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Inhaltswarnung: Facts, evidence, consistency be damned. This time it's about feeling By Mark Kenny
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8869720/mark-kenny-australias-political-evolution-the-lefts-uncertain-future
QUOTE BEGINS
The world has become more hard-edged, more right-wing.
Social democracy seems lost in the storm, its outlines blurry and indistinct.
Across the West, the political right speaks to the hot viscera of disgruntled human bodies while the left mouths the cold abstract language of markets, fiscal discipline and economic indices.
When was the last time you heard a Labor Party figure make a major speech calling for transformative government interventions to rescue those left behind?
More often, its suited technocratsia explain to voters who feel pessimistic and unheard how much better off they really are.
This is a politics of disconnection. And disaffection.
Around the globe, established parties of the centre-left are waning, usually following periods in power in which they have failed in their core aims of materially improving the lives of working people, protecting the poor and ending environmental rapaciousness.
Economies have become harsher as companies have replaced governments in many services.
The richest have become richer. Living standards have stalled and often slipped back. Education has become less affordable, less enjoyable, more narrowly instrumental.
Health insurance is prohibitive and a trip to the dentist, potentially ruinous.
Home ownership is a pipe dream. Some reforms have been implemented but voters view them mostly as tinkering.
The left, long-accused of virtue-signalling, is now trapped in the middle and losing the values fight.
The question is not merely what does it stand for, but with whom does it really stand?
Is it the tuxedo crowd or the homeless?
While the current shift is electoral in form, it may turn out to be epochal in nature.
It is not just swinging voters in the middle who are shifting rightward, but core supporters - blue-collar communities and even unions who have long made up the bedrock of parties like the US Democrats, British Labour and the ALP.
Once unbolted, these voters may never return.
Peter Dutton is onto this and has been speaking to these voters in soft breakfast TV spots for three years.
Around the world, the message from voters has been the same. Incrementalism has failed.
Centrism has failed. Internationalism has failed. Multiculturalism can become a negative.
Resurgent nationalism is in vogue. The people lust for sharper turns, radical shifts - mostly inwards and backwards.
They hanker for disruption of a system that no longer offers the credible hope of continuing improvement for all.
Declarations consistent with this new philistinism - even when plainly cruel or idiotic - attract supporters where previously they would have been laughed at. Like annexing Canada or invading a European ally.
In the quickening run-up to a state election in WA, the once more sensitive Liberal Opposition Leader, Libby Mettam, has suddenly announced she would not stand in front of an Aboriginal flag if elected premier on March 8.
This calculated nastiness mimics the harsh stance recently taken by Peter Dutton.
Capitalising on a latent racism successfully fanned in the Voice referendum, both argue that they are virtuously pro-unity.
The country, they say, can have just one flag.
Mettam had supported constitutional recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty as recently as 2023 but now calibrates her political presentation to a harsher Australia.
The gestural mediocrity aside, it eludes both leaders that almost uniquely in the world, Australia's "one flag" features another country in prime position. Now that is laughable.
What genuinely self-respecting nation would put up with this? But then, consistency is irrelevant in emotion-based politics.
Invariably, these abdominally aimed pitches animate two intertwining measures of identity: nationalism and nostalgia. That is, they speak to an inchoate sense that things used to be simpler and better before multiculturalism and woke politics, before the international interference of the UN and multinational finance.
Consider the market-tested themes punctuating the democratic world's hardening nationalist sentiment.
In Brexit in 2016, British voters were urged to take "back" control. In Donald Trump's unlikely run that same year, the impudent outsider promised simply to make America great "again".
His plagiarised Reaganite slogan worked so well, he used it again. Indeed, so in tune was it that after four managerialist years of Bidenomics, Trump's "make America great again" even facilitated a bizarre nostalgia about his first shambolic term. MAGA voters recalled how rosy the economy had been under Trump the first time.
The Harris campaign protested that the numbers told a starkly different story but nobody cared.
America was "on the wrong track" voters kept saying and media kept reporting.
In that vein, is it any surprise that Dutton's working slogan going into the looming federal election is "let's get Australia back on track". Once again we see this unquantifiable notion of a previous golden age to which he promises return. It is an attractive idea and one hard to meet on its own terms, precisely because it is not a fact but a feeling.
Even more so in the digital communications age, emotion beats fact, and subjective perception - often called "lived experience" - leaves objective evidence writhing in the gutter.
At the core of the crisis gripping the cosmopolitan left, is its own timid failure to conduct politics and policy in this light.
A reluctance to confidently assert that the state has a role in social and environmental problem-solving and a refusal to demonise social division, widening inequality and galloping corporate profits.
#sigh #AusPol #ClimateCrisis #WomensRights #ShitParty1 #ShitParty2 #FsckOffDutton #WhyIsLabor #NoNukes #VoteGreens #ProgIndies
QUOTE BEGINS
The world has become more hard-edged, more right-wing.
