August 20, 2005
A couple of events. First a Geoff Pryor cartoon published in the Canberra Times:
The other event is the Australian Financial Review's response to the negotiations over the sale of Telstra by Barnaby Joyce and his Nationals. The Review talks in terms of reforms passed by the Howard Government's control of the Senate being marred by pork barrelling:
Now control of the Senate has opened up a whole new vista, where pork is measured in billions of dollars.There may well be a need to bring rural communications up to scratch, but the $3.1 billion ransom for Telstra's sale reflects the National's price, rather than any rigorous assessment of need.
What is underling this is a concern about the faction versus the national or public interest with the public interest associated with the sovereign will. Pork is associated with faction and national interest is associated with the neo-liberal's economic plan of privatisation.
My interpretation? The privatisation of Telstra is part of the grand plan of economic reform and faction and debate represents a form of corruption of the sovereign will.
You could say that the Review's position is that reform represents the general will of the nation--the general interest that expresses a single indivisible sovereign power--as opposed to the will of all. Consequently, the Nationals, who represent the particular interests, are the enemy within the body politic.
Do you not sense totalitarianism with the AFR position, with its desire for order? The interests of the whole must automatically and permanently be hostile to the particular regional interests of the Queensland Nationals. Don't you sense the absolutism?
I'm not sure how the AFR gets a Hobbesian conception of a single indivisible sovereign power from its economic uititaritarianism--that puzzles me. But I understand that the AFR radically devalues pluralism, political action and the public sphere.
It is not liberalism that the AFR is expressing---since liberalism affirms pluralism.
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My girlfriend and I noted the same idea of totalitarianism.
I have to admit that I'm finding it all, and all that is happening in America very scary.
Are there alternatives? How can I help resist this rise of what I think is appalling?