You should get a blog, Jack. That’s a very long comment.

I think I’ve managed to fix all the broken html that stuffed up the formatting.

The suspicion lurks that Mark’s comment was adressed to someone who fits my ideological description. Possibly a case of misshapen identity.

Thanks for the re-formatting, Webdominatrix.

So you’re less an historical materialism kind of a guy than an “historical rugged individualism” kind of guy, eh? Less EP Thompson than FJ Turner? Less latte and chardonnay than esspresso and Malboro?

Give em one day of the year, get it all over and done with by April.

She has learned from the experience and moved on

The significant thing is that she hasn’t disavowed her past activism and is happy to accept and wear the feminist label in a state some claim is the most “socially conservative”.

And the opposition can’t lay a glove on her.

The fortunes of traditional communal institutions – evidenced by falling divorce rates, rising birth rates, rising private school attendances and revivals in nationalistic rituals (eg ANZAC day) – indicates that cultural conservatism still has a bit of life left in it.

Divorce rates are down, marriage rates are up and babies are booming. All this means is that traditional families are now valued somewhat more than they used to be a decade or so ago.

All this was refuted in great detail on the previous thread about religion. The “baby boom” is statistically insignificant, as any number of statisticians and demographers pointed out when the census data was misinterpreted by pollies and Jack style pundits.

Aging demographics are likely to provide continual support for conservative politics.

Similarly if you just take “no religion” as a proxy for secular values, then you can if fact see in the tables that were posted of the comparative census data over a decade that aging doesn’t imply any great flight from secularism or flight toward religion, and that “no religion” is stronger in every age group the younger it is.

As to the stuff about teh yoof, I think Mark offered to buy Jack a copy of the book containing the ASSA research. His response was to say it was authored by luvvies or something. Well, ignore the commentary and just look at the survey results from the largest survey of social attitudes and values conducted in Australia and all this bullshit is refuted as well.

Pundits, mostly those who do not have a good track record in social prediction, keep writing off John Howard.

I thought your “testable prediction” was that Howard was going to lose this election 53-47.

I think I’ve managed to fix all the broken html that stuffed up the formatting.

Some years ago, Guy Rundle argued in the Quarterly Essay that Peter Costello might lead the Coalition away from the dead end of cultural conservatism once the dead hand of John Howard is removed from the puppet strings. That argument, an interesting and provocative one in some ways (and Rundle was quite correct to see Jeff Kennett as a modern liberal who saw the libertarian future), was wrong at the time, I thought, as Costello’s product differentiation from Howard has always been something of a pose.

Left-liberals like Mark seem to be continually returning to the theme of the waning of the culture war. They desperately want to lay the ghost of cultural conservatism but, like Banquos, it continues to haunt them.

Mark is indulging in some wishful thinking if he thinks “cultural conservatismâ€? is just a “dead handâ€?. The fortunes of traditional communal institutions – evidenced by falling divorce rates, rising birth rates, rising private school attendances and revivals in nationalistic rituals (eg ANZAC day) – indicates that cultural conservatism still has a bit of life left in it.

Left-liberal minor parties, such as the DEMs and GREENs, seem to be dead in the water, if not actually sinking. I would like to bet Mark that their combined 2007 vote will be less than their combined 2004 vote. Do you feel lucky, punk?

Costello, who recently suggested that ethnic diversifiers push off, has hardly bothered to “differentiate� his pseudo-liberal “product� much from conservative Howard these days. That is because he knows what sells in the electorate. Ditto Rudd. Ditto Howard, although he needs no electoral incentive to do what comes naturally.

I doubt whether Mark really meant to write “Jeff Kennett as a modern liberal who saw a libertarian future�. This statement seems to have been dropped in as a practical joke by an editor moonlighting from a parallel universe. Bracks and Bailleu are not troglodytes but I doubt whether they would set many libertarian pulses racing.

Mark’s fairy tales from a liberal planet remind me of Peter Cook’s description of the Establishment Club, which he said was “modelled on those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.�

Mark says:

Just how seriously we should take Rudd’s claims to be a conservative is far from clear. Unlike Costello, he describes himself as “a non-denominational Christian� for whom sexual ethics are pretty much negotiable: by no stretch of the imagination a religious conservative.
Where he stands on the burning cultural questions of the times — from the teaching of history to declining standards of literacy and numeracy and the political correctness that still infects our universities — is anyone’s guess, although if they were issues he cared about, you’d expect that we’d have heard something about it by now.

