Intriguingly, this seems to be something that’s very topical. We’ve seen two books specifically addressing how class disdain is expressed through cultural contempt published recently, Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class in the UK, and here in Australia, David Nichols’ The Bogan Delusion.

The topicality of Jones’ work is starkly evident from the way that the denizens of areas which experienced rioting recently have been characterised as if they’re some sort of savage and de-civilised beings, part of a Tory backlash which is also heavily racialised.

[Jones reflects on the riots here.]

In Australia, things have been slightly different, as we’ve seen white working class people employed as political weapons since the days of Pauline Hanson. One of the ways neo-conservatism has worked as a screen for neo-liberalism has been the celebration of the supposed nativist authenticity of outer suburban culture, a celebration orchestrated by latte sipping Liberal voting middle aged white people, the chattering fraction of the bourgeoisie.

This then produces its mirror, a self-identification by progressives which looks a lot like the ‘inner city’ stereotype. It proceeds in train with the decline of class politics, the de-unionisation and fragmentation of working class jobs, and the dis-organisation of politics in favour of cultural identities.

The paradox here is that the space of the political narrows to a debate between different groupings of inner urban highly educated progressives; and actual poverty, inequality and, well, class are screened out in the ultimate social exclusion.

But the repressed returns: in malicious humour. At Left Flank, Liz_beths takes a look at how this works, in what I think is compulsory reading, through twitter memes such as #boganmovies and #tightsarenotpants, and websites like Things Bogans Like.

In doing so, she has put her finger on something very important indeed about how politics now works in Australia, and how politics and class collapse into cultural distinction. Politics, and economic interest, are distorted and dissolved by a cultural imaginary.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.Com thinks that the move is, politically speaking, a “brain freeze”. He also queries “the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit”.

Obama’s move will placate ‘Blue Dog Democrats’, including champion deficit hawk Evan Bayh of Indiana, whose seat is looking shaky. In a broader sense, it’s further evidence of the triumph of politics over economics, albeit in a somewhat different register; a return to a sort of pre-Keynesian mindset, or Maggie Thatcher’s petit bourgeois rhetoric of ‘household budgets’ without the monetarism.

David Dayen:

Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.

Andrew Leonard at How The World Works:

If ever there was a time to pull out the old Karl Marx chestnut, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” that moment is now. Prominent members of Obama’s own administration have warned against repeating the errors of 1937, namely, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending and balance the budget too quickly, thus strangling a nascent recovery from the Great Depression. But with the U.S. economy far from healthy, the president has decided, once again, to bow to the political winds and make the deficit priority number one.

It’s also the effective decoupling of the US from the G20 stimulus agenda, and further proof that America is mired in the politics of domestic decline. What happens to a globalised economy when the globalisers opt out?

Incidentally, this is additionally the sort of policy u-turn the Coalition in Australia have long been advocating. If further sclerotic growth, or even a double dip recession in America, is the result, it won’t be without its ramifications for the political debate here.

Update: Robert Reich on how Obama’s political panic could ruin the economy.

Update: Michael Lind.

Update: Brad DeLong: This is such a disaster in the making.

Update: Krugman: Obama Liquidates Himself.

I’m not going to repeat anything she’s written because it’s unnecessary, rather I want to talk about another thing I’ve noticed through all the exciting #spillage of the last week, and that’s the role of women in the events themselves. We’re really starting to see the effects of decades of pushing to get women accepted into all areas of public life, while at the same time we’re still seeing the effects of keeping them marginalised for so long.

This week, after Penny Wong negotiated a deal with the Liberal party on the ETS, we’ve had Sophie Mirabella’s exit from the front bench alongside Tony Abbott, triggering a mass walkout of further Liberal frontbenchers. We’ve had “loyal girl” Julie Bishop, who has managed to survive three leadership spills and keep her job. We’ve had the brave and principled senators Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, who walked the walk when other Liberal Senators toed the party line. While all this unfolded, Kevin Rudd was overseas, leaving Julia Gillard to run the country, while the new opposition leader promises to stop flirting with her. And over in NSW, the ALP caucus voted to make Kristina Keneally their first female premier.

Meanwhile, Annabel Crabb made her ABC debut, becoming one of the go-to journos for smart, insightful political analysis, along with Samantha Maiden and Laura Tingle providing great information and analysis of events as they unfolded. And in another mini-spill, Sophie Black took the reigns and became editor of Crikey.

I’ve forgotten plenty of women, no doubt. I hope I have actually. It shouldn’t be possible to list all of the women involved in events this big.

So… to the Problems. Mirabella and Bishop are criticised for selling Australian women out in supporting Abbott. Keneally can be seen in the long tradition of Labor only making women their leaders when things have gone entirely to shit, further reinforcing the pressure for women to be nurturers, healers and uniters. Meanwhile Bishop is again criticised for playing a uniting role, lining up behind the three leaders democratically chosen by her party. I won’t go on, there are plenty of words to be found about how women are fucking up, some fair, some not.

But the Good Things! We have a new female premier to add to the list, and she’s not from the left. Another step further towards providing enough variety that they are seen as Premiers first, not Women Premiers, as if that’s some kind of category. We have female Liberal MPs putting their electoral and preselection chances at risk in order to stand up for what they believe in, be it Mirabella and Adams or Troeth and Boyce. We have Julie Bishop playing a clever factional game, making it almost impossible for her to be dumped from her spot as deputy leader. We have Ms Crabb, who is seen as one of the most insightful political analysts working today, and hardly anyone is putting the word “woman” or “female” in there. And yet we have Miranda Devine being given a platform to be as mad and wrong as the maddest and wrongest op-edder The Australian has to offer. And while Dr Cat is right about the lack of genuine understanding about what, exactly, Abbott’s women problem really is, it’s now just a given that you cannot win elections by completely alienating women.

