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May 16, 2005
One blockage to the renewal of social democracy in Australia is the conservative populist assault on liberalism and the difficulty liberals experience in confronting the resonance of the culture war amongst working-class people.
On the backlash account of conservative populism the ordinary hard working Australian worker understands that that the arrogant elitist social liberals aren't the friends of ordinary mainstream people, but the enemy. This is interpreted as the ALP having deserted them by swinging too far to the left, and embracing the policies and values of the inner-city, cafe latte crowd.
This politics as culture and class has become the very blood and bone of public discourse since 1996. A lot of the strategy and script is derived from the US, where conservatives approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) elites. As Thomas Frank explains:
"The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it."[3] These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding."
Frank says that the backlash narrative is more powerful than mere facts, and according to this central mythology conservatives are always hardworking patriots who love their country and are persecuted for it, while liberals, who are either high-born weaklings or eggheads hypnotized by some fancy idea, are always ready to sell their nation out at a moment's notice.It was that narrative that Murdoch's papers pushed in Australia during the Iraq war, the war on terrorism and on national security.
The effect is to dislodge the blue collar working class from social democracy and the ALP.
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