A strong cultural base as essential as sound politics
Greg Sheridan
Our new Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is a seriously believing Pentecostal Christian, while the Liberal Party’s new deputy leader, Josh Frydenberg, is a proud Jew whose mother was a Holocaust survivor from Europe. If you want to paint this move in the Liberal leadership as a lurch to the Right you’ll need some pretty nifty footwork on the identity labelling.
But of course their religious affiliations are of no moment in their ascension to national leadership — and, incidentally, the Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, is a Catholic, giving us a very ecumenical holy trinity at the top of government.
For all the Australian uniqueness of this gothic week, and the strange decade we have had of each of our past four elected prime ministers being assassinated by their own parties, what is happening in Australia is also a representative element of the broader crisis in Western politics.
Politics in most Western nations is broken. The old model of a candidate or party submitting a manifesto, winning an election, implementing their promises and being judged accordingly at the next election is operating nowhere. The prestige of democracy is in decline and many developing nations have moved away from democracy. It is no longer associated with modernity, efficiency and good government.
This is where the latest Liberal leadership crisis has perhaps its most profound potential effect. It not only damages the brand equity of the Liberals. To some extent it damages the brand equity of our democratic institutions. It rattles their stability. As one MP put it: “The walls of Parliament House seemed a little hollower, a little less substantial, in the midst of this.”
The Centre Right is undergoing a deep structural crisis in many parts of the West. Ten years ago the sense of crisis was on the Centre Left. How could social democrats reconcile the values and issues, and especially the anti-industry environmentalism, of their progressive, cosmopolitan, inner-city voters with the social conservatism, and need for blue-collar jobs, of their traditional working-class supporters? The crisis on the Centre Left remains unresolved. In some countries it limps along in coalitions of varying effectiveness formed from the shards of its shattered self. Where it has stayed together as one party, especially in Britain, it has been captured by an extremist class of activists represented by Jeremy Corbyn. Some similar dynamic is under way among US Democrats, who nearly nominated a formerly Soviet-loving socialist in Bernie Sanders as their 2016 presidential candidate.
Now, across the West, the Centre Right is fracturing around a different but similar set of contradictions. Centre-right parties are in conflict between their traditional free trade, low-tax, small-government, balanced-budgets, strong-national-security basket of issues — a very strong basket ever since World War II — and a new, protectionist populism and nationalism that is much less interested in those traditional policies and structures.
Again, look first at Britain and America, our two close cousins. Consider Britain. Nationalism, jobs and concern about immigration were the powerful forces in the Brexit insurrection. David Cameron seemed to have performed the alchemy of transforming the Conservatives from the nasty party to the modern party. He was the contemporary cool conservative, Tony Blair’s heir.
But in the biggest vote for anything in the history of humanity on the British Isles, the electorate rejected Cameron’s advice on Brexit and voted to leave. The Brexit vote was still a coalition. There were some genuine Little Englanders such as Nigel Farage but there were also genuine globalists such as Boris Johnson. They were united in the quest for British sovereignty against the transnational EU.
Nationalism, in both good or bad guises, was the most powerful political force of the 19th and 20th centuries, and seems likely to dominate a good portion of the 21st century. It need not be a bad thing. Enlightened nationalism is not based on ethnicity or blood but on citizenship and civic identity. At its best this kind of nationalism is an expression of a decent human solidarity. At its worst it is vile racism. Mainstream conservative parties around the world are having fierce internal debates about just where on this spectrum their nationalism, which is newly important to them, lies.
Johnson welcomes immigrants but wants the British government to choose them, just as the Australian government does.
Donald Trump emphasises a fairly crude nationalism and a pretty crude approach on immigration, and has no hesitation in naming groups he doesn’t like, especially Mexicans and other Latin Americans. Nonetheless, Trump is responding to a genuine concern. US citizens, including Hispanic citizens, do not like illegal immigration.
Immigration has become a powerful issue in Australian conservative politics and it is one Morrison will have to navigate carefully. Although I am a strong supporter of a big immigration program, it is undeniable that the urban infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne has not kept pace with population growth. The huge growth in visas is mostly overseas students, rather than the formal immigration program, and these students bring billions of dollars in export income.
Nonetheless it is perfectly reasonable for the new Morrison government to cut the size of the immigration program if it wants to. This is not remotely racist, it is not even dog-whistling for race-based sentiment. This is mostly a nonsense construct of the Left. Post-colonial and postmodern analysis can become ridiculous — sometimes a traffic jam is just a traffic jam.
