Four weeks into an enervating election campaign in Australia, where do we stand? The polls tell us that the parties are in a dead heat and the prime-ministerial contenders are disliked as much as they are liked. The phoney war in the torpid leaders’ debate did nothing to resolve the languorous deadlock.
While ongoing campaigns in other English-speaking democracies — the Brexit referendum and the United States presidential election — are exciting great rancour, in Australia, there seems to be something more like resignation. More people expect the Coalition to prevail than desire that outcome.
People don’t like the choices on offer among the parties most likely to govern, but there seems to be no room for imagining how things might be better. If Malcolm Turnbull is the embodiment of disappointment, Bill Shorten is the avatar of permanently lowered expectations. Turnbull’s numbers might have cratered during nine short months in office, but leader of the opposition Shorten’s have always been grim to mediocre. There’s apparently no transformational figure waiting in the wings of either major party who might redeem this.
A month in, then, people know things aren’t as they should be, but they’re held in place by the weight of conventional wisdom. The given seems intractable to change. Things have started to curdle. The German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, coined the term “cynical reason” in the 1980s to describe a pervasive contemporary mindset — that of “enlightened false consciousness”. He thought that in post-modern times, people have not so much been blinded by systematically false ideology as crippled by the realisation that while things may be bad, even depressing, there are no alternatives to the current economic and political paradigm.
Sloterdijk described the modern cynic as a “borderline melancholic” who harboured “a permanent doubt about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so.”
It was this cynicism that pacified highly educated, literate and information-rich populations in the West, even as the neoliberal ascendancy gradually eroded their wages, working conditions and political rights. Sloterdijk saw modern cynicism as a mass phenomenon: Whole populations were immobilised by a force that was impervious to ideological criticism, because cynicism already incorporated a thorough understanding of that criticism.
Does this sound familiar? In some contemporary democracies — for better or for ill — the age of cynical reason seems to be coming to an end. While neoliberalism still lies at the centre of politics in most advanced states, it looks increasingly beleaguered. As matters of individual survival have become more complicated, the mood has changed from cynicism to fury.
Take the US election. While Donald Trump is proffering a feral paleoconservatism, which frequently lapses into outright white nationalism, on the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders is calling into question the trade deals, deregulation, and corporate control that have defined that country’s economy and politics since the 1980s. This double insurgency has been accompanied by a marked change in tone by comparison with recent elections. When Rolling Stone recently asked Sanders what the common denominator was between his voters and Trump’s, he answered: “To the media’s great shock and to the pundits’ great shock, there are millions of Americans who are very, very angry.” He connected this to economic desperation. “They’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages. They’re angry because they’re working two and three jobs.”
While Trump scapegoats, blaming “Mexicans or Muslims or women for the problems facing society”, Sanders said “we are also addressing the anger of the American people”. That anger has not only powered two campaigns, but spilled over into searching criticisms of media commentators and their role in maintaining things as they are. People have lost jobs because their criticisms of those committed to consensus politics was adjudged impolite. This, in turn, has led to a debate about political civility.
But anger, as the man sang, is an energy. Whatever might be happening in the US election, it’s not possible to view it as cynical resignation. The fruits of the open, internecine conflict on both sides of politics in the US is likely to transform both main parties. Trump is leading the Republicans further down a nativist cul-de-sac. But there’s the possibility that Sanders can push the Democrats into more progressive positions. (There’s evidence that this is already happening.)
This has presented Americans with some clear and dramatic political choices. And the durability of both campaigns shows that status quo is no longer seen as an imperfect means of surviving. Politics as usual is on the rack.
Perhaps it has served to remind Americans what politics actually is. It is not the elite parlour game played between politicians and pundits. That’s how real politics is shut down. It returns in the moments when that cosy pursuit is rudely interrupted. By contrast, Australia’s campaign has proceeded in an entirely familiar manner. Neither of the prime ministerial candidates is contemplating a radical departure from the orthodoxies of recent decades, nor even hinting that it’s possible.
Shorten is promising to keep company taxes on big business where they are to fund education a little better, but then the government is effectively running to his left on superannuation. There’s no consistency on either side. 2016 may be the apotheosis of Australia’s political cartel: The whole show is about cautious product differentiation on a policy-by-policy basis. No one’s discussing anything that violates political common sense, let alone making a call to arms.
There’s not much anger in play so far in Australia, perhaps because leaders can’t seem to spell out what exactly is at stake. Or because we are all too aware that the election is being contested in areas where one side or another detects an incremental electoral advantage in marginal seats. People are also conscious that their understanding of this changes nothing. Once again, cynicism is being imposed on the people. The ostensible reason for the double dissolution, the government’s attempt to bring back the Australian Building and Construction Commission, may, in other circumstances, have stimulated a debate about industrial relations, the changing shape of employment, long-hours culture and connected with anger at the worsening situation many of us face at work.
But it seems to have been mostly forgotten, with the party of workers as keen to let it drop as the Coalition. (When Turnbull attacked the construction industry union, the CFMEU, last Tuesday for negotiating a large pay increase for its workers, Shorten offered a dead bat, saying: “Ultimately, what employers and employees negotiate is their business.”) Other emergencies are either avoided, or treated cursorily. Like the connection between the Great Barrier Reef, climate change and Australia’s coal industry. Or the general post-boom drift that is ravaging regional economies. At best, these problems are ticked off with disconnected announceables. When a topic is given sustained attention, as in the case of superannuation, we can watch, in real time, as proposals are ground into a shape that derives maximal electoral advantage without unduly offending powerful interests .
There’s no real pretence that anything else is happening — no sense that posterity or principle are consulted, and no apparent shame about that fact. The election is presented, and desultorily accepted, as a professionally-targeted series of transactional bribes. In Australia, the age of cynical reason continues. In the US, change has come, as Sanders says, from the deep crisis that’s still hanging around after almost a decade. Consensus politics precipitated that crisis and saw to it that those who profited from the immiseration of the American people were not only not punished, but rewarded. Let’s hope Australian politics can shake off its cynicism without first passing through such a catastrophe.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jason Wilson is an Australian-born writer living in Portland, Oregon.
