My new housemate has a blog. This is the most interesting post in it.

[Platypus]

Where does the left path lead?

Posted by Andrew Carr on March 23, 2009


I’d long wondered why the ALP was pushing the idea of internet censorship. It seemed a badly organised and designed political ploy to bring over the social conservative vote. After all, the Howard Government was equally concerned about the internet, and yet due to its luddite ways seemed unsure of what to do. But had they won another term in office, it’s pretty reasonable to expect they would have pushed a similar nation wide internet filter policy. Yet whilst Rudd attracts some social conservatives through his own image, the move seemed evidence of a a poor understanding of the voters to assume this issue would change what are normally locked in Liberal party supporters. Guy Rundle of Crikey however helps complete the circuit for me:

Throughout that series of struggles[from the 1960's-70's], the ALP was — more often than not — on the side of a freer and more open society. It was, in that sense, Australia’s liberal party. For everyone up to and including Keating, the modernisation of Australia manifested in making it a fairer, better society was equally expressed in the idea that ideas, debate and media should be as free as possible, and that each was a condition of the other.

Like New Labour in the UK, the ALP has now abandoned that, for a number of reasons. Once it committed itself to neoliberal economics (”social capitalism”) Labo(u)r became freaked about the social dissolution and rupture, the desocialisation created by turning the polis into a giant market of winners and losers. The tough answer to this is genuine social democracy, in which people have a social being not entirely defined by whether they’re a “winner” or a “loser”. The easy answer is to let the market rip, allow it to change the culture, and then seek to control and reshape people’s behaviour, selling it to them as “protecting the many against the few”.

Politically, this also serves as a way of outflanking the Right on the law and order issue, with a distinctive centre-left twist. The Right can talk about “throwing away the key”, “three strikes”, etc, sounding increasingly olde-worlde, while Labour can offer filters, ASBOs, CCTVs and so on, portraying themselves as both cutting-edge, high-tech, and hardline. And any objection concerning an open society from within its own ranks can be dealt with by reference back to the way in which “rights stopped Labour achieving real change” — high courts striking down tax laws etc etc.

Rundle highlights the critical point that with the left’s economic surrender, it also lost it’s connection to what the good society could look like. Whilst it came naturally to left wing leaders such as Ben Chifley, and Gough Whitlam to talk of great objectives and the struggle towards the light on the hill, modern Labor has almost no idea about what that city of shining gold would look like. It still has it’s values and principles, albeit reduced to child-like slogans “the fair go”, and plenty of smart people to churn over policy ideas and pass them up the chain. So, to be clear it can still govern competently.

But, and this is critical, without an idea of where you are going, you can’t justify any social disruption that may occur along the way. It is for this reason that Rudd and Labor always seem so poll driven. They cant bring themselves to justify upsetting people, or telling them to accept the consequences, because they don’t actually know if the costs are worth it. Any policy therfore gets reduced to questions of how many will it hurt, and if that number passes a certain threshold it is abandoned. This number however doesn’t even have to have any relation to the number who benefit. Hence the prospect that some small % of people will get angry over pornography on the internet, or use it for malicious purposes means the great liberalisation taking place in our society, of people (and businesses) everywhere interacting like never before has to be given safety rails and smoothed out.

As such, whilst little attention or fanfare is made (certainly nothing like the actual moral police on the right would have us do) Labor slowly introduces more and more laws to restrict and “protect”, all assessed and sold on immediate merits and without comparison to how such measures fit into their ideal of what society ought to look like. Take this latest move from the UK:


London cops have been given the power to “disperse” anyone under 16, gathered in groups of two or more, from almost all of central London, after 9PM. The police don’t have to see the kids doing anything wrong, they only have to believe “the presence or behaviour of a group of two or more persons in any public place in the relevant locality has resulted, or is likely to result, in any members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed”. If you’re observant, in central London, you may have seen this notice [See Right] casually cable-tied to a lamppost. From afar, it looks like a council planning application, or parking bay suspension. It’s actually notifying you that you’re now subject to an anti-social behaviour order, and the Police (and the not-really-Police Community Support Officers) have special powers to remove you from this area if they feel like it. These dispersal areas cover large swathes of London, and other cities in England. There are now over 1000 such areas.

Ideology is often damned in our politics. It is seen as causing us to be reckless or wasteful. But it serves a very important duty of letting us give perspective to the changes advocated. It shows how each piece fits into the larger picture, and if the inevitable harm any change occurs (though change is the only constant) is justified for some greater social, political or economic goal. These days most of the duties of governance are questions of administration, maintenance and compromise between competing options. In this Labor is still highly skilled, and perhaps at the State level where questions of ideology are largley absent, it has made itself the de facto party of government).

But nationally, this represents a real concern. The lack of coherence that results from such pragmatic approaches to governance creates distortions in society (such as the vast differences in our tax code for various favored groups) that inevitably give rise to anger. The lack of restraint in pragmatic approaches to governance means creeping changes that would be rejected outright on principle are slowly put together. And the lack of an endpoint in pragmatic approaches to governance means that society begins to slowly drift along, without much sense of enthusiasm or energy. This is a gap that can be filled with Nationalism (as Howard occasionally flirted with) or by investing faith in a single person to inspire a new beginning (Such as Obama in the US), but neither path suits the goals and ideals of the left.

This is a big part of the reason why i consider myself a liberal (small l) rather than of the left. Liberalism seems to offer an offset for the costs (individual freedom), buyt with the left there is no end to the list of those to be helped in some way. This is also why there are several good books showing the shortcomings of the left (largely for moral ambivalence & political weakness such as in Nick Cohen’s What’s Left) and yet no real change in left wing political thought is apparent since Anthony Giddens began pushing the ‘Third Way’ back in the early 1990’s. And even that was more a re-branding so as to avoid admitting actual abandonment of now unworkable ideas like socialism.

Political victories in Australia and the US -especially here in Australia won due to the failure of their opponents- will of course distract the left, convince it that it’s in the ascendancy and dampen any desire for fleshing out the ‘vision thing’. But if these are to be truely progressive governments then they will need a place to which to push the boulder of society. Otherwise it will simply become a Sysiphisian task, pushing the boulder of society in one direction to enable social reform, and then back the other way to in some way mitigate the costs or appease the complainers. And on and on and on. Now I’m not seeking utopian end points, and the task of government should largely be one of sensible re-adjustment to the current circumstances and needs of the community. But, without a direction, those corrections end up taking on the bearing of pure drift. And perhaps take us into places we would not like to find ourselves.

The task before the left’s clear: What should the ideal society look like? What is the shining city on a hill to be today ? What ‘crazy’ long term dreams for change are to be had? What ‘never going to happen’ ideas are in need of a revisiting? What ideas that the political will has never existed for could now begin to be built up toward, perhaps over a generations fight. Figure out that, and many of the problems of the left will also be solved. That was what Reagan and Thatcher offered people in their conservative revolution, now it is time for ours. Perhaps then I’d be proud to call myself a left winger again.