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June 28, 2010
David Burchell continues to do his culture wars job at The Australian of playing of the bad elites versus the good ordinary Australians. In his latest column---Real people don't get besotted with prime ministers he ties this into The Australian's intense dislike, nay antagonism, towards political bloggers. Their conception of politics is the existential conflict based on the friend and enemy distinction.
Burchill says the latter, as political enthusiasts, are political romantics caught up in their own fantasies:
One of most curious aspects of the past three years has been the yawning and ever-growing gulf between the universe of the political enthusiast -- the blogging savants, the convulsive Facebook oracles, the haiku poets of the Twitterverse and their motley followers and hangers-on -- and the reality of those who have to grind their lives away in the dreary vicinities of power.
The former are consumed by that beguiling procession of fashionable delusions and fantasies that they project onto the screen.
Burchill, of course, exempts himself from being part the political enthusiast. He does not succumb to his sbeautiful private fantasies. He is in touch with the real world beyond the screen; the world of those hard working folk with sound common sense and their feet solidly on the ground (in western Sydney):
All across the land, public administrators, local Labor and trade union workers and businesspeople alike have been gnashing their teeth in frustration at a government grown so dysfunctional that it could no longer sustain attention in a single policy priority for more than a few days, and so careless that it could no longer keep track of its proliferating expenditures, despite the charade of fiscal prudence. The Australian, of course, has little time for the new voices in the public sphere especially when they are informed and are left of centre. We don't know what we are talking about, have little grasp of the national interest, and cannot even interpret the polls properly.
Burchill is bringing in Carl Schmitt's ideas into Australian conservatism. In Political Romanticism Schmitt writes:
In the romantic it is not reality that matters, but rather romantic productivity, which transforms everthing and makes it into the occasion for poetry. What the king and queen are in reality is intentionally ignored. Their function consists instead in being a point of departure for romantic feelings. The same holds for the beloved. From the standpoint of romanticism, therefore, it is simply not possible to distinguish between the king, the state, or the beloved. In the twilight of the emotions, they blend into one another. In both Novalis and Adam Müller, the state appears as the beloved, and the poeticizing of the science of finance that they bring off lies in the consideration that one should pay taxes to the state just as one gives presents to the beloved. (p. 126)
In Burchill's interpretation the romantic bloggers are all talk. They play at a liberal parlor game building their fictional edifices of words.
The only legitimate political commentators in the eyes of The Australian are the professional ones (especially those who work for The Australian) and who tell us what to think and what our politics should be. Their understanding of the public conversation about the political events of the day is that it is one conducted within the Canberra beltway by the professional media types in touch with the politicians and who have their finger on the political pulse of the nation. And that is the way it should be.
The Australian stands for the restoration against the democratic strands of the internet revolution. It also stands for the new austerity.
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Reverse Envy is a nasty trait often exhibited in conservatives, from the traditional hatred of welfare recipients, through to our time, when all sorts of people are othered, judged as "undeserving".
Like Howard, Abbott is one of these with such a disappointing life of their own to comfort them, must then seek to intervene or interfere with others (the aboriginal intervention is an example?).