CHAPTER SIX

With us or with the terrorists

In the anti-corporate movement of the late 1990s, a particular anecdote circulated widely. It related to Subcommandante Marcos, the charismatic masked leader of the Mexican insurgent group known as the Zapatistas.

The story went that a government official tasked with suppressing the insurrection in the state of Chiapas had spread a rumour about Marcos’s sexuality. The leader of the Zapatistas, the official said, was gay.

In macho Mexico, the charge might have been damning. But rather than angrily asserting his heterosexuality, Marcos responded with one of the poetic communiqués for which he’d become famous.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristóbal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.’1

The quote was repeated widely in countries a long way from Mexico, since Marcos’s response captured the optimism, exuberance, and solidarity emerging at the end of the 20th century, during a brief — and now largely forgotten — revival of direct politics.

The anti-corporate movement was wiped so thoroughly from popular consciousness after its defeat that many no longer remember how, for a few years in the late 1990s, a series of huge demonstrations across the world drew together social activists from different causes and different backgrounds collectively demanding massive structural change.

The global justice movement (or GJM, as it was known) emerged most spectacularly during the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999, a protest against a summit of the World Trade Organisation, where the unity between environmentalists and members of the powerful teamsters’ union was famously embodied in a placard reading ‘Teamsters and Turtles: together at last’.

Thereafter, demonstrations ricocheted from country to country, in a pattern that recalled the cascading campaigns of the late 1960s. In September 2000, 20,000 people blockaded the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne; in July 2001, 200,000 people marched in Genoa against the summit of the World Trade Organisation.2

In a sense, the anti-corporate eruption represented a progressive response to the same historical moment that spurred the Republicans’ embrace of culture war: the era following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Where neoliberalism’s supporters popularised the idea of TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’), the protests that followed Seattle raised the slogan ‘Another World Is Possible’, challenging accepted notions about globalisation, free-market economics, privatisations, and poverty. The actions brought together a diverse group of constituents — climate-change campaigners, Indigenous people, church groups, students, trade unionists, and others — to critique corporate power and the international order.

But the GJM didn’t merely take on neoliberalism. It also challenged delegated politics. Rather than working with established political institutions, the GJM described parliament as fundamentally broken, dominated by corporate interests at the expense of the poor. Where delegated politics tinkered at the edges, GJM supporters demanded fundamental and institutional change. If delegated leftists prioritised the efforts of academics, or the heads of NGOs, or sympathetic politicians, the GJM depended on massive mobilisations that were often physically attacked by police and other state agencies.

There were many reasons for the decline of One Nation after 1998, not least the campaign backed by Tony Abbott about Hanson’s campaign-financing that eventually culminated in her imprisonment.

But the marginalisation of the outsider anti-elitists also coincided with the rise of the GJM. The S11 demonstration at Melbourne’s Crown Casino in September 2000 raised many of the issues that preoccupied Hanson’s supporters, such as the power wielded by banks and other massive financial institutions, the baleful consequences of unregulated free trade, and the anti-human dynamic of the market. But the protest also mobilised constituencies that Hanson demonised, such as Indigenous people, unionists, environmentalists, and others. As such, it entirely destroyed the culture-war frame. The corporate leaders and politicians inside the WEF were, unequivocally, the elite; the tens of thousands of protesters outside were, equally unequivocally, both ordinary and progressive, in a way that left no space for the faux anti-elitism of Pauline Hanson.

In Australia, as elsewhere, this brief glimpse of hope was shattered by terrible events.

In late August 2001, the federal government sent Special Forces soldiers to board the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa to prevent it bringing into Australian territory the 433 asylum-seekers who had been rescued by the crew. With an election looming, John Howard famously declared, ‘We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come,’ as his government set in place the architecture of the ‘Pacific Solution’.3 A few weeks later, Islamist suicide terrorists crashed airlines into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in New York.

Those two events brought culture war very much back to the fore. Howard went to the polls boasting that he was ‘scorned by the elites and held in such disdain’. After the Liberals’ emphatic victory, the right-wing commentator Paul Kelly anticipated the culture war to come, spelling out the opportunity that the dominance of the delegated left presented to the right. Howard, he said, was ‘going to focus on social policy this term and … smash the post-Whitlam political alliance between the working class and the tertiary-educated left that defines modern Labor … [Howard] senses that the 30-year alliance of the Australian left is collapsing because of its fundamental contradictions.’4

Obviously, 9/11 — and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’ — reshaped the political climate all across the world. The resurgence of militarised nationalism in the immediate wake of the atrocity confronted the GJM with a very different atmosphere. With war, terrorism, and national security dominating the headlines, the anti-corporate movement struggled with complicated political questions for which no immediate answers presented themselves.

