I must say it is has been many a moon since I have seen a journo talk about “the Left.” We are all “Progressives” now, you see.

“Equality of opportunity” is a bit of meaningless agitprop, shamlessly copied and pasted from Xianity, whose only practical implication is equality of outcome.

What you are saying by referencing Margaret is also correct. I don’t think it conflicts with the application of any reframing tool.

but he would say he’s created the lowest unemployment for 30 years, more opportunities, more wealth …

Exactly! That’s what he says he’s creating. So to reframe that conversation with Howard (imagine this happening on television!) in terms of what he’s creating, you can bring up the future battlers and tier of overlords! You are picking up there, Russell, exactly, how this works. You’ve identified the ways Howard speaks about what he’s creating, so if you were in a position to bring to light what else he’s creating he is forced onto your terms of debate. You don’t just swallow the line, you work with him in his creative work to unpack that issue more completely.

If you don’t like what he’s creating, by reframing your conversation with him you put him in a position where he has to defend it. That challenges it, and weakens his selling of the expedient line. He’s now in a position to have to talk about a generation of battlers he’s creating and those bloody overlords. That’s your power, by identifying that common element of creativity and reframing. That’s an application of what I’m talking about, which brings Howard into the real world!

Russell, regarding your vision, I’m not to challenge it or press you on it. I respect people do have a vision for life: that’s exactly my point to: we all do.

I guess all I wished to share there as ideas is that a general, cohesive vision hasn’t been provided from people who consider themselves part of the “Left”.

That’s where you need to, as Margaret said at the beginning “Live in the real world – marshall your evidence and get your facts straight” and puncture the claims of prosperity by talking about mortgages, debt, the difficulty for young people to get a house and start a family, the under-employed, the lack of planning and investment for what comes after the boom etc.

“it really does behove you to get a vision!” yes, how are you going to do that?

You said earlier, of the left “to me, there is a central, cohesive, powerful idea missing” – not for me, I’ve always had a vision of what the left stood for and it hasn’t changed. Most people commenting here are left-wing, where did their beliefs come from? – presumably something like mine: family background, church and reading. And then as you get older, experience.

What I’m talking about here is a new way of looking at an old problem. But the way I am asking it to be looked at is as old as humanity itself. It has its roots deep in the human pscyhe, just as the alternative, current way of looking at politics (left right).

Let’s remember, also, that many people in real life don’t give a hoot about left right. They, more readily, appreciate what I’m suggesting, not wishing to engage in the ideology of politics (which is not to denigrate that either of course).

So what it comes down to is the application. I’d like to bold that line but it would be visually offensive. May i say it again?

So what it comes down to.. is the application.

How do you apply the simple question of “What do I wish to conserve, and what do I wish to create?”.

Try it yourself. Look at any political issue and ask of it: what do you wish to conserve, what do you wish to create?

As a tool, it is incredibly powerful, because it unpacks the issues, removes the distractions from them, and allows you to be a part of them. Then you can be effective.

(Variations of course on the same tool, same principle, are to ask: what do I wish to see conserved, what do I wish to see changed, built. Or, within a particular issue: what are the creative elements of it? What is it creating? What is it conserving, keeping?)

So in effect all that happens is that you have been given a tool, which allows you to integrate and be effective. (Anywhere and anyhow you like).

Russell, I don’t for a minute think the great pscyhological divide will merge. Journos for instance cannot remove the word “Left” from their thinking because to do so is the equivalent of removing the letters…. t f e l …from their keyboards: they wouldn’t feel they could write anything! It’s in their interests, as one example of many, to maintain the divisive terms. This suits the conservative and is one reason why it behoves us to begin to learn to think differently if something other than that agenda is to be implemented.

However, as a simple tool, to apply whereever and however you wish, it does empower you, personally, if you give it a good go and get used to it. It actually makes politics exciting, just to look at it that way.

Ask of Howard: what is he creating? Sheesh, he’s creating a whole new generation of subservient battlers, and with that the cementation of a tier of born leaders over them. How awesome is that? How creative!! And what has he conserved in the meantime? And so it goes…

For practical application, a good example once again is watching Kevin Rudd, who’s applying many of these principles of integration (the practical implementation of this way of thinking) in pragmatic, comprisingly effective, ways.

So, specifically, it’s a tool. A tool to apply, as you wish.