Where the immigration concerns among conservatives are a little different is the worry about Muslim immigration. This, too, is perfectly reasonable as a subject for discussion and for the Morrison government to take account of. But the overwhelming majority of Australia’s legal immigrants are successful, for themselves and for Australia. Morrison can tackle this, and probably needs to because it is such a concern among the conservative base, without remotely being guilty of any dog-whistling, so long as he and his government lay out their principles clearly and tackle the problems head-on.
Uncontrolled immigration has wrought grave damage on European societies and seen the eclipse in numerous countries of the traditional centre-right parties and the rise of populist anti-immigration parties. Some of these parties, as in the League in Italy, are broadly respectable; some, such as the Alternative for Germany, have appalling antecedents and connections. In eastern European countries such as Hungary and Poland, the fear of this uncontrolled immigration has led to the development of famously illiberal democracy. The moving force in these nations has been nationalism.
Free trade is much less of an issue in Australia than in the US. Although the US has a notional unemployment rate of about 4 per cent, the real unemployment rate is much higher, especially among non-college-educated working-age males. The subtext of almost everything Trump says is jobs. Trade talk is code for lost American jobs. Immigration is code talk for lost American jobs. Environmentalism and greenhouse gas emissions targets — which Trump has substantially abolished — is code for jobs.
Australia has benefited so clearly from free trade deals that free trade doesn’t get anything like that traction in Australia. Immigration is certainly starting to. But climate change policy shapes as a major challenge for Morrison.
The truth is that Australia’s emissions reduction policies have had not one speck of an effect on the global climate. Malcolm Turnbull has twice now lost the leadership of the Liberal Party over what is essentially a symbolic issue, although it is certainly the case that Australia has lost some industry and some jobs because of the needlessly high power prices we have inflicted on ourselves.
Two lines of policy suggest themselves for a Morrison government. One is to emphasise action to get electricity prices lower, as he sensibly did at his first press conference after winning the leadership. And the second is not to abandon Paris altogether but to treat its targets as aspirational. We will make some effort to get to them but not at the expense of harming our economy. This is in fact the often undeclared real position of many other countries. You don’t wear the odium of formally repudiating all the Paris blatherers but nor do you penalise your economy. As for actually securing investment in a new power station, that would be a mighty achievement. That the Liberals have abandoned free-market dogma on this issue is less revolutionary than it might seem. Robert Menzies’ development of Australia was state led. Effective democratic governments are always pragmatic.
Nonetheless, it is the case that the whole political paradigm in the West on some issues has moved left. Trump is not interested in cutting welfare, or indeed any transfer payments, to help balance the budget. Theresa May proposed a kind of user-pays system for some old-age care in Britain’s election and her support collapsed. She saw an election campaign that began with a lead for her of 23 per cent end in a minority government.
Which brings us to the question of culture, both the culture the Morrison government must work in and the culture it must try to create. Part of the crisis in Western politics is a crisis of belief. As the West loses God, it is losing any sense of larger purpose.
The transcendent disappears and common sense follows shortly after. When people are newly accustomed to believe in nothing, they certainly don’t believe in old-fashioned institutions such as parliaments and old-fashioned concepts such as compromise.
We are truly living through the postmodern age. As French sociologist Jean Baudrillard argued, postmodernism is particularly weak in five qualities: depth, coherence, meaning, authenticity and originality.
Western liberalism is going mad in the postmodern age, cut off from its true spiritual roots and removed from the civilising and moderating constraints of tradition.
A Morrison government, as any other, has to navigate this newly destructive environment, made all the worse by the hypersonic media cycle and the rivers of vituperation that flow through social media.
Indeed, bringing the digital universe under the rule of law remains a huge civilisational challenge. It is hard in its probably eight remaining months for the Morrison government to do much on this. But it should make a start.
It also should make a start in addressing the Liberals’ general hopelessness in the politics of culture and cultural institutions. In Britain, the Conservatives have lost almost all distinctive influence on the culture. Thus they can fall into government only on the basis that Labour is unfit or exhausted, and they are empowered occasionally only by the most astonishing popular revolt against cultural conformity as in Brexit.
In the US, cultural conservatives have been much more robust, enterprising and energetic, especially in creating new institutions.
That’s one reason the Left around the world hates them so much. Trump offers a very poor model for Australian Liberals, partly because he benefits from an unintentional pro-rural gerrymander in the presidential electoral college that has no equivalent here.
But a robust presence in the culture, as well as the politics, is critical for conservatives. Morrison’s identity as a chronic Cronulla Sharks fan is a very good first step.
Nocookies