I can’t find the exact quote, but Amanda Vanstone once said that women won’t be equal until a woman as useless as the most useless male MP can be elected. While we’re still at a point where women being in the spotlight at all is remarkable, the incredible variety of women we’ve seen this week should give us hope that we’re slowly reaching that point where women will be judged for the work they do, and not the work they do As Women. And hopefully along the way, we’ll all come to understand that men like Tony Abbott don’t have a problem because they don’t get “women’s issues”. They have a problem because they don’t get that women are people, and they are more and more reluctant to put up with anyone believing they are anything less than that.

Diablo Cody nails it:

K, here’s a problem that is holding back feminism and you see it on the blogs. We all hold each other up to an incredibly high standard in a way that men do not. Let’s say a woman directs a movie that’s not very good—everybody piles up on her. It’s, like, “No! You’re representing us! It has to be perfect!” And that’s not how it works! Women should be allowed to make bad movies. Good movies. Porno movies. Terrible made-for-TV movies. Women just need to be out there directing as many movies as men do. We don’t all have to be the model woman—what we need is to be more visible. We really, really are tough on each other.

As long as there are ludicrous opinion pieces being written, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are being written by women, and as long as there are both political ideologues and factional warriors lacking in any sort of policy beliefs at all, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are women, too. Here’s to Crabb and Devine; to Gillard and Bishop; to Mirabella and Troeth.

Writing in The Guardian, Michael Tomasky considers:

the degree to which, during the Obama era, American conservatism – already fiercely ideological and obstructionist, operating according to sets of “facts” produced and paid for by oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and other corporate interests – has contrived to go completely barmy.

And the rhetoric of the Republicans often reflects the wider themes of the wingnut blogosphere and talk back radio:

Healthcare is socialism. Saving the auto industry is liberal fascism. Trying to halt global warming is both. Negotiating with Iran – I didn’t even get to foreign policy – is proof that Obama wants to obliterate the US. And to top it all off, the Great Obliterator isn’t even a citizen.

Tomasky implies that UK citizens are lucky that total lunacy hasn’t yet become mainstream in British conservative politics. I’m not so sure we can say the same in Australia. What lies behind all this? I mean, you can trace particular forms of irrationality to causal factors – for instance, the close relationship between polluter interests and climate change denialism. But what allows all this madness to find a receptive (albeit minority) audience? Speculate away!

Update: John Quiggin launches a “Sane Republican Hunt”.

We are sending a clear message that Australians need this boost. As a uni student I need help to buy my text books, my mother is a single parent who needs help and my brother is heading into year 12 and he needs it….

Think about how much difference this bonus will make to you and your families…

The group page also provides information on how to lobby Senators.

Very interesting indeed.

Elsewhere: Terry Flew.

Elsewhere: The Age:

Australians planning to spend Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s promised $950 bonus on holidays, new drum kits, Wii games, tattoos and weekend-long benders have flooded into a new Facebook group.

At Catallaxy, Jason Soon thinks we’re “luvvies”. Quelle surprise! No doubt John Greenfield will be along soon to show off the calibre of intellectual debate Catallaxy is renowned for all over the intertubes.

Update: 465333 members as of 1.30pm Saturday Brisbane time.

The issue is not going to go away, regardless of the short-term success or failure of attempts to reach a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The more clearly the political right is identified with the anti-science side of this debate, the harder it will be to salvage any of its existing institutions.

Kevin Rudd’s rhetoric in 2007 recognised that Australian politics deals particularly badly with long term issues. Our statist political culture means that interest groups of all kinds seek to cut deals for whatever their short term interests require, and the veneer of “ideas” – particularly neo-liberal ones – is particularly thin, hardly sufficing to pave over the cracks of corporate self-interest. Rudd, of course, has hardly fulfilled the hopes he himself aroused. But surely it’s worth wondering what long term costs the right will bear after the time passes when denialism loses any patina of plausibility.

Writing in the Centre for Policy Development’s Insight, Bill Bowtell takes a look at our electoral system:

Counter-factual history is entertaining, and no more than guesswork, but at the very least truly fair elections would have resulted in many more occupants of the Prime Ministerial throne over the last six decades. And in four out of five of these elections, the will of the people was to embrace the ALP rather than the conservative alternative.

Had the will of the people been implemented at these elections, whether to install governments of the left or the right, these governments would have been more reflective of the contemporary needs, aspirations and opinions of the Australian people who after all have voted for change ten and not just five, times since 1949.

It is therefore deeply wrong to blame the Australian people for the sclerotic timidity and lack of vision that has so often disfigured Australian politics and greatly delayed necessary reform by many post-war governments. Since 1949, the Australian people have voted for political change at almost every other election, yet their will has been denied by a complex system that does not reliably deliver a majority of seats to the side that wins a majority of votes.

This absurd contraption of single member electorates locks up and effectively disenfranchises millions of Australians in safe electorates, while showering largesse on a small number of voters in marginal seats. Over time, this has created a massively distorted imbalance in the national distribution of services and subsidies. This has counted against safe seat voters on both sides of the political spectrum – and especially voters in most rural and regional seats and the inner cities.