The Queen of the fake left let her petals of wisdom fall on the weekend. Katherine Murphy at The Guardian:
Burnout is an ever-present risk for people in public office. The most effective political leaders live in a constant state of hyper-vigilance. They scan the horizon for incoming risks and run multiple scenarios in their heads at once. It’s an occupational necessity, but it’s an exhausting and unnatural way to live.
…A few years ago, I found myself writing about political burnout frequently because the torrid atmospherics warranted it. Canberra was, truly, a cauldron. Things were genuinely terrible during that decade of unhinging – the war between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, the slugfest inside the Liberals that saw leadership passed between Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, back to Turnbull, then finally rest with Scott Morrison.
Canberra’s deranged coup culture was fuelled by a disrupted media chasing spectacle to engage readers and viewers in the new digital world, and the internal instability inside the major parties was the backing track for the pulverising hyper-partisan politics of the period.
It’s a simple, albeit depressing, formula. Extreme partisanship drives extreme polarisation. Extreme polarisation always delivers freak show politics and it empowers and validates freak show narration of politics by the mainstream media – a symbiosis that fatigues a country.
All true and all irrelevant and therefore symptomatic of the real problem.
This is a description of effect, not cause. It lacks economic insight, epistemological depth and political conviction. All characteristics of today’s fake left vertical market, which is part of the most important issue facing politics.
The polarisation of nothing.
As the fake left has abandoned the struggle over economic distribution, in its place, has risen the politics of the ultra-margins.
Today’s leftist politics fights not over poverty, class, enlightenment or atavism. It rages over how tiny fractions of the polity feel.
As the edifice of irrelevance rises, the foundations crumble. What is left over is the polarisation of nothing as the rich plunder everything.
Is political burnout relevant? In Katherine Murphy’s polarisation of nothing, yes, politicians are another persecuted minority whose feelings matter.
But the burnouts themselves are a part of the pantomime. All recent leadership retirees have gone straight into lifetime corporate sinecures. The next step on the political career path laid out before they started. These are not career-ending breakdowns; they are long-prepared promotions to the financial reaping phase of corporate ascendency.
I can propose only two hypotheses to explain the emergence of the polarisation of nothing.
The first is that we are genuinely at the end of history. The triumph of liberal democracy, such as it is, is so complete that all revolutions are now ethical only.
Or, second, we are so utterly gaslit by the contemporary aristocracy and its tools of technocracy that we have lost control of our minds.
A quick survey of the world tells us which is closer to the truth. Our current system is:
- killing the planet at astonishing speed;
- contested by the most powerful autocratic enemies since Nazi Germany, and
- riven by paralysing wealth and income inequality.
In short, the politics of nothing is an act of ubiquitous denial. Perhaps the very magnitude of the political challenges makes it so.
Yet, elsewhere in the free world – in America and the United Kingdom – genuine left-wing politics has at least partially returned. Electoral shocks were the catalyst.
In the UK, it was Brexit, which limited the inflows of cheap foreign labour. Such that today’s wage inflation is so strong it threatens to become destabilising.
In the US, Donald Trump stole the labour movement from under the fake left’s nose. This forced the Democratic Party back to the real left. It closed borders, rediscovered industry policy, and prioritised wages.
Today, US industry booms as the UAW fights over how generous pay raises will be, not whether it will survive next year:
Yet, not in Australia. Here, fake left and fake right vertical markets still duke it out in an ersatz culture war while corporate interests run wild.
It was not the choice of the polity. Following the US and UK, at the last election, Australia voted for change. Albanese’s Labor declared for action on climate change, that China was dangerous, and that we needed much lower immigration to lift wages.
But it lied on all three counts, giving us virtually no difference on climate change, a humiliating crawl to Beijing, and mass immigration for capital so strong that the real living standards fall would make a robber baron blush.
Then, it distracted everybody with more polarisation of nothing,
Such betrayal should be mercilessly punished. Not least by left-leaning media.
But where is this retribution? Not from fake left media who are now the conservatives of nothing.
Katherine, not all polarisations are bad. The polarisations that drive real, material progress for the most people, most of the time, are worth it.
The polarisations that demand slashed immigration when it is making mass Australians homeless are worth it.
The polarisations that drive union power to reverse wages and falling living standards are worth it.
The polarisations that put the fate of the species at the forefront of policymaking are worth it.
The polarisations that prepare for, and prevent, war are worth it.
Like every all-encompassing theory of history, Marxism is full of flaws. But the polarisations of dialectical history – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – can drive real progress.
It’s time the Australian fake left rediscovered it.
