The fall of Tony Abbott and the rise of Malcolm Turnbull has kicked off a civil war on the right in Australia, which parallels what’s going on in other English-speaking democracies.
The most amusing manifestation of this has been the way in which News Corp has been unable to get its ducks in a row on the leadership transition.
While The Australian has pragmatically signed up with the new regime, the company’s hard cases — Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and Miranda Devine — are outraged that Abbott, the boots-and-all social conservative, has been replaced by someone who is cosmopolitan, not gung-ho enough on refugee policy, and worst of all, thinks we perhaps could do something about climate change.
In the immediate aftermath of Abbott’s ousting, Chris Mitchell and Andrew Bolt had a furious spat. It started when News Corp’s boss, Julian Clarke, called for the country to get behind the new prime minister in the interests of economic “reform”.
Bolt, along with his conservative cronies in radio (Ray Hadley, Alan Jones) and in the Liberal party itself (Cory Bernardi) had spent the week brooding and sulking, attacking “treacherous” Turnbull and his supporters, and darkly hinting at the possibility of a new, authentically conservative party. Mitchell helpfully ventured that all the fuss might be because Bolt’s readers are conservative retirees, “whereas The Australian’s readership is younger, rich, better educated”. Bolt responded with a post entitled: “An editor losing that much money shouldn’t disparage the papers subsidising him.”
All good fun, especially because both of them are partly right. Mitchell’s paper is not a commercial enterprise, but an ideological one, which couldn’t survive without being cross-subsidised by the rest of the business. And Australia’s readership for tabloid newspapers is being inexorably reduced to a greying, right-wing remnant — indeed, catering to this audience is one of the secrets of Bolt’s success. He and his pal Tim Blair were duly outraged on the weekend when liberal strategist Mark Textor was quoted as saying that the Liberal’s conservative base “didn’t matter” in electoral terms. Textor has tried to walk this back, saying that he was talking specifically about a conservative website.
But the quote as printed sure reads like a blanket statement: “The qualitative evidence is they don’t matter. The sum of a more centrist approach outweighs any alleged marginal loss of so-called base voters.”
Whatever his intended meaning, it’s true that structural factors like compulsory voting and a lack of primary contests mean that in Australia, the socially conservative base matters less than it does in the USA. There, the hard right’s grassroots influence has seen in recent weeks the retirement of a not-particularly-moderate speaker, and surges on the part of “outsider” conservatives who probably can’t win a general election.
Even if the Liberal party are able to head off conservative revolts in a way that Republicans can’t, in both places we’re seeing the same symptoms of a profound disconnect between party elites, who are focused on winning elections and delivering for their sponsors, and a rank and file who demands ideological purity, and delivery on a reactionary programme of social revenge.
Since the economic crises of the 1970s, the political right’s successes have come from welding together such a socially conservative base — some of whom have been peeled off from centre-left parties — with a money wing whose priority has been reducing their tax bill, eliminating regulatory constraints and diminishing the power of organised labour.
Unrestrained capitalism
Centre-left parties felt pressure to acknowledge the claims of identity movements, which allowed right wing candidates and parties throughout the anglophone west to work a simple formula. In culture war mode, they would rail against feminism, multiculturalism and gays. For their financiers, they’d cut taxes, cripple unions, and dismantle regulation and welfare systems.
If [the left] could grab the mantle of economic populism, they might be able to show the right up as economic elitists.
The biggest contradiction here is that the onward march of unrestrained capitalism is the biggest threat to the things that conservatives hold most dear — patriarchal families, monocultural societies, religious authority, and, in general, tradition. There’s also the fact that low-income conservative voters — like all towards the bottom of the economic pile — suffer the most in material terms from the effects of deregulatory capitalism.
In earlier times, politicians like John Howard were praised as political geniuses for holding all of this together, and satisfying the contradictory demands of his constituencies. He both carried out “reforms” that funnelled money upwards, and threw out enough red meat to keep the likes of Bolt happy. But he partly resolved the contradictions by blowing a boom-fuelled surplus on massive electoral bribes, mostly delivered through the welfare system. The pressure on traditional family units, and the lower middle classes, was relieved through direct subsidy.
Also, he was fortunate in that a chasm had not yet opened between conservative and mainstream values. Now, with large majorities favouring gay marriage, the mainstreaming of basic feminist assumptions, and sheer demographic change, the electoral appeal of hard-core, patriarchal conservatism is becoming more and more limited.
At the moment, the Liberals can’t seem to find a candidate that can answer to all their needs. Abbott pleased conservatives, but was not able to close the growing divide between their desires and mainstream values. He was also less than entirely enthusiastic about neoliberal reform. Turnbull suits the money guys, not least because he’s one of them. He’s already making noises about assaulting the conditions of workers. But for the likes of Bolt, and the grassroots conservatives he panders to, Turnbull’s a sell-out.
In the Republican party, the battle is between those candidates who represent the conservative base and conservative media, and candidates bankrolled by the big donors. In the interests of electability, establishment candidates are trying to woo the immigrants who some outsiders want deported, and candidates like Donald Trump are surprisingly critical of neoliberal approaches to the economy. As for the UK Tories, even before they have a full-on internal barney about Europe, they’ve seen the populist message of Ukip trouble them on their right flank. Their electoral system, too, preserves them from the worst consequences of this.
What underlies all of these conflicts is economic stagnation and/or worsening inequality, which affects the conservative base as much as anyone, and the increasing difficulty of attracting enough voters to a hard right platform. So far, no one has an answer, as the bust-ups between Bolt and Mitchell, Blair and Textor, Turnbull and Abbott, and Trump and Jeb Bush show.
There’s an opportunity in this disarray for centre-left parties to start making arguments that will appeal to those who are economically adrift. If they could grab the mantle of economic populism, they might be able to show the right up as economic elitists. But this would require the courage and imagination to wholly reframe the political conversation. Don’t hold your breath waiting for either from a Shorten-led opposition.
