One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that so far, populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left-
wing one. In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members vote for conservative politicians who serve the interests of
precisely those financiers and corporate elites they claim to despise. It has been several decades since anyone on the left has been able to articulate, first, a coherent analysis of what happens to the structure of advanced societies as they undergo economic change and, second, a realistic agenda that has any hope of protecting a middle-class society. The main trends in left-wing thought in the last two generations have been, frankly, disastrous as either conceptual frameworks or tools for mobilization.
Francis Fukuyama
Overly simplistic, perhaps, but I think the major reason the Left has retreated from populist economic narratives because the Right has been very effective at associating regulation with communism.
The Tea Party is misguided and harming its own interests, but the participants are absolutely convinced that any government involvement in the finance system is a big step directly down the road to gulags and central planning. Articulating a case against the barrage of “socialists!” has become tiring and unrewarding, so the Left tinkers with social issues instead.
If you ignore for a second what politicians actually do (after all, surely only a minor percentage of the population votes for left-wing parties in the hope that they will entrench organised labor privileges and ‘government consultants’ at the expense of the social justice?) and focus on their rhetoric, it surely isn’t hard to see why the left-wing model isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders! Sure, there’s a substantial gap between rhetoric and reality, but that applies to both sides.
What the right-wing populists have done most successfully is associate the status quo with left-centrist politics. Partly, this is by association – they are for being soft on immigrants, hence being soft on immigrants is part of ‘what hasn’t worked’, we are for opposite (being tough on immigrants), hence the rest of our platform is part of the opposite to what hasn’t worked.
That’s pretty much the reverse of what I said above, and while I think that’s true on some issues, I don’t believe it describes the way the Right describes the Left’s economic beliefs.
The Right I’m thinking of portrays centre-Left economics as a radical departure from the norm. Think of the carbon price, which is condemned as being a socialist tax justified by a Marxist conspiracy to corrupt the global scientific institution, rather than a staid market-based solution to a problem that the majority of the electorate wants addressed.
The Right’s entire schtick is about claiming to represent stability and predictablility, so I would say that on immigration the Liberal Party is arguing that Labor is applying the aberrant and unnatural idea of multiculturalism to undermine traditional western values, and promising a return a white Australia where the only brown people you see are waiters.
That’s a bit harsh. Particularly as the largest migration increase in recent history occured under the Howard government. And they were mostly not white – the asian student market got legs in the lates 90’s and rapidly expanded from there.
I think the fundamental reason why there is no strong left wing economic ‘vision’ is that both sides are basically in agreement that democratic governance, coupled with property rights, reducing unnecessary regulation and allowing individuals to go and produce is the only system that works.
The only difference is the degree to which either side pushes on deregulation etc.
Oh, yes. Howard oversaw massive immigration and growth of government, but that’s not how conservatives remember it.
We’re seeing the same pattern in the US. The Republicans routinely refer to the last fifty years of Republican administrations as models of fiscal rectitude, which directly contradicts the plain facts.
If Australian politics ran on observable facts and rationality, the current government would be wildly popular and the only Liberal with any chance at the Lodge for the next decade would be Malcolm Turnbull.
Sancho,
You write this:
I think you’re trapped in chattering class chit-chat. You’re describing what they say at the IPA, but people generally support action on climate change – until a specific proposal comes up and they realise they’re being treated as part of the problem and they don’t like it. People are in favour of tax reform too – until they find out the particular kind involved.
So at least as I read it, something quite different is going on. Oppositions can always engage in scare campaigns, particularly if the government is actually doing something substantial. At that point they have an advantage – which evaporates once the reform has been introduced. At that point things can swing back the other way (unless your leader is not very good).
Oppositions can’t really be constructive because the media’s news values monoculture is oriented around a single dimension – conflict. So conflict and opposing its opponents initiatives is the most efficacious way to conduct an opposition. Tony Abbott demonstrated that about the mining tax and carbon pricing.
The Australian public just watch this stuff go by and don’t give it too much of a thought. They buy the grand, vague aspirations – to fix the planet and have ‘tax reform’ but are easily exploited and scared when the details turn up. The fact that some in the have crazy justifications of these views can play some role in the propaganda war, but none of this is ideologically very stable, most of it is the epiphenomena of political opportunism.
So where you see the right as winning the ideological battle, I don’t. I see them as winning a tactical battle because their opponents (who objectively speaking have most of the natural advantages) are unusually politically inept. A competent politician would eat up this opposition. Hawke would romp into office were he in Julia’s shoes. Likewise the Obama Administration reminds me of what Churchill said about Americans. They always do the right thing – after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.
Clinton’s magnificent speech to the convention set the tone and he came out swinging. Then Obama did it as well. And guess what? Standing up to the Republicans craziness works a treat because a higher proportion of Americans than Australians may be insane, but there’s still enough who are not to make exposing and attacking the Republicans’ insanity their best political bet.