That is a good article. It is interesting that the homogeneity discussed in the article only comes through central state authority - which means the state has to be dominant over not only the individual but other competing political entities ie the federated States.

Political homogeneity is shared by all the parties at the federal level though. All are centralisers. I do not think that governance through emergency or exception is unique to the federal Liberal party. NSW Labor did it too last year with the Cronulla Riots.

Every government at the national level has tried to construct a national narrative that is politically advantageous to them. One that both binds and wedges at the same time. Even though the article discusses Brett noting that a Menzies 'you' became a Howard 'we', I don't think that is significant enough as Menzies had plans to create camps too - for communists rather than refugees.

There is an argument I think that this form of governance becomes natural for executive government under the political organisation of a nation-state.

Cam,
yes it is refreshing to see. It makes sense of John Howard's conservative position that Muslims are uniquely resistant to assimilation, that Christianity is fundamental to Australian culture, that immigrants have to adjust to our values, that talking about the causes of terrorism constitutes appeasement, that the Cronulla riot was a media beat-up.

There is a certain liberal blindness around this otherness that can be found here, where the emphasis is on deadshits, working to engage marginalised and disaffected young people, and developing strategies to ensure young men of Middle Eastern background feel and are included in Australian society.

This response by liberalism is fine as far as it goes. However, this liberalism completely ignores what the new emerging conservatism is trying to do. This is a Schmittian conservatism that is deeply opposed to liberalism, and has a very powerful critique of liberalism.

Gary, What were Schmitt's pivotal texts in this area? It seems I am going to have to read up on them.

Cam,
best to start with Carl Schmitt The Concept of the Political as this text is concerned with the defining feature of politics --division, conflict, antagonism. this provides the basis for Schmitt's understanding of the shortcomings of liberal democracy.

Thanks Gary, it should be arriving at my door in a few days.

I really don't think comparisons of Schmitt to the thinking of contemporary right-wing nationalist/corporatist parties hold much water. For one thing, Schmitt was a dirty, nasty bastard, but a highly intelligent bastard, - and one well versed in the thinkings/writings of his "enemies". (His thinking was significant provoked by an early reading of Lukacs, and mirrors the latter on several key points). And Schmitt precisely had a keen eye for the trouble points, sore spots and even paradoxes contained in the interrelations between national sovereignty, legality, politic conflict and "authority", which is what makes him still worth reading and considering.

The contemporary right simply does not operate at so high a level of reflection, and, in fact, could be subject precisely to Schmittian criticisms. (I really don't have any clear image of Howard, but I'd imagine he's a much more intelligent, competent, and eloquent, and less arrogant and vulgar version of W., which, of course, ain't sayin' much).

Schmitt's criticism of liberals was that they operated in terms of a privatistic split between economism and moralism, ("the antinomy of bourgeois consciousness"), which failed to grasp the public and conflictual nature of the properly political, toward which they were therefore either oblivious or hypocritical. Further, Schmitt operated out of an acute sense of the differentiated structural condition of modern societies, which strained any traditionalistic appeal to "unity", but required the deliberate organization of correlated political "forces". And, perhaps most of all, Schmitt's thinking was haunted by the awareness that there is nothing "natural" or "inevitable" about any political arrangement or system and that a political system could quite readily go "off its rails", which the (belief in) the "rule of law" does little to guarantee against or counter. Finally, for Schmitt politics was a high vocation, in that what was ultimately at stake in it was the existential status of "man".

There's little in the complacent gerrymanderings of contemporary "conservative" politicians that matches up to these concerns and addresses the contradictions inherent in them. To the contrary, Schmitt's perspective just exposes how threadbare their ad hoc panderings to their interest constituencies really are and how little clear-sighted and long-range strategic thinking is involved in their contemporary "success". If anything, the "Liberals" would exemplify precisely the privatististic degeneration of "authority" that Schmitt attacked in the liberals, (behind whom he espied the specter of the Marxists, behind whom the threat was one of ultimate anarchy). The last thing thing that contemporary conservatives who conserve nothing would want would be that the powers of sovereignty inhering in the state would assume and reveal their explicitly political form. That would reveal the contested nature of such power, which would expose it to pressures to provide for actual social balance and the proposal of measures by which it might do so.

Also, I don't think that Schmitt, inspite of his rancorous emphasis on antagonism in characterizing the political, can be taken as saying that the faltering of traditionalistic bases of "authority" can be remedied by the deliberate production of enemies to re-enforce the unifying effect of traditions. It depends, I suppose, on just how one reads the relation between the analytic-descriptive and the normative dimensions of his treatment of politics, but I think his point is that "enemies", conflict between political/existential antagonists, will never be in short supply. It's not that the political is reducible to violent extremity, but rather that the latent potential for violent extremity underlies and circumscribes the specifically political character of human behavior in existential conflict over ways of life. And it's such conflict over the extinguishing of traditions that does not allow for the imposition of traditionalistic "solutions".

John,
I agree with your comment 'that the contemporary right simply does not operate at so high a level of reflection' as Schmitt.That's the point. His categories---national sovereignty, legality, politic conflict, authority, state of exception etc can be used to understand the contemporary right. This conservatism is more than simply being a Burkean one, which is how the Australian conservatives understand themselves, and how clothe their nakedness.

Re Schmitt I agree with you that Schmitt's criticism of liberals was that:

they operated in terms of a privatistic split between economism and moralism, ("the antinomy of bourgeois consciousness"), which failed to grasp the public and conflictual nature of the properly political, toward which they were therefore either oblivious or hypocritical.

That account--- liberalism aims to reduce political questions to questions of the economic or the morall---cuts to the core, especially with neo-liberalism. It's now nearly all about markets and individual responsibility.

Doesn't the conservative 'state of exception' in the 'war on terrorism' and fighting the Islamic fascist enemy with friends return us to the political that neo-liberalism denies?