Andrew Bartlett:

For the last few months, I’ve found it hard to shake the idea that the Liberal Party’s overriding approach to politics and policy has deteriorated to a level little better than where the US Republican Party now finds itself. I think the reason why things have sunk this low has a lot to do with the perverted nature of the so-called culture and history wars which were embraced with such fervour by the Howard government.

The Liberal’s incoherent, self-contradicting approach on a whole range of policy issues – most worryingly even on economic and tax policy – might be sufficiently obscured by their continuing inchoate war on everything as to provide electoral benefits for them. But once rational thinking is no longer required – in fact becomes an impediment to launching the latest barrage – then there is no guarantee it will ever be returned to at some stage down the track.

Charles Richardson: [paywalled]

Fraser’s generation, having lived through the Second World War, could never forget the importance of liberalism; even down to John Howard?—?whose similarities with Fraser are often overlooked?—?it was understood that there were potential enemies to the right as well as to the left.

With the current generation, that realisation has been lost.

The Liberal Party of Fraser’s time, whatever its faults (and there were many), would never have flirted with torture, with creationism, and with the repudiation of international law over Tampa and later Iraq. There are still liberals in the party today, but they are outnumbered and outgunned by the acolytes of an American-style “movement” conservatism?—?militant, intolerant and anti-intellectual.

I’m not sure the Libs are the Tea Party equivalent; that movement has spun out of the Republicans’ control, as the victory of Rand Paul in the Kentucky Senate primary, Governor Charlie Crist’s defection from the GOP in Florida, and the results of the Utah convention show. Mark Lillia, writing in the New York Review of Books has a rather interesting take on the Tea Party – libertarian anti-politics, he suggests. But the Liberals have certainly taken over a huge slice of the Republican/Fox News/Noise Machine playbook. The soil for constructing an electoral majority on these lines may be more fallow in the US than many think – I’m not at all sure the expected Democratic wipeout in the mid terms will eventuate. But I do strongly suspect it’s even more fallow here in Australia. Rudd may be in trouble; but Abbott’s probably still unelectable. In the mean time, we have nothing like a sensible political debate on the issues confronting our country.

TONY Abbott has proposed banning the dole for people under 30 in a bid to entice the unemployed to head west and fill massive skill shortages in the booming resources sector.

This is yet another thought bubble, not yet policy, but an idea Abbott threw on the table at a meeting with business representatives.

It sums up Abbott’s reflexes – punitive populism in the service of capital.

It also sums up Abbott’s gender lens – I wonder if he stopped for an instant to consider how many young women are employed in the mining industry.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin.

Update: Hoyden About Town.

Sparrow examines how the ground for a populist upsurge of climate change denialism among “the old, the white and the angry” was well prepared by the Howard era culture wars.

Once upon a time, the Liberal Party, an organisation temperamentally suited, after all, to hierarchy, accorded an almost royal deference to Big Science. Menzies presided over an Australia that wondered at atom splittings and Sputnik launchings, and not in the sceptical sense of that word but with genuine awe, with the mysteries expounded by clipboard-carrying oracles understood as evidencing the remarkable advances of the modern age.

Under Howard, however, the party embraced a populist anti-elitism, in which the instincts of ordinary folk always trumped the hoity-toity pronouncements of over-educated know-it-alls. Throughout the culture wars, the high falutin’ elitists in their inner-city apartments, those whining postmodernists confounding the common sense of you and me and the bloke next door, were a perennial punching bag for the Liberals and their mouthpieces.

The climate debate thus arrived with an oppositional script already well-prepared: on the one hand, the fancy-dancing, silver-tongued scientists and ideologues, with their incomprehensible graphs and statistical charts; on the other, the hard-working traditional Australians forced to feel bad about SUVs and air travel by self-righteous scolds.

Slapping down some scientific poindexter became, then, a reflexive defence of values associated with the ’50s, even as it manifested an attitude to the research establishment that Menzies would have found incomprehensible.

