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February 10, 2005
The neo-con reader that may help us to understand the conservative majority. The review is not that great a help but it does suggest the possibility that Australia is now living with a conservative majority. How did this come to be? What was the strategy to ensure conservative majority?
This article by Dennis Glover in The Age gives us some insight. He helps us to understand how the strategy whereby the convervative majority is being worked into a Coalition majority. Glover refers to Karl Rover's insights on the middle ground in politics:
'Rove has a simple philosophy, which he outlined in an interview in the New Yorker magazine in 2003: "There is no middle! 'Middle' is the wrong word. 'The unattached' is a better way of putting it, because to say 'the middle' implies that they are philosophically centrist in outlook, and they aren't. Some of the people who are unaffiliated are on the left. Some of the people who are unattached are on the right. Some are hard to characterise philosophically at all on the traditional left-right continuum."'
I think that is a good insight.I'd always assumed that the middle between the two major political parties in America, the US and Britain to be an identifiable bloc with a philosophical core. The last election in Australia showed that not be the case as it melted away like snow in the sun.
Glover then asks what does this 'shifting empty middle' mean for the abortion debate now happening in Australia? That debate is being driven by dissident backbenchers from the Coalition's right wing putting questions on notice, attending inter-faith meetings and now cobbling together a private member's bill. Given John Howard's record of crushing dissent within his party, the continuation of the debate has the PM's assent.
Spooner captures the tactics nicely. The abortion values debate is being played a certain way. What is it? How is it connected to the formtion of the conservative majority?
Glover's answer to the above question about the significance of the empty middle for the abortion debate is interesting. He says that:
"...as traditional political loyalties based on class dissipate, Howard is trying to appeal to people all over the political spectrum who hold strong personal views on often divisive issues connected to religion, nationalism and race. He wants them to put aside their economic interests and vote for conservative values. It usually involves pegging out a position on a topic which intellectuals say involves complex moral and legal issues, but which the man or woman in the street sees as black and white. Abortion is simply the latest issue in this unfinished war of turning the majority against flip-flopping, floundering elites."
Moral issues are seldom resolved. They never go away as they keep on surfacing. So we have an eternal values debate.
So what is the PM's tactics on this abortion issue?
Glover says:
"The real reason the Prime Minister is allowing and encouraging the abortion debate is to send a message. The law won't change, but after a long and costly parliamentary fight - which will monopolise media coverage for weeks and involve senior Liberals appearing on television agreeing with church leaders - morally conservative working-class Australians will know that, secretly, if only those rotten elites would let him, John Howard would love to move against abortion."
Deploying such tactics ensures the support of the conservative populist working class voters against the liberal enemy within the nation state. They become rusted on and the transition away from the ALP is permanent.
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Gary, that makes a lot of sense. If only there was a competetive "left" strategy other than Clinton's disastrous "third way"--or if only it was simply an issue of strategy (and not one of having the cards increasingly stacked from the beginning.) The neocons exploit a severely unbalanced situation, profitting from decades of conservative trend-setting. But in the end they just aren't sexy! Where is their sex appeal?!?