Democracy in crisis as woke concerns trump real-world problems
Joe Biden has shown no inclination to meet or speak to Scott Morrison since the ‘landmark’ AUKUS announcement. Does something strike you as a bit strange about all this?
The US, Britain, Australia – the three amigos of AUKUS – are led respectively by a centrist Democrat long at the heart of his nation’s political life, a Conservative maverick who led Britain out of the EU, and a Liberal Prime Minister heading a government in office for eight years.
They should be the pinnacle of Western resolve, the sharp end of allied purpose. In truth, each nation is moving to the left culturally, and therefore over the long term they are moving left politically as well, notwithstanding short-term electoral wins for conservatives. Each also is displaying spasmodic but disturbing signs of a lack of seriousness in national security.
And each society, but especially the US, is internally polarised.
This is not a counsel of despair. Things can change. But a key attribute of military success is situational awareness, confronting the circumstances you’re actually facing. And the circumstances are not good.
This analysis requires going beyond a couple of recent events that might seem to suggest the opposite trend. Conservatives had a thumping victory in the state election in Virginia at the start of this month, and did very well in a slew of other electoral contests on the same day.
And the three nations have recently signed up to a new defence agreement – AUKUS – aimed at providing nuclear propulsion technology for Australian submarines and general hi-tech co-operation.
I have written a lot about AUKUS. But two things stand out about it. It was briefed out that this was the most important security development for Australia since ANZUS. Yet, weirdly, since it was inaugurated, US President Joe Biden hasn’t said a word that’s positive about it or about Australia. Though doubtless briefed up to the last minute, he couldn’t remember Scott Morrison’s name at the virtual joint appearance of the three leaders announcing AUKUS. His only comments on AUKUS have been relentless apologies to France, which also received the diplomatic gesture of a visit by Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Harris is one of the most unpopular and ineffective vice-presidents in recent American history, but sending her to France is a sign that Biden wants to make a big deal out of the French relationship. It’s a diplomatic gift to France. Australia got only a – albeit very welcome – webcast from US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan that had some general pro-AUKUS statements.
And Biden has shown no inclination to meet or speak to Morrison since the AUKUS announcement. Does something strike you as a bit strange about all this?
Second, the Morrison government keeps telling us the subs will be built in Adelaide and the very earliest we might get the first is 20 years from now. That’s wildly optimistic timing, by the way. Never fear, the government says, our six aged Collins-class boats will still be “regionally superior” into the 2040s. Yet the same government also told us the French Attack-class subs would be “obsolete” on the first day they came into service in the early 2030s. Those two statements cannot both be true.
The only conclusion is that this is mostly about symbolism and electoral politics. And here is one of the clues to the malaise across the West, particularly the three great Anglosphere democracies.
The politics of all three countries has become dysfunctional, inefficient, often incapable of dealing with real-world problems, and therefore, on both left and right, increasingly preoccupied with fantasy symbols, with long-distant future aspirations and with contested cultural iconography.
And in these areas, though the conservatives will have their occasional victories, and these will be significant, the left overall is prevailing. This ultimately will be as confounding for the left as it is for the right, for the more the left wins in the cultural field, the more confused, extreme and unreasonable its demands become. The result is a very fractured and incoherent society.
Let’s go back to the Virginia governor’s race. Republican Glenn Youngkin won in a state where a Republican hasn’t won a statewide vote since 2008. Youngkin ran one practical economic policy – cutting taxes. And he ran one culture wars policy that was also very practical – giving parents a fair say over what is taught to their kids and keeping radical ideology, in particular the madness of critical race theory, out of classrooms.
That’s the kind of culture wars victory conservatives are most likely to win, when the stuff the left is proposing is wildly over the top. No one doubts there is racism in the US and that racism is evil. No one doubts that there has been severe racism in US history. But CRT in the US holds that the entire purpose of the American nation was to embody racism, and that racism is central to every aspect of American life and history, and that a white person can truly be non-racist only when they are actively performing anti-racist ritual.
This is rightly seen as a kind of quasi-witchcraft, pseudo-religious cult. It’s completely bonkers. No normal person could fall for it.
And CRT has its obnoxious place in Australia, as the recent proposed National Curriculum demonstrates. Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge is right to campaign against it. It’s the sort of issue that could help the federal government a lot if handled well. So far it hasn’t registered much in the national consciousness.
But in the US, Britain and Australia the pedagogic left has been in complete control of the curriculum for decades. It has long taught that our societies are essentially evil, based essentially on evil constructs – racism, sexism, heteronormativity, militarism, colonialism, capitalism and all the rest.
This of course is an inversion of moral reality. There are plenty of things wrong with the US, Britain and Australia, and plenty of bad things happened in their history. But human beings are fallen creatures. All three societies, working with imperfect human beings, are among the most just, least racist and most democratic societies humanity has ever created under any circumstances.
