley. We were told that despite doing well in the eleven-plus, Julia’s dad couldn’t go to a grammar school. He probably had to go to work, and Julia never forgot it.

But what was Julia’s point? Surely her justification for being “on the Left” was not just a sense of resentment that her dad couldn’t go to grammar school even though he was clever? Julia’s father at least had the opportunity to go to an English grammar school. They were fine schools, specifically designed for equality of opportunity for the poor who were clever. I hope that we have an education minister who wants all children to have an education as good as those schools offered. Anyway, if that is what Julia is saying it would be a welcome change for someone whose team is the Left.

In the education system where I worked as a teacher for fifteen years, equality of educational opportunity meant equality of mediocrity, or sometimes plain equality of ignorance. Why? It was controlled by one of the most left-wing unions in the country, the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation, of which I was a compulsory member. Like most intimidatory left-wing unions the Federation, whose then supremo was Jennie George, didn’t care about anything except its own power.

In New South Wales, unlike the old Wales, hardly any of our brighter children could have ever aspired to the equivalent of a good English grammar school education. Under the system held to ransom by the Federation, there was a policy of abandoning even the few selective schools we had. Curriculum, schooling structure, and teacher promotion —all were subsumed to so-called egalitarianism. Elitism was the baddie; egalitarianism, the goodie. There was no acknowledgment that true egalitarianism comes from elitism for all. Fairness comes from wanting the best for everyone. It is called aspiration, a term much used during Howard’s prime ministership. It is a term that explains everything about Australian politics. No wonder that in a speech two years before the election Julia conceded that the culture wars were over, declaring that the aspirational “conservatives” had won. After all—look at aspirational Kevin Rudd and his über-aspirational wife.

So it was surprising that Julia explained her dedication to the Left with the old “immigrant comes to land of opportunity, and education” story. Most contributors to the “What’s Left” series were veering off the old “I grew up in a cardboard box” story. And anyway, so many people, including my family, came to this country in so much worse circumstances than the ten-pound poms, that Julia’s rather paltry story of woe should cause mirth. So many Australians of Julia’s own generation had to leave school early to work, or as was the case with my husband, who despite attending the best selective high school in Australia couldn’t go to university and went straight to work aged nineteen, or as in my case, had to take a scholarship to do something you were not all that interested in because the scholarship paid you.

But then of course the Left can point to free university education under Whitlam, which was supposed to benefit everybody. But what happened? The universities had to expand to the point where standards went south. Most tradesmen are much better educated than the media graduates of some of these universities. The main objective, to expand education to the poor, was not realised. The real poor were not the ones who became the beneficiaries of the Whitlam university largesse. It was more of the mediocre middle, children who previously would have worked in the trades, nursing, teaching or in other skilled areas.

And of course that middle group, pedestrian and gullible, were recruited into the counter-cultural Left. If they were useful women they became the vanguard of the feminist movement. How many sailed through academia in paltry women’s studies courses and were later taken up and promoted into areas of the public service by affirmative action? In the Labor Party the old Emily’s Listers still hold sway. So many of them were unsuccessful until Julia came along that it was embarrassing.

Many of the contributions to the “What’s Left” series show two preoccupations. The Left would like to control the agenda on workplace reform and the family, because so far the Right has done this. Also, young women in the Labor Party are becoming frustrated at the dominance of the old feminist guard, who really don’t understand that the values and priorities of young women with families are not the same as theirs were. I discovered this for myself recently when I gave a talk and debated Susan Ryan at New South Wales Labor headquarters in Sussex Street. These younger women, whether they are on the Left or the Right, are interested in their families and family policy. They do not see themselves as mere units of production and they resent the old intimidating career-obsessed feminists, who, they bluntly told me, “just don’t get it”.

David McKnight asked why those on “the Left” don’t talk about the family. For McKnight, as for most commentators, progressive and conservative have replaced Left and Right. So why have the Left progressives conceded the ground on the family to the conservatives? The reason why those on the Left don’t talk about the family is that during the rise of feminism they abrogated their right to talk about the family. The new Left of my generation specifically condemned the family as a tool of oppression. The family is the only bulwark for the gullible young against bullshit. Consequently, attacking the family was important to the new Left to keep the now-old feminists on side.

To this end the new Left invented a parallel series of moral paradigms, expressed as repetitive slogans designed to show us that progressives were simply, well, more progressive. Choice became a paradigm in itself. Now choice, the buzz word of feminism, of a generation, that hallmark of Left progressive thinking, is representative of a hideous barbarism, 100,000 abortions a year—not a sign of progress. This new morality cannot distinguish between right and wrong, because the choice is not informed by an overarching morality; for them the choice is the morality, one choice as valid as any other choice, never mind if it is a right or wrong choice.

However, back with the family, which McKnight realises must vote for you if you are to gain power. That family, whether voting Liberal or Labor, has similar aspirational dreams. So here, according to McKnight, is another moral mantra, another slogan for the masses, that is relatively new to the big brother lexicon: care. “Care” is now being used the way feminists use “choice”. They are now calling for a “right to care”. Of course, it is “care” at taxpayers’ expense.

This is a very popular idea, and it has some justification because of course children have the right to expect care from the people who love them. And we have already accepted a level of government funding for outsourcing childcare. However, this can lead into a level of state involvement in the family that is neither desirable nor cheap nor, ultimately, what most Australian parents want.

As in Sweden, women will be “freed” to work. But mothers, having become mere units of production, will become mere breeders of children, whose care is then abrogated to the state. This is not solely a leftist vision. Some members of the previous government favoured it. When I questioned Joe Hockey about the unfairness of many of the WorkChoices policies towards women in low-paid jobs, he responded, “Angela, the country is running out of workers!”

