|
July 04, 2004
I'm reading Robert Menzies Forgotten People Essays at the moment. These were radio broadcasts made by Menzies in early 1942 just after the fall of Singapore.
I'm reading Menzies to understand how John Howard has taken an inherited political language developed for a bounded industrialized nation state, and then adapted it to the political present of Australia in globalized world.
Howard's political rhetoric adds social conservatism to the economic liberalism and the dry economic language of competitive, market-based liberalism. He connects this social conservatism to the experiences of the battlers----families and small businesses: to their lived experiences around work, family and neighbourhoods. This mainstream Australia was then enveloped in a taken-for-granted assimilationist nationalism. Hey presto, we can start talking about the nation as a common Australian culture again. The battler package became a political touchstone.
Howard's battlers move is similar to Menzies' forgotten people move 50 years earlier. That move adapted an inherited political language to the new circumstances of industrial Australia. In the Forgotten People speech Menzies says:
"In a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war. But if we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class - the middle class - those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and the nether millstones of the false class war; the middle class who, properly regarded, represent the backbone of this country. We do not have classes here as in England, and therefore the terms do not mean the same; so I must define what I mean when I use the expression 'middle class’."
The middle class for Menzies lies between the rich and powerful and the unskilled labouring mass. This class consists in:
"....the intervening range - the kind of people I myself represent in Parliament - salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on. These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganized and unselfconscious. They are envied by those whose social benefits are largely obtained by taxing them. They are not rich enough to have individual power. They are taken for granted by each political party in turn. They are not sufficiently lacking in individualism to be organized for what in these days we call "pressure politics". And yet, as I have said, they are the backbone of the nation."
This non-manual class becomes the forgotten people who are the backbone of the nation. The forgotten people constitute a moral community; they see themselves as the individual bearers of moral qualities or virtues; and they have their own homes in the suburbs. Menzies says that the value of this middle class is multiple. The first is that:
"...it has a stake in the country". It has responsibility for homes - homes material, homes human, homes spiritual...The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving "for a home of our own"...homes human is where my wife and children are...homes spiritual....combines dependence upon God with independence of man."
The value of the middle class also included other moral virtues:
"Second, the middle class, more than any other, provides the intelligent ambition which is the motive power of human progress...Third, the middle class provides more than perhaps any other the intellectual life which marks us off from the beast: the life which finds room for literature, for the arts, for science, for medicine and the law....Fourth, this middle class maintains and fills the higher schools and universities, and so feeds the lamp of learning."
Hence we have the moral middle class as a people with virtuous character who were deeply concerned with what is good for the nation.Personal virtue and national strength were linked to give an account of how people could live together and cooperate for their shared endeavours of nation-building.
What Howard was able to rework this understanding of the virtuous middle class and the nation. He drops all Menzies talk about service and obligations re citizenship and links what is left to the nation's history read through the prism of the Anzac legend.
|
Gary, check out these two from Webdiary:
Rediscovering our moral compass through Menzies
and
The Liberal Party: headed for oblivion?