He’s also spot on in honing in on the fact that rational argument is incapable of shifting the views of denialists (much as the apparatus of knowledge has to be mimicked with graphs and charts); a mindset driven by affect, emotion and ressentiment, a perceived assault on a way of living and anti-rationalism is by definition immune to persuasion. After all, the frame of ‘the people v. the elites’ rules out the canons of evidence based debate by definition – if you can do that, then you’re one of the dreaded over-educated, latte-sipping tribe.

It is necessary to continue to argue within the rationalist, scientific paradigm, but it’s also vital to recognise that we are talking about two very distinct and opposed modes of being in the world and that the twain will rarely meet. The disjunction between magical thinking and scientific reasoning reinscribes itself because those who are trained in the latter are very often unaware that it is a rare and highly learned skill. The very practice of learning to think rationally naturalises it; and disguises the fact that it is an artifice constructed by human endeavour rather than ‘human nature’. This, then, circles around to the recreation of a feeling of social distance from those who don’t live in the worldview of science.

And that’s what causes a lot of the communicative failures that occur again and again, when incommensurable discourses clash. In fact, respect for science is grounded in status distinctions, as well as concomitant knowledge differentiation, and the erosion of the acceptance of authority pervasive throughout the lifeworld of late modernity erodes the naturalisation of such distinctions, and allows them to be politicised as a cultural war between elites and the folk(s). When you’re at war, dialogue has died.

At the more mundane level of electoral politics, though, all is not lost, because the two opposed constellations of forces are both small minorities within the populace as a whole. (Those who claim to speak “for the people” are also an elite social formation, of sorts.)

Sparrow, again:

Abbott thus faces a ticklish dilemma. On the one hand, the deniers bring a passion that an Opposition sorely needs. On the other hand, the climate sceptics teeter on the verge of overt hostility to the very establishment that the Liberal Party needs to win over. Populists, after all, despise and mistrust not only greenies and EU commissars but Big Media and Big Business.

The Liberal Party, well, not so much.

John Howard managed?—?most of the time?—?to present himself simultaneously as a populist and a man of the establishment. Perhaps Abbott can do the same. But it doesn’t seem likely, at least partly because the rhetorical tenor of the sceptics has grown so shrill.

NB: Related post.

Yesterday, we had a ‘fighting speech’ described as ‘Churchillian’. Winston must be turning over in his grave, or at least reaching for another scotch.

Today, we’ve got an op/ed from John Howard’s chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos, which certainly fits the description of excitable. Abbott isn’t Churchill today, he’s Spartacus. Make of that what you will. It’s effortlessly deconstructed by Andrew Elder.

This mad boosterism about Tony Abbott’s pugilistic style has one purpose, and one purpose only. (Fantasies about armies of tradies who know all too well the Rudd stimulus has kept them in work adopting Abbott as the new messiah are just that; there’s no sensible electoral calculus in the Liberals’ current positioning.)

If money follows the polls then the Liberals are buggered. If you were on a corporate board you’d have Mr Abbott to lunch as a matter of courtesy, and listen to him describe cutlery as namby-pamby and elitist. Then, you’d send a donation to the ALP to keep in sweet with Senator Arbib.

Both Abbott’s speech and Sinodinos’ piece are really just fundraising letters. The Liberals are broke, deserted by big business. The policy suggestions, such as they are, are also premised on a fantasy – that Labor really is a socialist wolf in sheep’s clothing, with mad skills in disguising its intent to tax everything in the cause of redistribution.

Kicking the union can again is also significant.

Abbott does have an ideological position, one akin to Barnaby Joyce’s. He’s the voice of the petit bourgeois mentality, the populist appeal to those who feel themselves under siege in a fast moving world. It’s Pauline Hanson politics without the racism. Irrational, driven by affect, and projection. It’s the pure cry of the aptly named ‘anti-Labor forces’, and has no resonance or point of connection with the reality most of the electorate see.

It’s capable of attracting all sorts of folks driven by ressentiment, though, so it might bring in a buck or two. Here’s a tip, though: polls to stay around 56/44 in Labor’s favour.

On Lateline tonight, Liberal frontbencher and new Immigration shadow minister Scott Morrison, claimed, in defending Barnaby Joyce’s mad ravings, that folks didn’t want “clones and drones”.

Let’s make a number of further points about this claim, and Joyce’s effusions.

