Left’s identity crisis means Dutton can be a champion for equality

When the US Supreme Court recently struck down the affirmative action admission policies of Harvard University on the basis that they violated the 14th amendment (the “equal protection clause”), the howls of outrage from the left of politics were predictable.

President Joe Biden led the charge, denouncing the decision in intemperate language that showed no respect whatever for constitutional niceties such as the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers. More interesting, though, was the reaction from the right. Many Republicans, Donald Trump among them, invoked Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, treating the decision as the fulfilment of his hope for the day when all Americans were judged “not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”.

If Anthony Albanese focuses on identity politics, Peter Dutton can talk about equality.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The reactions to the decision reflect the way in which equality – traditionally a political value associated with the left – is increasingly being claimed by parties of the right. This represents not a shift in conservative philosophy, but in the way parties of the left have changed the way they think about equality.

In the good old days, it was pretty straightforward. As Fin Crisp, a member of Chifley’s brains trust who went on to be professor of politics at the ANU, wrote in 1965 in the first undergraduate textbook on Australian politics, the ALP was the party of organised labour and the working class, while the non-Labor Parties were “first and foremost the political instruments of the owners and controllers of private, productive and commercial capital, urban and rural”. The basic structural division of society was class.

Increasingly, as the result of intellectual movements on the left roughly traceable to the 1970s, class is being replaced by identity as the principal preoccupation of left-wing politics (although the term “identity politics” did not come into vogue until more recently). Redressing the unfair treatment of minorities, through anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action policies and other measures, came increasingly to dominate the agenda. As it did so, the discourse of minority group rights, and the politics of minority grievance, became ever more powerful.

Who do working people find more aligned to their concerns and social values: Matt Canavan or Mark Dreyfus?Credit:

Socialism was based on a theory of economic inequality defined by the class system. The working class was not a minority; its political (and moral) claims were based on the structural injustices of capitalism. The consequence for left-wing politics of the replacement of class by identity as its principal focus has been that, as the demands of minorities dominate the debate, the interests of the broader working class are pushed down the agenda. As this happens, working people increasingly find that left-wing parties no longer speak to them: particularly, those whose livelihood depends upon the much-despised “old economy”. Who do you think working people find more in sympathy with their concerns and social values: Matt Canavan or Mark Dreyfus?

At Labor’s National Conference next month, we can expect to hear a lot more about the Voice than about working-class poverty (particularly since Labor now owns the cost-of-living crisis). In the referendum campaign, Anthony Albanese will talk about empowerment. Peter Dutton will talk about equality.

Meanwhile, the grievance narrative, once associated with the socialist critique of the injustices of capitalism, has been turned on its head. The American satirist Tom Wolfe teasingly described this phenomenon as “Rococo Marxism”: “Marxism may be dead, and the proletariat has proved to be hopeless ... But we can find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors we can be – non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes, hardwood trees – which we can use to express our indignation towards the powers that be and our aloofness to their bourgeois stooges. .... This will not be Vulgar Marxism; it will be Rococo Marxism, elegant as a Fragonard, subtle as a Watteau.”

Since Wolfe wrote that essay in 2000, huge advances have been made in the inclusion of some of the minorities he identifies. This poses a problem for identity politics: what happens when the grievances of the minority are addressed? One of the grounds of the decision in the Harvard students case was that affirmative-action admissions policies were no longer required to serve the purpose that was their original rationale. Yet once-marginalised minorities are often reluctant to abandon the status of victimhood.

Anti-discrimination policies are meant not to entrench minority disadvantage but to eliminate it. This takes time – perhaps a long time – but such policies are designed to succeed, not to fail. Social attitudes do change. Consider the Sydney Mardi Gras: something that began as a protest movement has evolved into a joyous celebration. Laws discriminating against LGBTQI people were progressively struck down, culminating in the adoption of marriage equality during the Turnbull government.

Meanwhile, those who do not belong to an identified minority increasingly find that there is nobody to speak up for them. Whose life chances are better in modern Australia: the gay kid from a loving family in a wealthy suburb who goes to an elite school and will sail into university? Or the impoverished kid from western Sydney who suffers the tyranny of low expectations but does not belong to any self-identifying minority? Who speaks for him in the babel of minority voices?

The trap for Labor in the embrace of identity politics is that its historic concern for equality has become narrowed to a boutique concern for particular groups – including some which, although once marginalised, are no longer. As working people feel abandoned, this creates a political space for others to become their champion. Never underestimate Dutton’s plain-spoken appeal to those people.

Labor will come to rue the day that, in its embrace of identity politics and minority interests, it surrenders the broader equality narrative to the right.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor in the practice of national security at the ANU’s National Security College.

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