Social democracy seems lost in the storm, its outlines blurry and indistinct.
Across the West, the political right speaks to the hot viscera of disgruntled human bodies while the left mouths the cold abstract language of markets, fiscal discipline and economic indices.
When was the last time you heard a Labor Party figure make a major speech calling for transformative government interventions to rescue those left behind?
More often, its suited technocratsia explain to voters who feel pessimistic and unheard how much better off they really are.
This is a politics of disconnection. And disaffection.
Around the globe, established parties of the centre-left are waning, usually following periods in power in which they have failed in their core aims of materially improving the lives of working people, protecting the poor and ending environmental rapaciousness.
Economies have become harsher as companies have replaced governments in many services.
The richest have become richer. Living standards have stalled and often slipped back. Education has become less affordable, less enjoyable, more narrowly instrumental.
Health insurance is prohibitive and a trip to the dentist, potentially ruinous.
Home ownership is a pipe dream. Some reforms have been implemented but voters view them mostly as tinkering.
The left, long-accused of virtue-signalling, is now trapped in the middle and losing the values fight.
The question is not merely what does it stand for, but with whom does it really stand?
Is it the tuxedo crowd or the homeless?
While the current shift is electoral in form, it may turn out to be epochal in nature.
It is not just swinging voters in the middle who are shifting rightward, but core supporters - blue-collar communities and even unions who have long made up the bedrock of parties like the US Democrats, British Labour and the ALP.
Once unbolted, these voters may never return.
Peter Dutton is onto this and has been speaking to these voters in soft breakfast TV spots for three years.
Around the world, the message from voters has been the same. Incrementalism has failed.
Centrism has failed. Internationalism has failed. Multiculturalism can become a negative.
Resurgent nationalism is in vogue. The people lust for sharper turns, radical shifts - mostly inwards and backwards.
They hanker for disruption of a system that no longer offers the credible hope of continuing improvement for all.
Declarations consistent with this new philistinism - even when plainly cruel or idiotic - attract supporters where previously they would have been laughed at. Like annexing Canada or invading a European ally.
In the quickening run-up to a state election in WA, the once more sensitive Liberal Opposition Leader, Libby Mettam, has suddenly announced she would not stand in front of an Aboriginal flag if elected premier on March 8.
This calculated nastiness mimics the harsh stance recently taken by Peter Dutton.
Capitalising on a latent racism successfully fanned in the Voice referendum, both argue that they are virtuously pro-unity.
The country, they say, can have just one flag.
Mettam had supported constitutional recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty as recently as 2023 but now calibrates her political presentation to a harsher Australia.
The gestural mediocrity aside, it eludes both leaders that almost uniquely in the world, Australia's "one flag" features another country in prime position. Now that is laughable.
What genuinely self-respecting nation would put up with this? But then, consistency is irrelevant in emotion-based politics.
Invariably, these abdominally aimed pitches animate two intertwining measures of identity: nationalism and nostalgia. That is, they speak to an inchoate sense that things used to be simpler and better before multiculturalism and woke politics, before the international interference of the UN and multinational finance.
Consider the market-tested themes punctuating the democratic world's hardening nationalist sentiment.
In Brexit in 2016, British voters were urged to take "back" control. In Donald Trump's unlikely run that same year, the impudent outsider promised simply to make America great "again".
His plagiarised Reaganite slogan worked so well, he used it again. Indeed, so in tune was it that after four managerialist years of Bidenomics, Trump's "make America great again" even facilitated a bizarre nostalgia about his first shambolic term. MAGA voters recalled how rosy the economy had been under Trump the first time.
The Harris campaign protested that the numbers told a starkly different story but nobody cared.
America was "on the wrong track" voters kept saying and media kept reporting.
In that vein, is it any surprise that Dutton's working slogan going into the looming federal election is "let's get Australia back on track". Once again we see this unquantifiable notion of a previous golden age to which he promises return. It is an attractive idea and one hard to meet on its own terms, precisely because it is not a fact but a feeling.
Even more so in the digital communications age, emotion beats fact, and subjective perception - often called "lived experience" - leaves objective evidence writhing in the gutter.
At the core of the crisis gripping the cosmopolitan left, is its own timid failure to conduct politics and policy in this light.
A reluctance to confidently assert that the state has a role in social and environmental problem-solving and a refusal to demonise social division, widening inequality and galloping corporate profits.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
#sigh #AusPol #ClimateCrisis #WomensRights #ShitParty1 #ShitParty2 #FsckOffDutton #WhyIsLabor #NoNukes #VoteGreens #ProgIndies
Mark Kenny | Australia's political evolution: The left's uncertain future
Nationalism and nostalgia are reshaping Australia's politics, posing a challenge for traditional left-wing parties.Mark Kenny (The Canberra Times)