Rudd “stands� shoulder-to-shoulder with Howard on at least one “burning cultural questions of the times�: the emergency rescue mission to remote Aboriginal communities. Rudd supported Howard’s conservative authoritarian cultural policy to re-normalise these ravaged places. This has effectively ditched the failed Left-liberalism that has wrecked and ruined so many young lives amongst the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

Mark, amongst many others, have been wailing and gnashing their teeth about this. For all the wrong reasons.

Mark says:

Reading Simons, one can get a sense of what Rudd has actually said about faith and politics, and the substance really is restricted to what he wrote in The Monthly last year. His main concern is to re-orient the discussion toward social justice, something Pearson (and Abbott) know well.

Progressive egalitarianism and conservative communitarianism are a good fit, summed up by the phrase “working familiesâ€?. Mark’s brand of differentiating libertarianism has been done to death over the past generation and is definitely past its used-by date. These born-again luvvies are just trying flog off a discontined line. As Dame Edna says, “isnt it embarassing at his age”.

Mark says:

But her reading of the Australian Social Attidudes Survey data (which I referred to in an article on the census earlier this year) demonstrates that we have a much more liberal and secular culture than America’s

This is not exactly an apples to apples comparison. Saying that AUS is more liberal and secular than America is stating the obvious. A thing that Mark is getting better at now that he has given up on prediction as “too hard�.

The more relevant question is: is AUS more or less liberal now than it was a decade ago. My answer: it is obviously less liberal.

And a good thing to. Liberalism tends to eat itself if taken to extremes. This has been recognized by most liberal thinkers, such as Mill, Hayek and Popper. Only modern libertarians, who all appear to have come down in the last rain shower, seem to have forgotten the importance of the conservative cultural foundations of a free society.

Mark says:

Pearson and his compadres are whistling in the dark if they really think that the so-called “burning cultural issues of our time� have any resonance beyond the crazed contentions of the commentariat and those, on both left and right, whose interest or ideology is served by claiming that there’s some sort of retraditionalisation of social norms occurring. That is flatly false.

There is legitimate scope for debate about the meaning and scope of the conservative (authoritative communitarian) revival in familial, parochial and national institutions. There may be a bit more aspiration, rather than actualization, in the conservative tendencies abroad.

A lot of people feel a little bit guilty about missing Mass, not visiting their parents, misspending their youth, indulging in petty vice and so on. So they tend to thump the tub a bit when they hear a Right wing politician giving vent to spleen.

My “Decline of the Wets� thesis is mainly about the loss of political momentum amongst libertarian polities (parties, politicians and policies). I have never maintained that the Col Blimps or Bible Bashers have got the whip hand. All though we could all do with a stern lecture now and again.

These “contentions� about the �retraditionalisation of social norms� cant be all that “crazed� if someone like Pauline Hanson can get 25% of the vote in a state election not so long ago. Obviously some of the punters took note then, and in 1996 and again in 2001.

“Border Protection� is Australia’s most popular television show. No doubt its “crazed� sponsors are laughing all the way to the bank, celebrating the xenophobes who lap this stuff up week by week.

Those “crazed contenders� who have lampooned trendy fantasies about multiculturalism, the republic and reconciliation can also be forgiven for having a quiet chuckle under their breath. That glad morning is never going to dawn again, given the dissaray and disgrace of these movements.

Mark says:

I think one of the most interesting things about the media coverage about Anna Bligh’s ascension in Queensland (and see this article by Ben Eltham in the latest New Matilda as well as my Crikey piece from last week) is precisely how little has been made about her past as a feminist activist. There’ve been no “shock! horror!� stories, and Bligh herself, while pointing to the changed context of the times as well as her own personal trajectory, has seen no need to disavow her previous commitments for electoral advantage.

She has learned from the experience and moved on. This is something that all somewhat re-constructed post-seventies Lefties should do, as part of their “personal growth� process. Rather than playing the Net-rooter confecting outrage against a moderate Centre-Right government that has done not much more than administer a long-overdue hiding to an ideologically bankrupt movement. Not mentioning any names or pack drill.

