There seem to be some interesting parallels between US and Australian politics emerging. Anonymous Liberal blogged some time ago on the delusions afflicting conservative commentators who seek to maintain the old norms of two-party analysis when one of the parties has, so to speak, 'jumped the shark'.
Those commentators on the right who are now writing columns through the prism of 2010 election speculation are similarly awash in unnavigable confusion. The Liberal calamity is tied to the ideological tensions that Howard introduced and exacerbated, and now that they have surfaced in the public arena, dividing the party neatly into two tribes, there is no use carrying on the charade any longer. The emperor has no clothes.
Guy Rundle has been examining the possibility of a Liberal split this week, emphasizing the long history of the current ideological tensions. To Rundle, the Australian right has been, since the Menzies years, 'a cloud of atoms pointed in roughly the same direction'. Though the diagnosis of internecine conflict is, I feel, entirely accurate, I think the issues surrounding a potential split can be considered further (using much of Rundle's own thinking).
Rundle makes much, in his analysis of US society and politics, of the emergent divide between the 'service' and 'served' classes. In this he is not alone. Joe Bageant in his wonderful Deer Hunting With Jesus paints a picture of a conservatism born of the bitterness of failure and the cultural disorientation of the working class, with the professional class simultaneously growing to accept economic rationalism and class divides as the natural order. As Rundle pointed out in Crikey:
Socialism in its 20th century form is over, and the question is no longer framed by private-public, worker-company divisions. Increasingly the divisions is between knowledge frameworks – people inside the new global economy, often working mainly with information, who see theworld in terms of systems, networks, processes, global entities, as part of a single humanity on the one hand, and those tending to be in theold world of more local, parochial, and fixed ideas of morality, work and social order.
The natural question - what of the ALP? Remains unanswered by Rundle. If, as he alleges here and elsewhere, the new social divisions are not about lines of capital and labour, but around inclusion and exclusion in the new economy and its attendant cosmopolitan worldview, then the ideological health of the ALP is just as pressing an issue as that of the coalition.
The ALP, especially after Keating, has been held together mostly by the power networks of the old labourist institutions more than any particular ideological creed. The state Labor governments have demonstrated that they are more than willing to veer between populism, Blairist social micromanagement, centre-right private-public partnerships, and old fashioned opportunism to hold on to power. Could a new dividing line be drawn in the House between the 'New Worlders' and 'Old Worlders'? If the old political 'spectrum' is a farce in Australia, I think this new one is very much relevant.
What do you think, dear reader?