____

I’d add, also, that when you begin to think in terms of those essential forces, the creative and conservative force, it really does behove you to get a vision! It throws up our own inadquacies, dogmas, and kneejerk thinking, because those things are not effective.

Hence, the problems when applying this tool are not of the tool, but of the vision, the lack of depth, cohesion, usefulness and relevence. That’s been a big criticism of non-conservatives. Do you have one? How deep, specific, cohesive is it?

That’s not to criticise, either, but to highlight a general problem for progressives.

“The pre-multicultural Australian immigration program 1945-75, which you conveniently ignored, worked pretty well. Non-Anglo European immigrants were quite successful at making a go of it in this country.”

wow, you mean like providing a generation of stupid bogans in southern and eastern sydney causing riots and making docu-soaps that valorise macho violence? yeah, awesome culture that one. well integrated.

No immigrant ever stopped me from doing something Australian. Has any non-Australian ever stopped any Australian from doing something Australian? can anyone please provide an example of where an Australian was stopped from doing something Australian because of a non-Australian?

I can remember the thing about someone being called ‘Mate’ at new Parliament House, but that was a class thing. Then they stopped the Mexican Wave at the cricket, but that is ok cause it was Mexican. Hmmm, oh! Some Turkish people tried to intervene in every young Australians’ dog-given right to go to ANZAC Cove and make a drunken spectacle of themselves. We should be able to invade the Cove whenever we f’ckin want to and as f’ckin drunk as we want to be.

“Finally, the Culture Wars have taught the Left a philosophical lesson: if you try to replace modern nationalism with post-modern globalism you just might wind up with pre-modern tribalism.”

The only tribalism I have witnessed in the last decade is a product of the pocketed anglo-australian nationalism. ‘Pocketed’ means it only appears in pockets of (to be slightly paradoxical) pre-modern nationalism. Of course the ‘national’ here figures as a kind of tribalism for weak-minded fools who try to enrich the existential poverty of their lives by incorporating a fundamentalist love of certain symbolic remnants of the national imaginary: “Kiss the flag!”

“My biggest criticism of the Left, in the post-modernist context, is their failure to acknoledge the virtue of conservatism in improving the situation of the low-status. A conservative seeks to conserve the Good Society. This is an epistemological, not ethnological, committment.”

My biggest criticism of the conservatives, in their neo-post-modernist context, is their failure to acknowledge the true costs of conservatism in improving the situation of the already privileged. A conservative seeks to conserve the Good Society at an unacceptable cost to present and future generations.

“These characteristics were usually considered low-status but are now considered higher-status eg “vibrant ethnicsâ€?, “sassy womenâ€?, “trendy gaysâ€? etc”

Sassy women were not valorised in previous times? wtf. I love the sassy women. Pure sass. f’ck yeah. If nothing else this demonstrates how advanced we now are. Thanks.

“I am afraid you misunderstand the Left completely. It is the Left that is into transcendence. It is the Left that seeks to escape the challenges of today by trying to control the future. The Left is in denial, so escapes into various types of utopian eschataolgies.”

Oh, most importantly, John Greenfield, I forgot one: the Left don’t stick their heads in ovens.

One of the very basic challenges that the conservatives and/or Right have never been able to properly to attack is the reality that most problems the world faces today demand a politics that exceeds short term political games and some even exceed the frame of reference of human generations. These include the middle-east conflicts, environment, the privileged distribution of socio-economic wealth, housing/mobility crises in most metro-urban areas, etc.

We need more elites. No enough elites. l33ts. If only to serve as positive role models that are not boofhead rugby players and accountant politicians.

I agree with looking for a vision broad enough to accomodate everyone, but I think you need to be more specific. A lot of what you write sounds to me like something from the back of a “new age” paperback. That’s not meant as an insult – I don’t mind occasionally dipping into the new age – but you won’t get too far with that kind of language in a conversation with the average person. Remember the phrase “get real” ?

I think you need to express your vision in more specific goals. A political party has to have a brand – I think Labor’s brand should be: a fair go, community building, progressive/creative. It’s not hard to craft distinctive and broadly popular policies in line with those values.

4. on that point, don’t be afraid of pragmatic responses to pressing issues
- that is, clinging to ideals is worthy, but you may have to take baby steps to actually take folks with you.

…an’ aint that the truth!