Tudge was right to make the obvious link to national security. If you learn at school and university to hate the basis of your society while acquiring almost no knowledge of its history, why would you be inclined to defend it with your life or even with your taxes?
So when you get wild left-wing overreach, as we see in the US with CRT, you have every chance of securing a conservative electoral victory. But that’s not conservatives winning the battle of ideas overall.
For these victories are always temporary and almost never change the direction of society, they merely slow the pace of change.
On the same day the Republicans won in Virginia, the good people of Minneapolis, Minnesota voted against a proposition to abolish the police and replace it with some kumbaya niceness agency.
That’s not the real story, however. The real story is that fully 45 per cent of Minneapolis voters did vote to abolish the police.
Watching the television coverage of that vote, it was obvious that the strongest opponents of it were black citizens in poor, crime-ridden neighbourhoods. The only thing that stands between them and violent criminals is the police. The most enthusiastic champions of abolishing the police were upper-class white uber-liberals who live in neighbourhoods with low crime.
But the really extraordinary and striking consequence of this vote is that this utter woke madness – abolishing the police – could score 45 per cent of the vote in a direct plebiscite.
There are two main ways now that conservatives gain electoral victories. The first is by essentially surrendering to the left on the big ideas but for the centre-right party to promise to implement them in a much more sober, cautious, incremental and balanced way than the centre-left itself would.
In a sense this is what has happened with budgetary response to Covid-19. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has taken tax, and the size of government, higher than it has been for nearly 70 years. Government expanded massively during World War II in Britain and then again after the war with the introduction of the welfare state.
Naturally, Biden’s spending limitations know no bounds, and the US is now running a record debt level.
Australia has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on its Covid response without, incidentally, a single extra dollar for defence and without introducing a single extra defence platform.
Huge swathes of the money the Morrison government is spending on defence – tanks, heavy armour designed for Afghanistan and Iraq – have no relevance at all to the maritime challenge posed by China’s aggressive militarism.
The second way conservatives win is to mobilise the common sense of the average citizen against the elites. These victories are often exhilarating, but virtually without exception conservatives in politics are not clever enough to turn such victories into long-term institutional change.
The left is inherently concerned with ideas – many of which are crazy, but they are still ideas – and lives and breathes institutional politics and government process. The conservative parties are complete amateurs on this. John Howard tried to reform the way history was taught in Australia and failed. All the conservative governments have tried to reform the ABC and failed. There is a squad of left-wing think tanks associated with Australian universities. They are not balanced by conservative think tanks.
The one or two conservative think tanks that do exist – the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies – rightly pride themselves on their complete independence of government.
But in sheer size and funding they are no match for the limitless rivers of gold that pour forth from ideologically committed state-funded institutions.
David Brooks, of The Atlantic, has written brilliantly of the dominance of the group he calls “bourgeois bohemians”, or bobos, the symbol-wielding class, the well-remunerated creatives, who totally dominate American culture.
He traces the vitriolic Donald Trump backlash to the dominance of the bobos, of whom he considers himself to be one.
He writes: “I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades the number of working-class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling.”
Meanwhile conservatives have had their own crisis, arising predominantly from the collapse of religious belief. Robbed of a sense of the transcendent, bitterly resentful of the bobos’ dominance, much conservative reaction has become ugly, nationalist and nativist.
A telling example of this was a recent interview by conservative hero Tucker Carlson with an Ohio Republican who wanted the Biden administration to send aid to Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Carlson, a powerful and in his way brilliant broadcaster, denounced this view. Why would we send any help to Ukraine, he demanded. What’s it got to do with us? Why don’t we take Russia’s side? They could help us against China.
This is a radical change for popular conservatism, to no longer seriously favour democracy and human rights over dictatorship as a value in foreign affairs.
A lot of well-informed people don’t think, if it really came to it, that Biden would take military action to defend Taiwan if Beijing decided to attack. The fact he might take action is Taiwan’s best chance and the main constraint on Beijing’s actions.
But if he did want to take action, what sort of support would Biden get from the strand of American culture represented by Carlson?
John F. Kennedy as president spoke magnificently of America’s commitment to allies and to freedom – we will bear any burden, oppose any foe, support any friend, to ensure the survival of liberty.
That kind of rhetoric, that kind of sentiment, is now completely missing from American presidential politics on either side.
The American educational system not only frequently imbues a hostility to America, it’s actually very bad at teaching people to read and write and to add up and subtract. The same is true of the British and Australian education systems.
Once Western nations such as ours were the best in the world. Now, we are miles behind East Asian nations.
So, what is the single most important explanation of this?
Karl Schmude, the founder of Campion College, offers the answer in the November issue of Quadrant: “Politics is downstream of culture. And culture is downstream of faith.”
It’s very unclear that Western nations without transcendent belief can prevail in the long run.
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