Was Robert Menzies a liberal or a conservative? How is the Liberal Party liberal and conservative at the same time? What’s a liberal and a conservative anyway? What’s that strange creature, a “liberal conservative”, which Tony Abbott calls himself?
For most voters, this is an arcane debate. For many voters, it will be entirely meaningless; they won’t have the faintest idea who this Menzies bloke is, so the complaint that discussing your party’s ideological origins is mere “navelgazing” probably doesn’t have much substance — voters have to know that it’s a navel that’s being gazed at in the first place. More likely is the possibility — horrific as it might be to the government — that voters have simply tuned out.
Matter of fact, however, Turnbull’s reflections on the origins of his party, and more particularly the context — despite denials — of targeting Tony Abbott, are relevant. We keep banging on about it here, but it’s important: we’re at the most important ideological juncture in over 30 years. The neoliberal consensus has fractured, crushed under the weight of corporate self-indulgence and the reaction against globalisation. Politicians are scrambling to play catch-up with voters. Some on the right, like Turnbull or Theresa May, have been shunted to the left by the an experience of political mortality. Others, like the Republicans and even many Democrats in the US, think they can get away with business as usual — which in the US means facilitating ever more corporate avarice and economic war on the poor.
[Turnbull finishes the week with a trophy for his shift to the centre]
But confusing the issue is that none of this is a simple matter of “moving left”, even if that’s an accurate shorthand for what Turnbull has had to do this year. That’s based on the assumption that neoliberalism can be located perfectly on the “right” end of the ideological spectrum. Except some of its features cannot be. Globalisation has long been an aspiration of many parts of the left (using the “cultural” rather than industrial left), which support open borders and enabling refugees to move to wealthier countries. Large corporations love globalisation for exactly the same reasons — it helps drive wages down by constantly threatening workers in the developed world with competition from a vast pool of cheap labour. And neoliberalism is based on only one value — your economic value as a consumer and producer. Your identity is irrelevant. Your sexuality, race, gender, doesn’t matter. In fact, companies are only too happy to support, say, marriage equality — that “pink dollar” (yes, that’s an actual thing) is worth a trillion dollars. Not to mention that while the left obsesses over identity politics, it’s distracted from the task of developing a coherent and effective critique of neoliberalism.
So on both open borders and on social values, neoliberalism is antithetical to the conservatives who can usually be found enthusiastically endorsing it.
This isn’t a new problem created by the death rattles of neoliberalism, but embedded in it. That’s why Tony Abbott and his ilk, while demanding that the government move in a more economically “conservative” direction — by which they mean a more neoliberal direction, involving smaller government and less regulation, the usual pabulum — are also demanding that the government move in a more “left” direction by intervening in the energy market to build and operate coal-fired power stations, an outright socialist policy. How can a government-owned coal-fired power station be either “liberal” or “conservative”? The absence of a coherent answer to that question illustrates the incoherence of Abbott’s position (which is, in any event, about destabilising his enemy, not some quest for ideological purity) but also the problematic nature of defining what’s going on strictly in terms of where things fit on the left-right spectrum.
[Poll Bludger: the accidental overnight success of Cory Bernardi]
Abbott, similarly, has joined with the Hansonites and other racists in calling for a halt to immigration. Again, this is decidedly not neoliberalism. But one of the biggest failures of neoliberalism is its incapacity to address localism and tribalism, in its demand for open borders and its reduction of everyone on the planet to an economic value. Addressing the reaction to that has forced governments to shift to the right in closing borders — in the UK’s case, with Brexit; in the US, with Trump railing against free trade and threatening to “build a wall”; in Australia’s case, with a bipartisan crackdown in 457 visas under the mantra that Australians should have first go at jobs here.
The fact that the industrial left backs this doesn’t detract from the fact that it is essentially a right-wing reaction. If the 457 visa issue had been handled like many on the left want asylum seekers handled, Turnbull and Dutton would have done what their predecessors did: devoted themselves to leading the public on the issue, explaining the benefits of allowing large numbers of foreign workers in and showing how they are no threat to Australians. That’s how corporate Australia would like the issue to be handled. But it was not to be — especially when Labor began using the issue systematically against the Coalition in exactly the same way as the Coalition used asylum seekers against Labor.
Another version of what Turnbull said in London is that it was a frank admission that the Liberal Party has been deeply confused about what it actually is ever since neoliberalism triumphed. But for the moment, the end of neoliberalism isn’t helping to clarify things much either.