Mark says:

And we no longer hear too much about the Caroline Overington talking points about “Young Fogiesâ€? or “South Park Conservativesâ€? at which I took aim in the Griffith Review last year [link to pdf] – not just because the evidence is that young voters have overwhelmingly tilted towards Rudd, but also because the shibboleths about a “generation of conservative rebelsâ€? have been exposed as Miranda Devine guff and the stuff of pop sociological boosters

This generation may or not vote more for the ALP than past generations. I don’t know and don’t care all that much since both major parties are pretty much the same. What is undeniable is that this generation of young people is much more socially conservative than the last one. Much less likely to experiment with drugs, protest movements or alternative lifestyles. It is hnot “conservative guff” to note that today’s streets are hardly thronged with rabble-roused youth.

Mark says:

Even where there are slightly statistically significant differences – such as more marriages among Gen Y than Gen X, they do not prove anything about a retraditionalisation of mores. The propensity not to marry of my generation is largely explicable by the fact that we’re the children of the most divorced generation in history. The alleged ideological objections to marriage as an institution are in fact the preserve of a tiny minority (myself included, I should add) and marriage simply no longer carries the same package of social attitudes in its wake as it once did.

Mark, like most Left-liberal sociologists, is out of touch with grass roots community sentiment. There are signs that the fundamental building blocks of social capital are re-forming after the damage inflicted on it by the insanity and iniquity of a generation of Wets. Divorce rates are down, marriage rates are up and babies are booming. All this means is that traditional families are now valued somewhat more than they used to be a decade or so ago. It is an indictment of liberal-Leftism that this good news is received with truculent bad grace.

Mark says:

I think the effect of a Rudd ascendancy would be to sweep away all the culture wars argy bargy quicker than you can say boo. I can easily see a post-Howard Liberal Party marginalising itself in the same way as the hard right Tories did for so many years in Britain. We’ll see, but I strongly suspect that Pearson’s “burning cultural issues of our time� will be cinders and embers this time next year. And no sane politician will try to stoke the fire again.

This is rather like counting your chickens before they are conceived, never mind hatched. The ‘“trad values� stuff�’ is one of the few things the LN/P has going for itself. Aging demographics are likely to provide continual support for conservative politics. The Tories were, to a certain extent, outflanked to the Right by Blair.

Pundits, mostly those who do not have a good track record in social prediction, keep writing off John Howard. As I correctly predicted back in mid 2006

The punditocracy’s never-ending write-off of Howard reminds me of Michael Coreleone’s description of Hyman Roth’s life-threatening cardiac condition: “Hyman Roth has been dying from the same heart attack for the last twenty years.� Yet he continued to get up of his death bed to get his enemies wacked.

Mark, who is always warning us about the impossibility of social science prediction, should reign in some of his wild speculative ideological fantasies. Or at least get some predictive performance runs on the board.

Mark says:

But what’s uncontestable, I think, is the inference that the package of rhetoric and biases dressed up as the “culture wars� has always been a discourse solely of elites. There is a small minority of voters, a very small minority indeed, who vote on these issues.

The strongest expressions of “culture war� conservatism come up on talk-back radio, the medium of the populus. This is the last place that you will find “a discourse solely of elites�.

Mark says:

The suburban “aspirationalâ€? middle class – on whose putative behalf this nonsense is normally articulated – don’t care. They care about things like interest rates, housing affordability, work and family and so forth, and in the great majority of cases, have relatively social liberal views.

The “apirational middle� class most definitely do care about crime on the streets, ruliness amongst the minorities, security of borders. The prospects of the communal-Right out there in the mortgage belt will look good for so long as the liberal-Left refuses to learn the lessons of the past decade.

“Just how seriously we should take Rudd’s claims to be a conservative is far from clear. Unlike Costello, he describes himself as “a non-denominational Christianâ€? for whom sexual ethics are pretty much negotiable: by no stretch of the imagination a religious conservative.”

Very interesting comment Mark, but who says self-branded “conservatives” have exclusive entitlement to that very term?

We’ve learnt from the WorkChoices experience just “how radical” the so-called Conservatives can be. When “what” you call somebody isn’t matched by “how” they run their program.

Furthermore, we also know from Kim Beazley’s struggle to hold the opposition leadership in 2006 that a politician can get caught in between “different interpretations of Conservative” – for example, The Left found Mr. Beazley “too conservative” and, as Imre Salusinszky reiterates in The Australian today, The Right found Mr. Beazley to be “too soft”.

