December 12, 2005
The race riots at Cronulla on the weekend bring the Australian Right into the foreground. The riots can be connected to what recently happened in France. I agree with Andrew Norton over at Catallaxy that the Cronulla violence is similar to the most recent Sydney riots at Macquarie Fields and Redfern. In both the French and Sydney cases the base economic issues are clear: poorly educated young people fuelled by anger, dispossession and booze/drugs, low incomes and poor job prospects, turning tribal.
Bill Leak
However,what happened Cronulla is also different from the events in France. Cronulla turned tribal and became racist, without the police or the political authorities fueling racism, which is what happened in France.
So how do we understand thie Cronulla riot in terms of the development of the Australian Right and in its own terms? Is it an Old or New Right?
What we can say is that more going on in this event than Tim Blair's account of beach trash, given this report, which suggests a discourse around the dominance of the white race. Glen Fuller has a stab here.
At the moment the Australian Right is a political movement possibly without a think-tank (the IPA?) and a school of thought. My judgement is that it is a political movement that provides a challenge to liberalism at the end of modernity. This political movement is pro-American, Christian, place a higher value on culture and identity than on economics, is anti-multiculturalism and very patriotic.
Can we say more than this rather conventional account of Australian conservatism and its understanding of nationalism?
Andrew Leigh over at Imagining Australia sees the significance of Cronulla in terms of 'Hindu/Muslim violence in India, and perhaps even the treatment of Jews in early-1930s Germany.' This kind of broader context is definitely needed, but it reduces the Right to ethnic racism, which is a traditional liberal response . My interpretation is that Cronulla signifies a 'radical nationalist politics' at odds with the dominant 'Western liberal internationalist ideology'.
If modernity designates the political and philosophical movement of the last three centuries of Western history, then modernity can be characterised primarily by five converging historical processes:
1. individualization, through the destruction of old forms of communal life;
2. standardization, through the adoption of standardized behavior and lifestyles;
3. desacralization, through the displacement of the religious narratives by a scientific interpretation of the world;
4. rationalization, through the domination of instrumental reason, the free market, and technical efficiency;
5. universalization, through a global extension of an (American) liberal model of society postulated implicitly as the only rational possibility and thus as superior to all other forms of life.
The tabloid media short hand of 'political correctness ' mostly refers to the politics of the New Class and so misses the sociology.
The return of a violent nationalism at Cronulla takes place within a crisis in modernity--the historical exhaustion of the great mobilizing n political narratives of right and left--- at the very point when the universalist liberal utopia is poised to become a reality under the form of liberal globalization in the 21st century. The death of the old is also the birth of the new--the beginning of postmodernity that is characterized by a series of new themes: preoccupation with ecology, concern for the quality of life, the role of tribes and of networks, revival of community, the politics of group identities, multiplication of intra- and supra-state conflicts, the return of social violence, the decline of established religions, growing opposition to social elitism, etc etc.
Cronulla signifies the role of tribes and of networks, revival of community, the politics of group identities, nationalism (Australian flags, Eureka Stockade flags, boxing kangaroos, Waltzing Matilda). The Australian Right is an Old Right not a New Right, as it stands for a return to the past, as distinct from a reworking of certain pre-modern values in a decisively postmodern dimension. It talks in terms of race not difference and this racism is the denial of ethnic difference.
Cronulla signifies a process whereby true blue Aussies mutate into One Nation Romper Stompers without becoming a National Front political movement that stills lacks a popular leader such as Le Pen in France. This movement in formation (a simulacrum of fascism?) is currently characterised by a scapegoat logic, which consists in making one group of the population (immigrants and Arab Australians) responsible for the unravelling of the social fabric, for Australia being threatened with a loss of its national identity in a globalised world.
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And Lebanese muslim gangs harassing and threatening people at the beach for years has nothing to do with it, right? God you people are morons.
And when Cronulla does not mysteriously give rise to a new pan-Australian fascist movement, what then? Will you think maybe you were wrong? Do you even bother to think about the stupid garbage you write befor you disgorge it?