Instead of the revived direct politics that many — and not just on the left — had expected, the 2000s unleashed a new militarisation. The Iraq and Afghanistan commitments justified massive expenditure on defence. The emphasis on terrorism brought national security into public life in ways unparalleled since the Great War, while the traditional bipartisan agreement over foreign policy gave way to almost total lockstep between the two major parties. Politicians draped themselves in khaki for photo ops; the funerals for soldiers killed in action were crowded with prominent government and opposition figures. ASIO and other security agencies, politically discredited after the Cold War, received massive injections of funding and political support, while parliament rushed through draconian anti-terror laws.

The War on Terror turbocharged the basic structure of right-wing culture war since, almost by definition, it accentuated the rhetorical gulf between ‘battlers’ and ‘elites’. In times of peace, the old neocon presentation of the ‘new class’ as being implicitly disloyal might sound overheated. But 9/11 allowed the right to literalise its accusations, normalising a lexicon of appeasement and betrayal.

In wartime, treason wasn’t simply a metaphor.

‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,’ president George Bush explained to a joint session of Congress.5

Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, countered criticisms of US bombing campaigns by warning that Americans needed ‘to watch what they say, what they do’.6 Attorney-general Ashcroft used an address to Congress to warn ‘critics’ that ‘your tactics only aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends.’7

The journalist David Neiwert described the proliferation of what he called ‘eliminationism’: a right-wing discourse that posited liberals and the left not as opponents to be defeated, but as enemies to be annihilated.8 Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, whose ‘No Spin Zone’ deliberately recalled the ‘no-fly zones’ imposed by Washington in Iraq, sounded less like a journalist and more like a combatant when he warned that those who opposed the military would ‘be considered enemies of the state by me’. Network talking heads across America produced a stream of eliminationist books, with titles like Deliver Us from Evil: defeating terrorism, despotism, and liberalism (Sean Hannity), The Enemy at Home: the cultural left and its responsibility for 9/11 (Dinesh D’Souza), The Enemy Within (Michael Savage) and Treason: liberal treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Ann Coulter).

The consequences for new-class theory were obvious. If progressives became ‘enemies of the state’, then, almost by definition, ‘culture war’ became an actual war — a struggle against traitors literally assisting the enemy. ‘[T]he rhetorical attacks on liberalism became enmeshed,’ Neiwert argued, ‘with a virulent strain of jingoism, which at first blamed liberals for the terrorism, then accused them of treason for questioning Bush’s war plans’.9

By the 2000s, anti-elitism had taken over the media, partly for ideological reasons but also because it worked as a business model. The virtuous circle identified by right-wing politicians and activists neatly suited news organisations. As huge corporations, they benefited from deregulation and other neoliberal policies; as media outlets, they found new audiences with culture-war rage.

In the US, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 had allowed Rush Limbaugh, and others like him, to develop listenerships by pandering to the conspiratorial outsider anti-elitism that burgeoned during the Clinton years. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch hired former Republican strategist Roger Ailes to build a cable network along similar lines. Right from the start, Fox News prioritised issues by which it could foster resentments against progressives, adopting the slogan ‘Fair and Balanced’ to differentiate itself from the ‘liberal media’, and then building its anchors into populist figureheads. Although Fox remained very much a mouthpiece for the GOP, the network flirted with outsider anti-elitism, a balancing act facilitated by the influence exerted by a Republican president during a time of war.

The network’s success spawned imitations both within the US (where, for instance, CNN developed its own culture-war fulminators) and around the world. In the 2000s, for instance, Murdoch’s national broadsheet, the Australian, served a very similar role.

On 12 April 2003, a few days after the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, the editorialist for the Australian told the paper’s readers that, apart from the Iraq War, ‘there is another war of values, and it is the culture war being fought within the West. This is the war between those who feel that on the whole our values and traditions are sound, and those among the intellectuals who argue they are simply a cloak for racism and brute power.’10

As Robert Manne argued in a 2011 Quarterly Essay, the Australian, like Fox News, played the role ‘not so much of reporter or interpreter but rather of national enforcer of those values that lie at the heart of the Murdoch empire: market fundamentalism and the beneficence of American global hegemony’.11

How, though, did it perform this function? It was, of course, the country’s only national newspaper. But the Australian was kept afloat by Murdoch, despite losing money year after year. It never achieved mass circulation. Most Australians didn’t see the angry columns in its opinion section. Why did a paper read by so few people matter?

Manne explained that the dominance of its Canberra coverage meant that the Australian influenced the more widely circulating tabloids, such as the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, as well as setting the agenda for outlets such as the ABC. Just as importantly, it was read by those who constituted what Manne called ‘the political class’ — ‘politicians, leading public servants, business people and the most politically engaged citizens’ — something that made it ‘an active player in both federal and state politics’.