Subsequently, Mr. Salusinszky goes on to say “in Rudd they (the voters) are prepared to embrace a leader every bit as conservative, temperamentally cautious and safe-handed as Howard.” (Tim Blair style subtext: a win for Labor is not necessarily a win for the Howard Hating, latte sipping Left. It may even be a win for the folks at The Australian newspaper )

I don’t believe you can “extract all the meaning” of what it means to be “conservative” by thinking in a linear left-right way. In Marketing, one thinks of Conservatives on a bell curve rather than on a linear spectrum. Conservatives on a marketing bell curve sit in between Early Adopters and Pragmatists to the Left of Conservatives and Laggards who sit to the Right of Conservatives.

One could argue that the Liberal Party are struggling because they appeal only to Laggards on issues such as Iraq troop engagement and the Environment, while at the same time being caught appealing
only to Early Adopters of their WorkChoices policy, a policy that has failed to appeal to the majority, whether they be the next adopters (the Pragmatists) or the next adopters after that (the Conservatives).

On the same day Kim Beazley has made his final speech in the House of Reps, it might be time to reflect back on Mr. Beazley’s interview with ABC Radio National in February, a podcast I listened back to on my way home to Australia from Los Angeles earlier this week. In the interview, Mr. Beazley challenges Mr. Howard’s seemingly endless capability of shifting the public conversation precisely because of a combination of “Hot Button Issues” and “Changing Community Attitudes” that simply don’t fit the linear battle between Left and Right elites.

…From Justin

You forgot Peter Phelps.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. One one side you’ve got me, Rundle, “The Right,” “conservative intellectuals,” Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwen, Paddie McGuinness, Imre Saluszinsky, Martin Amis, etc. etc. Dude, who is on YOUR side of the Church!!??

Barnaby really hooked into many of the conservative Catholic movements for his election campaign – he was running full page ads about abortion – and he barely got elected. He had to make something of that in the first place because of the extreme attenuation of the rural protest vote in Qld compared to some years ago.

Peter McGauran does much the same thing in Victoria, the Nationals have basically become the DLP as far as I can tell. Barnaby has shown his true colours now and would romp it in even if he ran as an independent. Look at the issues he crosses the floor on – Santamaria would be proud of him.

Windsor is different kettle of fish – the proclaimed Christianity does help him but without much of a fundamentalist streak.

I didn’t say that a successful candidate had to be fundamentalist, or even appear so – just to do whatever juju is necessary to get their votes.

I must admit to being offended at being forced to sit next to Mr. Rundle.

Wear it, dude. Part of the problem with conservative intellectuals in this country is the extraordinary prevalence in their ranks of ex-Marxists like McGuinness or Saluszinsky. The right welcome them as little lost lambs but they bring their wolfish Trotskyite assumptions with them. That church that you go to, however broad, is just another institution through which the long march is passing.

While I proudly confess to turning Left when entering the Church of Historiography – being seated as a “friend of historical materialism” – rather than turn Right and be seated among the poststructuralists, I must admit to being offended at being forced to sit next to Mr. Rundle.

I had never heard of him before LP, but to the extent his position was expressed during his time as Producer of the worst show in Australian TV history – Vulture – I shall demand pistols at dawn unless you take it back, toot sweet.

http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/a/australia/2004/2004senateqld.txt

I’d suggest Christian fundamentalists will take a greater role in defining it.

I’m not so sure. Yes, we shouldn’t be deterministic about demographic change leading to political change, but there’s still a huge push factor going on. I went up to Toowoomba in 2005, first visit since 95, and it’s a much changed place – getting its own suburban sprawl, far fewer moleskins and hats, more ethnically diverse, and instead of being Bible Belt city, the religious crazy on the Council lost badly in his run for Parliament as a Nat. That’s too broad brush, still, but you see where I’m going with it.

There’ve always been failing rural populist movements as well as successful ones.

Barnaby really hooked into many of the conservative Catholic movements for his election campaign – he was running full page ads about abortion – and he barely got elected. He had to make something of that in the first place because of the extreme attenuation of the rural protest vote in Qld compared to some years ago.

Derrida’s got nothing to do with it, strictly speaking…

… but let’s not let that get in the way hurling a few more insults his way.

“insightful” ?

or does she also incite with her torrid, “inciteful” rhetoric?