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October 20, 2009
The Coalition's hostile response to the recent boatloads of Sri Lankan asylum seekers coming to Australia got me thinking. The Liberals are in the wilderness and they will seize on anything to cut through by whipping up a populist storm to destroy Rudd's program of reforms and rational liberal mode of governance that seeks to strengthen institutions of governance.
The Coalition's paranoid rhetoric on illegal immigration is one of getting angry at imaginary stuff--eg., the Asian hordes swamping Australia. This anger taps into an emotional economy of resentment about their lived plight amongst the conservative base. So I wondered: 'Is white populism a foundation stone in political conservatism's desire to maintain, or conserve, the existing order in Australia?
My bearings are taken from here. This is a white populism that works in terms of fear and loathing towards the Asian hordes, a white backlash against decades of radical economic and social change, and a form of nostalgia about a sense of the past that imagines a social and political order that at once simplifies and “restores” a way of life based in community in the face of the rapidly changing relationships between the national and the global. It is also a form of nationalism premised on an Anglo-British Australianness that forms Australia's core culture.
Many in the conservative base feel under attack from the rapid social and economic change--eg., battlers caught up in the re-structural shifts of global capital that make their jobs ‘post-industrially’ redundant, depressing already basic living standards---- but they can't form a coherent definition of where the attack on their way of life is coming from. They are angry, and their "whiteness" operates like an ethnicity that has no other name, but is often expressed as assimilation.
I appreciate that there are many kinds of populism (people vs. the powerful", ordinary Australia's vs educated "elites,") and many kinds of issues that populist movements form around its oppositional qualities to corporatism, and that white populism is one way of cutting the cake. For instance, Jeff Sparrow describes the cultural politics thus:
Remember Katherine Betts’ The Great Divide? Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians? Michael Thompson’s Labor Without Class? Mark Latham’s From the Suburbs? The decades worth of columns in The Australian; the reports churning out from the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies?
The narrative was always the same. A chasm separated ordinary, decent Howard-voting Australians from an arrogant tertiary-educated, intellectual elite: a clutch of sneering know-it-alls who wanted to overrun the country with immigrants, make everyone guilty about Aborigines and brainwash the youth with Parisian post-modernist mumbo-jumbo.
This downplays the differences within a conservative populism that relies on nationalism to hold itself together, but it does describe one foundation stone of political conservatism in the last decade. The underground structures of feeling were anti-bank, anti-Canberra, anti-immigrant, anti-global, and this nationalism functioned to support the status quo to defend "the people" against a perceived threat by internal elites and subversive outsiders.
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it's no longer "populism with pitchforks" --an agrarian-based popular mass revolt against Canberra that sweeps across the regions--eg., that of a Bjelke Peterson.
This populism is one that says immigrants bring alien ideas and customs that are toxic to our core culture and it distrusts academics in their Ivory Towers. So it functions to undercut rational debate by discarding logic and factual evidence in favor of emotional appeals and prejudice.