Challenging Politics. Scott Ryan. Monash Uni Press: In the National Interest series

By common consensus of gen X, the greatest single movie ending is that of National Lampoon’s Animal House, the 1979 saga of a raucous college frat house of the early 1960s. It’s animated by John Belushi’s iconic portrayal of “Bluto” Blutarsky, the toga-partying, food-spraying chaos agent who — in pirate costume — destroys the town parade and drives off in a stolen convertible, kidnapped cheerleader in the jump seat — a shot captioned in the closing “Where are they now” sequence as “Senator and Mrs John Blutarsky”.

Fast-forward a decade, and your correspondent is in the Melbourne Uni student union, engaged in some student-politics struggle, which involved an alliance between the left and the Libs and which required a door to be blocked to prevent a meeting. The object used for this was a first-year Liberal, portly, clad in a dirty white windcheater bearing the tomato-saucy marks of O-week sausage sizzle. Wow, that kid’s a real Bluto, I thought, and by now you have undoubtedly surmised how right I was — for a couple of decades later I was watching the 2013 swearing-in and there was said Bluto, Scott Ryan, being sworn in as a senator. Life imitates National Lampoon. If only I’d known.

Ryan slimmed down, became president of the chamber, is well-respected by both sides — a hard-working committeeman, a fair and considerate president, someone seen as one of that declining breed of Melbourne moderates in a party being steadily taken over by happy-clappy horse ointment advocates. Just before his recent retirement (re-what?), he published this essay in Monash University Press’s “In the National Interest” series, which seeks — as per the title — to question the practice of existing politics, and suggest some better, less easy alternatives.

The essay itself is devoid of intellectual interest. That is not meant unkindly. Much of it is aimed at making an argument to a reader who might be in need of some verrry basic knowledge of Australian politics. But at its core is a set of ideas which, in their contradiction, give a vital insight into how a working politician of personal integrity, from a certain type of liberalism, thinks — and thus also functions as a guide to their steady march to extinction. 

Ryan’s view of the present is a familiar one from a certain type of politician and a certain type of Liberal. There is a sphere called politics, which people join or shun and to which they are admitted if they meet with success. Therein their role is to govern through discussion, negotiation and compromise to achieved ends. This sort of politics — which was, it is claimed, until recently the whole of politics — has gone into decline, such decline coinciding largely with the rise of social media and the displacement of conventional media.

Now moralising has entered into the consideration of matters that should be purely political, such as the management of climate change or mandatory detention. Falling levels of trust and wholesale anti-political attitudes are making such government by compromise increasingly difficult, which in turn emboldens politics by — the horror! — interests. 

The view that politics in general and Australian politics in particular is, at its best, that of issue-by-issue compromise and trade is very strong among those of both sides who came of political age in the Hawke/Keating years, when we were still an industrial class-based society: the issues were overwhelmingly economic, the press was pluralist, and the Liberal opposition pretty much agreed with a lot of what Labor was doing.

Taking that particular era to be what politics is presumes that it is always a negotiation within a social market/ordoliberal frame, in which parliamentary parties function autonomously from social movements but retain just enough social legitimacy as groups’ representatives to avoid notions of “elitism” and to make unnecessary — outside of a few weeks in elections — endless displays of blue-singlet populism. 

But this particular instance is only an intense version of a general case that liberalism tells about itself: that the interests it recognises and the “abstract reals” it constitutes have no history, never came into being through historical struggle, and that the line between these purely political objects and moral causes is self-evident and self-establishing.

Thus Ryan is disturbed that issues such as climate change are constructed by people such as Kevin Rudd as “the moral issue of our time”, and sounds hurt that people who disagree with successive mandatory detention regimes (largely imposed by the Coalition) as racist and inhuman. Each should be seen as part of the process of governance through compromise in which a trusting public has faith in its preferred party to get the least worst deal.

The obvious response is that there’s no external standard as to what counts as purely political or moral; Ryan would not see summary execution as a cause for compromise. Many of us see mandatory detention in that way. That disjuncture is what politics is. 

It is also thus an alternation between campaigning and compromise, producing different types of political periods. By ignoring Australia’s passionate, chaotic political history, Ryan can construct a myth of the Fall, in which mainstream media guaranteed stable pluralist societies, whereas their decline and the rise of social media has created tribalism. 

From that comes the nightmare of interest politics. There is no place in Ryan’s framework for the politics of changing notions of selfhood, harm and right attached to the race, gender or identity to enter; equally, there is no way to climb down from the fiction inherent to liberalism, that of an infinite nature, a non-political horizon on which politics takes place. When a party emerges based on the contrary notion — the Greens — Ryan’s political program simply crashes. 

This produces absurdities in which the Greens are held to be both a universal party and an interests party — the survival of nature on which we live being a particular cause:

… as more minor parties seek patronage for their constituencies. Whether it’s Nick Xenophon and his heirs seeking benefits for South Australia or Brian Harradine and Jacqui Lambie seeking similar for Tasmania, the new minor parties have put special claims above common ones. Similarly while not geographically defined, the Greens reinforces this approach.

States’ House members represent their states, and planetary survival is a special interest. This is the real deal and what makes the booklet so valuable. This is the pensée sauvage of the suburban Liberal, the Escher knot in which contemporary frustrations go round and round. If you wonder why your pharmacist suddenly goes on a rant about Bob Brown while putting a sticker on your statins, it’s because his head is going round and round in this way. The interests represented by centrist compromise politics are obscured by its claim to “common sense”. 

Such incomprehension is not without consequence. The notion that planet earth is not a special interest but indeed the condition of life itself is racing through every other area of social life to such a degree that one key political fact should become obvious: green politics is a liberalism. A very social liberalism, to be sure, but Ryan and others appear to have missed the process by which parts of their party drifted towards an old European-style politics of reactionary corporatism, while elements of their old base drifted towards the Greens as representatives of liberal values — which is why the party is now more competitive in Higgins and Boothby than in Grayndler or Cooper. 

The most quixotic moment is left to last. Ryan contemplates a recent moment when his party loyalty strained — over hapless education minister Dan Tehan’s repricing of humanities courses, such as might dissuade a one-time student of modest background, such as Ryan, from pursuing the humanities, while a blue-ribbon mummy’s boy like Tehan would not be perturbed.

What good would it have done to cross the floor and bring the bill down, Ryan wonders. The question is the answer. Ryan’s transactional liberalism and process politics has so worn away the sense of exactly when he should act exceptionally that he could not even take his own side in an argument.

As Senator Blutarsky rides out of the Senate — pretty much the ultimate toga party — and the election looms, his party assumes the position.