The collapse of neo-liberalism is due to its internal contradictions as well as its external contradictions with reality. The same is true of any theory or practice which attempts to explain or justify everything, as the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century disastrously demonstrated. Only a coalition of different narratives – including liberalism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, minority rights and (crucially) an acknowledgement of the validity claims of global as well as local-regional needs
and values – can do justice to an inherently plural reality. The political party ( or coalition of parties) that recognises and communicates this stands the best chance of electoral, moral, intellectual and practical legitimacy.
In other words, what we need is an approach to politics that recognises the necessity for compromise between the sometimes competing claims of political, legal, social, economic, environmental, international/regional, global/local, cultural, racial, gender/sexual and other forms of justice. There is no absolute heirarchy between these claims, none can be reduced or subordinated to any of the others, and their resolution must be decided on a case-by-case basis and is always provisional. The name of this permanently unfinished task is democracy: the necessarily imperfect but ‘least worst’ social formation we have thus far arrived at, and which no doubt needs to be re-thought and reformulated in the era of postindustrial capitalism, globalisation, automization, digital technology and the internet. The old totalising ideologies and absolute-isms of left and right (Marxism, neo-liberalism, fascism) won’t help us anymore, and perhaps it’s time to stop using them as a form of name-calling in these circular arguments and discussions. A realistic politics of compromise, inclusiveness and solidarity is now the order of the day.
In order to combat debate about “neoliberalism” being hijacked by racist reactionaries (and Marxist reactionaries), the core issue for the true centre should be reasserting the role of government in governing business activity and the role of taxation in providing public services.
This means a focus on such things as anti-dumping laws (I note our correspondent’s post Grenfell silence on criticising those), the actual ENFORCEMENT of labour conditions (ie: the issue of immigrants being used to undercut wages is largely because of the inadequate enforcement of laws, not because of immigration itself), protecting the role of unions and re-toothing the various regulatory bodies rendered completely toothless by several decades of bipartisan “deregulate-it-and-they-will-come” capitulation.
The neo-conservative movement will continue filling any vacuum on the above with appeals to nationalism/tribalism whilst accelerating down the path of deregulation and “small government” because the “golden age” they seek to restore is, basically, feudalism. (Presumably their hatred of “centrist” Turnbull is that he isn’t implementing this quickly enough…)
The Jokers in the pack are tech, automation and the possibility that it may already be too late to “re-regulate” as multinationals are more powerful than national governments anyway.
So I wouldn’t hold my breath seeking clarity. As it has been throughout history, the determinant will be the reaction of “the people”. Because it seems largely futile to attempt to anticipate and plan ahead when the response of vast swathes of “the people” will inevitably be based on knee-jerk reactionary scapegoating anyway…
The reason Abbott doesn’t fit well on the standard labour versus capital left-right spectrum is his overriding commitment to the identity politics of (threatened) traditional white male privilege. Hence his willingness to commit the party of capital to seemingly ‘socialist’ state funding of a coal-fired power station, and to confound the interests of business by calling for a halt to immigration. The irony is that neoliberalism delivered this identity crisis to traditionalists, because being a left-right consensus experiment in reducing labour’s influence over capital, it led to capital having power over everything – including traditional white male privilege. Abbott is just another symptom that the neoliberal experiment got out of control, and Turnbull (and May and Macron, etc) of a desperate hope that it can somehow be re-tamed. The ‘end of neoliberalism’ Bernard speaks of is looking a lot like the absolute victory of capital (hello there, Trump’s cabinet of billionaires).
Small point, BK “The neoliberal consensus (?”wot that, paleface?”) has fractured, crushed under the weight of corporate self-indulgence and the reaction against globalisation.” or to put it more simply, neolib’s noxious nostrums evaporated in the face of reality.
As pointed out above, had 457 workers been employed on the same conditions as locals, protected by union conditions there would not have been the resented effect of lowering conditions because the advantage to feckless BigBiz would not exist.
You might not have personally consented, AR, but consensus is most certainly the right word. Neoliberalism came to life in response to 1970s stagflation, around which a consensus formed across the political spectrum that economic irresponsibility on the part of powerful organised labour was ultimately to blame. Hence, Blair and Clinton didn’t stop, but rather merely softened, what Thatcher and Reagan started. It was our own Hawke and Keating who led the way in all of this, winning international acclaim for the consensus-model industrial Accord they brokered between Australian unions and big business. The whole genius of neoliberalism as an ideology lies in its success in getting both left and right to agree that responsible economic management is not a political but a technical problem. After all, did you ever get to vote on the advisability, design or foreseeable implications of 457 visas?