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November 5, 2010
Angry white Americans make good media copy, especially when they are fronted by suburban housewives with the attitude of Mama grizzlies, and backed by big Republican money. The angry Americans are the majorities of white men and women, suburbanites and older Americans whose nostalgia is for a lost America, and whose often cynical and fearful view of the future is coloured by this sense of loss.
Martin Rowson
Martin Kettle in his Boris Johnson could be the Sarah Palin of a British Tea Party in The Guardian says that the Tea Party:
stands for individualism, libertarianism, low taxes and small government. It is nationalistic, overwhelmingly white and not interested in the rest of the world, which it views as a hostile force. An insurrectionary party of that kind – stripped of the distinctively American aspects like guns, capital punishment and cultural conservatism – is surely at least conceivable in a British and European context. In fact, such parties exist in most European countries already, albeit on the margins. In this country Ukip comes quite close to this template, and it shares a lot of ground with parts of the Tory party.
And is surely conceivable in Australia. The nationalistic, overwhelmingly white strand is most obvious in those opposed, to and deeply hostile towards, refugees and to they two new asylum seeker detention facilities in Western Australia and South Australia. They advocate Fortress Australia in their desire to restore a lost Australia.
Kettle adds that if we imagine a British Tea Party as an off-the-peg American franchise we are asking the wrong question. The cultures are too different. Similarly with Australia. However, the roots are there in older Australia in the form of right wing populism, that is socially conservative, is hostile to an out-of-touch and corrupt Canberra elite, and is backed by the strong media presence and support of News Ltd.
These conservative populists---ethnic whites and older and working class men and women-- dislike unwelcome change and desire restoration, are susceptible to the Coalition's opposition to the process of transformation, which they see as being driven The Greens (the enemy within). The Coalition is doing its best to stir them up.
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In Angry America raises the barricades in the Financial Times Philip Stephens says that:
That is not the case in Australia. The economy is entering boom times.