Neither the Left nor the Right is willing to support the family as a unit. Both want to diminish mothers to units of production. But care is not something we can really “outsource”. Care is an obligation. Care can only be a real concept if it is based on the desire to give of one’s self to care. A family is based on mutual obligation to care. That is why the family should be supported in its mutual obligations as a unit. Policies designed to separate mothers from children are usually nothing more than a clever ploy under the guise of “freedom”, to split the unity of the family and force mothers into the workforce, often against their will. If the Left want to get into the debate on the family they should dump the militant individualism of old feminism and realise that the family operates as a unit. Consequently there is no “right” to have the state care for your children. Parents care for each other and they in turn care for their children. That is a parent’s privilege and right, and if you surrender that right to the Moloch of the new state, whether it is a left- or right-wing one, you have abrogated your duty to the most important thing you have—your child.

Angela Shanahan is a columnist with the Australian. Her most recent Quadrant article was “Human Rights and the Unborn” in the September issue.

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JASON SOON

LEFT AND RIGHT

THOSE ON THE LEFT can be touchy about being talked about or generalised about in any way. A convenient rhetorical strategy that has been prolifically used and propagated by postmodernist left blog Larvatus Prodeo is to make mocking references to “TEH left” (misspelling intended) anytime any critique of a thinker or movement identified with the Left is attempted. It becomes difficult to critique a philosophical tendency that claims not to exist. Yet left-wingers are usually happy to perpetrate the most blatant straw men on their philosophical rivals, as evidenced most recently in the celebration of Kevin Rudd’s essay on “neoliberalism”, which was long ago taken apart by Henry Ergas, though this has not stopped the sycophantic celebrations of the Prime Minister as a contemporary philosopher-king.

But then philosopher-kings are what the Left wants to see in political leaders. This is perhaps the strongest difference between the Left and the Right to the extent that these philosophical traditions exist in some coherent form. This explains in particular the notion of “social justice” that lies behind many of the contributions to the Australian’s series on the Left.

Understanding the term “social justice” and in particular how it differs from plain old “justice” exposes the philosophical fault lines between the contemporary mainstream Left and Right. Plain old “justice” is about due process and equal treatment before the law. It’s an important principle to uphold. People enter into contracts and make trades, including agreements to sell commodities or labour (these mutually beneficial processes acquiring a sinister taint in the Marxist narrative of “alienation”). The resulting distribution of incomes and wealth that cumulatively result from this trucking and bartering (to quote Adam Smith) over time are not the concern of justice. Plain old-fashioned justice would have something to say about whether the transactions are consensually entered into, without force or fraud. Justice would have something to say about the enforcement of the resulting contracts before the law without fear or favour. In the words of Hayek, justice refers to such “rules of just conduct”, “those end-independent rules which serve the formation of a spontaneous order”.

But the notion of “social justice” is something different, a category mistake, as Hayek recognised. “Social justice” is the strange notion that the unco-ordinated results of these numerous trades should be redistributed so that the final distribution of income and wealth in a society fits the ideal as decreed by some philosopher-king or social engineer, out of some conviction that not to do so would be “unjust”.

Let us note what isn’t being criticised here. The notion that we may all be better off making provision for some collective arrangements because unco-ordinated individual trades do not fully capture individuals’ willingness to pay for particular goods (that is, the public goods problem) isn’t what is being criticised here. Nor even that some of these collective arrangements may well take the form of transfer payments to people unable to earn a sufficient market income to support themselves and their families to a minimal living standard. Contrary to the Prime Minister’s characterisation of Hayek’s vision as a “Brutopia”, even the strongest critic of “social justice” accepted the case for a degree of poverty amelioration by the state.

Rather, what is being criticised here, which underlies the “light on the hill” invoked by so many on the Left whether in social-democratic or more radical incarnations, is the conflation of the very notion of justice with what is a question of social utility.

Insofar as the notion of “social justice” appears to derive from some strange conviction that somehow the blame or credit for the distribution of income and wealth arising over the course of numerous trades can be laid at the feet of some single entity with a will of its own, it is the Left’s form of creationism. Such creationism is in contrast to the more evolutionistic vision of a spontaneous order or an invisible hand as articulated by classical liberal thinkers such as Hayek and Smith.

The resulting metaphors of the various creeds do not just make for pretty pictures but have quite concrete policy conclusions. For the classical liberal or Burkean conservative the evolutionistic metaphor leads to a “precautionary principle” (strangely honoured most by the Right in its application to the body politic while most loudly invoked by the Left for the natural environment) against excessive interventionism, and a sense of the realistic limits of political or collective action.

Meanwhile, the natural counterpart to the Left’s creationism in politics is an unrestrained political prometheanism. This prometheanism unfortunately infects not just the radical Left but also even the social democrats who have grudgingly come to accept the free market as the goose that lays the golden eggs for redistributing. This prometheanism accounts for their zeal for coming up with countless ways of micromanaging the economy and society. There has been a surfeit of such schemes under Rudd with the various ill-fated “watches”, the ill-conceived scheme to regulate the internet, and most recently the grand plans to supplant the process of competition in telecommunications with a lavishly funded National Broadband Network. And this—the twitchy hyperactivity of the philosopher-king—is what makes the Rudd government a left-wing one despite his earlier claims to being “fiscally conservative”.

Jason Soon is a Sydney-based economic consultant. He founded and contributes to the Catallaxy blog.