What if they gave a culture war and nobody came ?
Sadly, the culture wars will be with us for a long time to come
Just after the 2007 election, I wrote a post with this title (reproduced below). And, in the wake of the latest stunning defeat for the political right, John Birmingham has used almost exactly the same title [1]. The fact that nearly 20 years have passed since my post suggests that the culture wars aren’t going away time soon. On the other hand, at least in Australia, the culture wars have been a consistently losing issue for the political right,.
Throughout the period since 2007, the conservative parties have been the B-team of Australian politics, winning mainly when Labor screws up. Fortunately for them, Labor managed some spectactular screwups in the years after 2007 (Rudd vs Gillard at the federal level, the rehabilitation of Brian Burke in WA, every kind of disaster in NSW) so the conservatives have remained competitive.
But they have rarely had a win in the culture wars. The one big exception has been policy towards asylum seekers, where the slogan “Stop the Boats” has proved unstoppable.
The “exception that proves the rule” (originally “proves” meant “tests”) was the Voice referendum. Having launched the referendum at the peak of his popularity, Albanese thought he could carry it through on vibes alone, without having to say anything about the model he would propose if the referendum succeeded [2].
This made the standard, and almost invariably successful, negative response to any referendum proposal “If you don’t know, Vote No”, even more powerful than usual. While early polling suggested 70 per cent support for the idea of a Voice, the fear, uncertainty and doubt of the “don’t know” campaign reduced the final Yes vote to 40 per cent.
On this reading of the evidence, 40 per cent of the Australian public consistently supported the Voice and 30 per cent consistently opposed it. The remaining 30 per cent, while sympathetic to the general idea, weren’t willing to buy a pig in a poke.
But from the moment the results were declared, rightwing culture warriors forgot how they had won, and imagined that the No vote constituted a massive rejection of political correctness by the silent majority of “quiet Australians”. Urged on by the Murdoch papers and Sky News, Peter Dutton campaigned on this basis, and came spectacularly to grief.
Dutton’s failure has meant the defeat of the rightwing culture warriors on a wide range of issues. No-one with any political sense is going to be in a hurry to attack Welcome To Country, work from home or “inner-city elites” again any time soon. And with the nuclear option thoroughly discredited, along with outright climate denial, attacks on solar and wind energy will be more difficult to sustain.
Still, the sense of nostalgic grievance that drives the culture wars remains, and now more than ever forms the core of the conservative base. The problem for the LNP is that, unlike in the US, this core is too small to command a majority in Australia.
What if they gave a culture war and nobody came?
It’s now looking just about as certain as any electoral outcome can be that the Howard government will be defeated, and that the Federal Liberal party will join its state and territory counterparts in opposition, possibly for several terms to come[1]. Given that the economy is doing well, and that the Australian electorate is not obviously in a state of leftwing ferment, this (still putative) outcome needs some explanation.
One striking fact, despite having received an overwhelming mandate in 1996 for a policy of making Australia “relaxed and comfortable”, the Howard government, and, even more, their supporters, see themselves as being engaged in a “culture war”. An even more striking fact is that the other side in this culture war has been just about invisible, particularly in political debate. It’s hard to see either Kevin Rudd or his smooth and scrubbed counterparts at the state level as engaged in a struggle to undermine traditional Australian culture. Even the Greens, led by Bob Brown, don’t fit the bill. And this is consistent with my day-to-day experience. Maybe UQ is riddled with extreme cultural leftists, but if so, I don’t get invited to their parties.
Yet opinion columns, talk radio and the rightwing blogosphere are dominated by diatribes against what appears, in their telling, as an amorphous mass of political correctness, environmentalism, radical feminism and general hostility to ordinary Australians and their values, which supposedly dominates not only the Labor party but all of our major cultural institutions including universities, the legal system, the ABC and even, in many accounts, the commercial mass media in which these bloviators are writing.
The pursuit of the culture war is, in my judgement, one of the main reasons that the conservative parties have become increasingly unelectable.
There are three main reasons for this. First, unlike the US, there is no core constituency for this kind of thing. Although some lefties get worried about the religious right, it’s pretty much non-existent here. The churches as a whole are moderately leftwing on most issues. That includes socially conservative Christians like Family First, who are typically centre-left on most economic issues. Even Hillsong, often see as the aspirational class at prayer, has backed Labor’s call to increase foreign aid. The other potential constituency, successfully mobilised by Pauline Hanson, to whom slogans like “political correctness” appeal, consists mainly of people who are generically unhappy about changes of all kinds, amounting to maybe 15 per cent of the population. That’s enough to provide the talkback shock jocks and their print and net equivalents with an audience, but not the basis of long-term success in politics, especially as much of this group is disengaged from politics much of the time
Second, the vitriolic style associated with the culture wars turns most Australians off. It’s striking given all the talk of looking for a “right-wing Phillip Adams” that hardly anyone on the right tries to emulate Adams’ avuncular style.
Third, and most importantly, the factoid-based, point-scoring, style of argument that goes with the culture wars eventually leads to complete insulation from factual reality. Any proposition, no matter how ridiculous, can be defended in this way, long after the average person has seen through it. This has been most obvious in relation to climate change and Iraq, but there are a whole string of issues where the culture warriors have imprisoned themselves in an orthodoxy every bit as constricting as the largely imaginary monolithic leftism they are supposed to be confronting.
Looking at the commentators who generally support the Coalition, the great majority (virtually everyone at the Oz, Devine pere et fille, Bolt, Akerman, McGuinness, Pearson, the IPA and much of the CIS) are self-proclaimed culture warriors and climate change delusionists, and most of the rest are carried along by this tide. The only pro-government commentators I can think of who are largely free of this kind of thing are Andrew Norton and Harry Clarke (no doubt there are some others – feel free to point them out). As long as the Liberal party gets its intellectual firepower from such sources, it will struggle to connect with Australians in general.
Note: A bunch of other people, including Mark Bahnisch, Guy Rundle (may be paywalled) and Andrew Norton (can’t find it now, but I’m sure I read it) have written useful stuff on this. And Chris Berg of the IPA has a good debunking of fears about the religious right. (all links in this post have died from linkrot by now, I fear)
fn1. It’s an obvious riff on a 1960s anti-war slogan, derived ultimately from the 1936 poem The People Yes by Carl Sandburg
fn 2. Although there was a reasonably detailed model put forward by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton, Labor wasn’t willing to defend it. I suspect they were frightened of comparisons to ATSIC and unwilling to make the case that ATSIC should never have been abolished, even if it needed reform.
Read my newsletter
the abolition of ATSIC was outrageous. in Australia we have a tradition of (occasionally) prosecuting political corruption and/or nepotism/cronyism in the federal and criminal law courts where there’s is overwhelming evidence of wrong doing by elected and unelected officials. i’ve never heard anybody call for the abolition of the Australian Federal Parliament in spite of the long standing evidence of grey corruption. The influence of the fossil fuel industries continue using nothing more democratic than money and political lobbying to for example, torpedo the long standing Labor policy ambitions and platforms around the need for a new code of environmental protection in light of the disfunction of the existing EP Act and the curve ball Climate Crisis brings to all ecological issues for just one example. another example of grey corruption everywhere would be developers at the municipale and state levels of government. nobody says let’s dissolve the constitution because developers are out of control.
I think the near-absence of Coalition Lower House MPs from much of Australia's metropolitan areas is as salutary a sign as any of their defeat in the Culture Wars. It is, I think, closely related to their unknowledgeable policy stances in relation to anything relating to the employment and professional aspirations of Australian women.