The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were.

I think that’s far too broad a statement, and could be contradicted with evidence from other policy domains. And needless to say, there were enough Howard Ministers – Tony Abbott being one who immediately comes to mind – who could trump almost anyone when it comes to sanctimonious authoritarianism. It’s more accurate to say, in my view, that the arguments of “communitarians” provide useful cover for left ALP ministers (for instance, Gillard, Tanner and Macklin) to sign on to an agenda which actually derives straight from the Catholic right, and which has more than a little political calculation behind it – both in terms of Senate numbers (and the cohesiveness of the ALP Senate caucus itself) and also in terms of skimming some votes from churchgoing socially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.

A very similar dynamic is observable with regard to the arguments of the Noel Pearsons and Warren Mundines of this world – in that they provide cover for authoritarian interventions in Indigenous affairs (and increasingly in social policy more generally). The basic mindset is the same – worrying about the breakdown of norms and the absence of community. The communitarian stream of political philosophy – which largely developed in the 1990s and has strong affinities with “Third Way” politics – generally bemoans the alleged fracturing of moral values and shared ethics and places the duty on the state of recreating community in its absence. Very often, the practical and political application of such views has more than a tinge of racism about it. The goals set can never be achieved (which is useful politically for the more canny operators), and a lot of the concern is misplaced and wrongly framed, but a lot of damage can be done along the way by state intervention. Also writing in Spiked, Guy Rundle is much more sensitive to the real political dynamics of moralistic social democracy than Miller.

Probably the best way of understanding what’s going on is in terms of the clash between post-materialist and materialist politics. Labor governments need their own discourse to recapture those who “should” vote for the centre-left on economic grounds, and moralism and campaigning about the dire effects of pr0n and binge drinking or whatever provides the missing piece of the puzzle. But it is very much the case that such attitudes – or at any rate similar attitudes – cross the political spectrum, and that’s why it’s far too simple to judge one government as more authoritarian than another. There is a reason why Miller is partially right in suggesting that the left’s response has been “anemic” but again I think she’s too predisposed by her political dispositions to be an objective analyst in this instance. That reason has to do with – yep, you guessed it – the same legacy of 60s libertarianism Hamilton rails against, but it’s a big issue, and one I’ll return to shortly in another post.