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May 2, 2007
An interesting essay by Jonathan Chait in the New Republic that has some relevance to Australia. Entitled 'How the netroots became the most important mass movement in U.S. politics' it discusses the rise of the Democratic machine in response to the much admired Republican one, which claims that it won the war of ideas or the culture wars. Chait says:
The most significant fact of American political life over the last three decades is that there is a conservative movement and there has not been a liberal movement. Liberalism, to be sure, has all the component parts that conservatism has: think tanks, lobbying groups, grassroots activists, and public intellectuals. But those individual components, unlike their counterparts on the conservative side, do not see one another as formal allies and don't consciously act in concert. If you asked a Heritage Foundation fellow or an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal how his work fits into the movement, he would immediately understand that you meant the conservative movement. If you asked the same question of a Brookings Institute fellow or a New York Times editorial writer, he would have no idea what you were talking about.
A similar situation exists in Australia. The netroots have begun to change all that in the US with the politically activist blogs, such as Daily Kos, Eschaton, and FireDogLake that are allied to liberal bloggers such as Talking Points Memo and Washington Monthly. A movement, and its partisan ethos and party-line sensibi is developing, and it is one dedicated to the cause of Democratic victory. Political punditry is not a form of intellectual discourse but of political battle.
Is something similar happening here in Australia? Do we have homegrown Labor Party netroots that see politics as a battlefield and understand a the effectiveness of an idea in terms of its rhetorical effectiveness, not its truth?
Chait describes the shift that place with the netroots:
The notion that political punditry ought to, or even can, be constrained by intellectual honesty is deeply alien to the netroots. They have absorbed essentially the same critique of the intelligentsia that the right has been making for decades. In the conservative imagination, journalists, academics, and technocrats are liberal ideologues masquerading as dispassionate professionals. Those who claim to be detached from the political struggle are unaware of their biases, or hiding them.
Any sense of detachment from the partisan fray is impossible as we are caught up in a political war. So the netroot bloggers are a message machine.
What has formed during the '90s and the Howard years is a shift in the media landscape: a large mainstream media, with a social liberal bias mostly working in terms of liberal objectivity and profesional neutrality and a wildly is there an audience for in raw partisan liberal attacks? Will the Internet Left blogs grow in response to this demand for raw meat?
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Reality is so constituted that it is evidenced and manifest, including in the way large numbers of people can recognise features in common. Meaning and value; deep fulfilment triggers, are activated through event and communication, which temporarily undermine the power of hegemony and appearance.
Don't forget, we never really saw the back of Mcarthyism; just grew innured to it, as is the actuality of repressive tolerance.
What is thought to be anomolous is actually the norm, but seemingly paradoxically due to the moment in history, this is also inverse to itself. It has been like the great underlying radio wave "buzz" of the universe not discovered until the 'sixties and 'seventies by the physicists because it was always "there", or the haze of pollution that millworkers in 19th century England were born into, lived their shortened lives under and died because of , never knowing the very bosom of their lives was toxic and artificial.
But once in a while things become so intolerable that people simultaneously wake up to the threat of the evolved current condition and begin to rebel in common.
As
Marx pointed out, the credibility gap between proclaimed and perceived reality becomes so great, the contradictions are somehow defined or contrasted by and through changing events inherent in the nature of reality, that even the least gifted recognise a threat.
On a superficial level, the Bush "Mission Accomplished" has the Right now deeply discredited in America and IR is having a similar efect on Australians.
The Right becomes inevitably too myopic and greedy and has to back off for a bit, offering the plausible compromise of weak social democracy. And most of us have become so fed up with the oppressiveness of the system that we'll plump for symptom-relief, and the buying of a bit more time between now and the grave.
As a social phenomena this proceeds to morph into a rebirth of consumer fetishism which allows the system a chance to buy back into the game through the production of little luxuries, as happened during the 'fifties, after WW2. Consciousness and memory decline.
And the cycle starts up all over again.