Creativity is certainly a vague word when looked at in the way you place it.. and yet it comes into direct, immediate focus and awesome effectiveness when talking about your ideological vision – the elements of them. what are the creative elements? (To ask that necessarily requires that you ask also :What are the conservative elements, because these are the building blocks of your vision.). If you want the word creativity to have focus, relevence, effectiveness, then you need simply to apply it to the nature of your vision. It will apply perfectly to the smallest increment, or the largest. If there is a problem in applying it, then the vision itself is not focused, effective, or relevent – what is otherwise known as a vague idea. This, by the way, gets back to your original need to come up with one!

Who knows, when he’s elected he may well do a John Howard and implement a radical vision!

But to be effective, he’s doing much in deed that is being sought for here in words.

Wbb, you’re right and helpful to bring up the paradigm you mention (if you’re positing something seriously). The self-interest is in becoming effective, integrally, in the national dialogue, for a start. Getting there is in self interest. That one can be effective there is also. The altruism comes from allowing the conservative to be heard, and to help balance, check and assist by those things your visionary agenda. This would be done not only to get the necessarily compromised (that’s politics and that’s achievement) self-interested visionary agenda in place, but also for the common good. I don’t know if you’re serious with that question, but it is a very good one.

Please go a step ot two further and tell us what you would say, exactly, if you were Kevin Rudd, and were given 5 minutes on TV to give your election speech.

It sounds like excellent advice for someone needing to engage daily with the conservative disposition.

This has been a particularly valuable and enjoyable thread.

Having read Margaret’s friend’s contribution, I wish to clarify my contributions above so they may be regarded more as an overall strategic approach. By not identifying with the word “Left” – I heartily recommend consciously making the effort to dispense with it entirely! – but instead by reframing the approach in terms of creative/constructive and conservative, you remove the left right paradigm from play and away goes all those unhelpful attendant problems, and change the paradigm to one of top down, or down up.

Let’s be clear, to reframe from top down or down up does not put the non-conservative at the top, just because the constructive/creative has a vision (the conservative also has a vision.)! It puts both of them into a positive alignment, equally.

It means, significantly, that the non-conservative force, when reframed this way, is actively engaged in every single matter.

Think of it as a way of removing yourself from the left right paradigm of adversary or opposition, and placing yourself integrally into everything that matters. You maintain your identity, what you represent and your wishes and dreams, your work and your achievements, but you are now actively integrated into effecting your vision. Nothing can escape you, nothing can isolate you. You recapture the whole agenda by reframing vertically: creative and conservative forces and tendencies. And, this is mindblowing, you are assisted by the very forces you once opposed.

It’s hard to imagine, but amazing if you get a grasp of it. I’ve probably not said it all very well here… still, let’s bring on that new paradigm!

6. … and have a good hair cut

Tell that to Kevin Rudd.

What this lefty has learned from the culture [history] wars is:

1. do your footnotes well (which is your point two) 2. don’t get emotionally involved with your argument or take it personally when folks disagree with you (they ain’t bad, they is just drawn that way) 3. it’s not just righteousness that we must guard against, it’s earnestness and as I get older I get more and more repelled by it 4. on that point, don’t be afraid of pragmatic responses to pressing issues
- that is, clinging to ideals is worthy, but you may have to take baby steps to actually take folks with you.
5. The right seem to have won many arguments just by having a better barometer for where folks feel comfortable which is why they have been successful in terms of language – David Marr makes this point in an old Overland essay about the moment he ‘got’ Howard – I don’t think it comes down to writing better, it comes down to hitting the right buttons, or, in ‘Don’t think of an elephant’ terms, framing. The left could have done its work a little better on anticipating the way the right would put up frighteners about certain things. You could say Unions NSW’s Your Rights at Work campaign is a very successful case of taking back the frame with the WorkChoices issue. It immediately takes the emphasis from choices to rights, without the need for an argument, and the Unions did a great job by packaging themselves in advertising, grassroots campaigning and rallies that were actually fun days as family friendly, appealing, knockabout, ordinary, happy, long before the government remembered to say unionists were tub thumping hysterics. By the time the government got back to union bashing, the unionists had a lot of emotional capital stored up.
5. Forget ‘left’ – use words like ‘decent’.
6. Always wear a suit if you are a bloke, and lipstick if you are a girl, and have a good hair cut. That is, grooming matters.

I think it was Chesterton who said something like (paraphrasing here), “The world is divided into Progressives and Conservatives. The business of Progressives is to continue making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”