(a) It may well be that some Labor ministers can be represented as clones and drones (though others, like Julia Gillard, are able to get the message across with more than a bit of wit and verve). But they’re not just on message – unlike the Libs, who continue to be, in Terry Flew’s words, chronic attention seekers, and will make themselves the story even when not openly brawling with each other – they’re also appearing as calm, measured, assured, apolitical. And Kevin Rudd is a much better communicator than he’s given credit for. He saves the bureaucrat-speak for his COAG performances and the like, where he actually doesn’t want the soundbite widely disseminated. Watching what does actually get on the 7pm news shows that his poll ratings are not an artefact of chance, or the lack of a good opposition, or whatever.

(b) Following on from that observation, it is just nuts to have the more savvy members of the media (that is, those that aren’t busily writing stories about the excellence of a frontbench that will take up the ‘fight’) competing with ministers to goad either Abbott or Joyce into sillier and sillier statements.

(c) Joyce’s populist stuff plays to a rural and regional base with a petit bourgeois mentality. At best, it’s targeted to farmers and small business; at worst, it’s pretty close to LaRouchite speak. There are just not that many voters with a mindset receptive to this sort of thing who aren’t already voting for the Coalition, and the fiction that ‘battlers’ will go with know-nothing nativism ignores the rock of WorkChoices. How many times will Eric Abetz have to deny that he still believes penalty rates are evil?

(d) Constantly carrying on like a pork chop might appear to an illusory base, or rather help to reconstruct such a base, but flicking the switch to populism disguises the change in the nature of right wing politics away from neo-liberal reverence for the market. It won’t be to the taste of big business. It’s not dissimilar to the worldview of elements of the state Nats in Queensland (surprise, surprise). As Andrew Elder has argued, Tony Abbott isn’t just captive to Nick Minchin, he’s effectively become Barnaby’s patsy too. Barnaby won’t so much care about winning the next election. He’s more interested in keeping the Nats alive, and in an echo of the Queensland LNP, working for the National-isation of the federal Coalition.

It’s interesting to watch, but it isn’t a path to federal electoral competitiveness.

(e) The Abbott/Joyce mob, in the absence of the shift to a more robust level of public funding (and those bills are likely to have a long ride through to Senate passage), may be anticipating that kicking the populist can will lead to some sort of grassroots effusion of donations. It didn’t work for ‘Joh for PM’, but then he didn’t have the internet.

But the problem here is that they’re then captive to their base, and it will make it harder for them to make the sorts of noises they need to make to be seen as ‘responsible economic managers’.

…Welcome to Barnaby’s Wombat Trail.

Update: Barnaby and the CEC.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin.

Update: More from Andrew Elder:

In 2007, the Liberals could not get used to the idea that Howard was leading them into perdition. In 2009, the Abbott Experiment is all about the idea that Howard-style conservatism is an idea that has not been properly tried, let alone exhausted. It’s an idea held by nobody who doesn’t vote Liberal/National/CEC already.

Now, the folks at the C-M have noticed that the last date for “a traditional Saturday election” in mid February – the time at which they were claiming that the poll would occur – has passed. (Incidentally, Anna Bligh’s not likely to call an “unprecedented Tuesday election” which would be illegal anyway…) However, it seems beyond the call of duty for the C-M to admit that their ungrounded speculation was just wrong. In quite a bizarre twist, they’ve flicked the switch to populism and published a story which is accompanied by a shooting gallery of pollies “who will get to claim $63,500 for life”. The logic (if that’s the word) behind this is that supposedly the predicted early election hasn’t been held so that the said pollies can qualify for their super.

Never mind the fact that a large number of the pollies named aren’t retiring and quite a few hold safe seats.

Acting Premier Paul Lucas told the Courier-Mail the super qualification deadline was “irrelevant” and that’s almost certainly not spin. The frenzied imagination of Brisbane’s only major newspaper and its preference for flicking the switch to populism rather than admitting error doesn’t bode well for the standard of coverage of the campaign when it eventuates. But that will suit the ALP just fine, and more’s the pity for those who think the media might have some role in ensuring accountability from a government with a fat majority in parliament.