Such observations were correct, and provided a useful description of how culture-war talking points, which are often remarkably obscure, percolate through the media. But Manne’s description revealed as much about the weakness of the right’s anti-elitism as about its power.

Consider the prelude to war on Iraq.

The elaborate campaign to make the conflict possible has now been well documented. Many of the key figures in George W. Bush’s cabinet — including Richard Perle, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — belonged to a neoconservative thinktank known as the Project for a New American Century. Throughout the 1990s, PNAC had developed a particular vision of US foreign policy, predicated on the maintenance of imperial supremacy. ‘At present,’ it argued in 2000, ‘the US faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.’12

Iraq loomed large in PNAC’s thinking, partly because of its location in an oil-rich region, but also because Saddam Hussein’s continuing rule after the war over Kuwait encouraged other minor strongmen who might think they, too, could flout America and survive. The neocons saw Iraqi regime change as essential to the US’s strategic dominance, weakened by the first Gulf War and the humiliating American withdrawal from Somalia. As far back as 1998, PNAC sent an open letter to president Bill Clinton, urging Saddam’s overthrow. As former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill noted in his memoirs, Bush officials were considering removing Saddam almost as soon as Bush took office.

But 9/11 fundamentally changed the political possibilities, convincing leaders that they could now achieve goals they’d previously thought unrealistic. According to CBS news, Donald Rumsfeld mulled over an attack on Iraq within hours of the catastrophe in New York, even though all the intelligence pointed toward Osama bin Laden. Notes made by one of his aides documented Rumsfeld declaring that he wanted, ‘Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit Saddam Hussein at same time. Not only Osama Bin Laden. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’13

Iraq, then, was an example of this sweeping up. It was a war that the Bush clique chose, an invasion only possible after the shock of 9/11.

All 175 Murdoch newspapers backed the conflict with enthusiasm. Later, Murdoch himself would say, ‘With our newspapers we have indeed supported Bush’s foreign policy. And we remain committed that way.’14 As Manne argued, the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, played a particularly important role in agitating for war, repeating and amplifying all of the talking points emanating from Washington and London.

The Australian’s coverage took for granted the basic logic of new-class theory, presenting suburban Australians as innately patriotic and thus seething with hostility towards the peaceniks of the chattering class. In this sense, the articles by Sheridan and his colleagues did indeed set the tone for Murdoch’s tabloids, as well as shaping the views of the political class more generally.

Yet, crucially, they did not convince the people.

Most wars, almost by definition, begin with massive public support. Iraq was different. The international day of action against the war on 15 February 2003 mobilised millions of people (some estimates suggested as many as 30 million) in protests in over 60 countries and over 600 cities, with demonstrations held on every continent (thanks to a small contingent of research scientists holding a protest in Antarctica). Something like 400,000 people took to the streets of New York; three million marched in Rome; two million in London; three million in Spain; and so on.

‘President Bush appears to be eyeball to eyeball with a tenacious new adversary,’ explained the New York Times, ‘millions of people who flooded the streets of New York and dozens of other world cities to say they are against war based on the evidence at hand.’15

Proportionately, Australia hosted some of the biggest demonstrations anywhere. The 300,000 people marching in Melbourne were, for instance, the most significant rally in the city’s history. Despite all the articles by Sheridan and his colleagues, despite the talk of nuclear explosions and WMDs devastating the West, far, far more Australians protested about Iraq than joined the famous Vietnam Moratorium protests.

In this sense, Iraq illustrated not so much Murdoch’s power, but his weakness. Yes, culture war raged in the mass-circulation Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun, in articles where the rhetoric from the Australian was reframed in a more popular style. But media critics had long understood that the working-class subscribers to conservative tabloids weren’t passive consumers but filtered what they read in various ways. If they bought the Telegraph to look over sporting results on the train, that didn’t imply an interest in neoconservative foreign policy, nor an enthusiasm for prolonged fulminations against this or that pacifist academic.

Again, despite the claims of the new-class theorists, culture war didn’t necessarily resonate with ordinary workers. Its effectiveness in the 2000s depended as much on the further evolution of the delegated left, which developed a kind of smug detachment from — and a contempt towards — its own traditional base.

The ascendancy of delegated politics had been predicated on both a decline in social struggle and the new opportunities emerging for the organisations, infrastructure, and activists of the social movements to play a role in governance. Bob Hawke’s ‘Consensus’ depended on the Accord with the trade union movement, a strategy that gave social weight to the union apparatus. During the thirteen years of Labor in power, NGOs and former activists helped develop and implement policies in relation to multiculturalism, Indigenous affairs, the status of women, and so on, while progressives established an intellectual and organisational foothold within certain sectors of higher education.

But because delegated politics arose from the separation of an upwardly mobile layer from the movement’s original base, the form that it initially took was deeply unstable, and contained the seeds of its own decline. The demobilisation of the people who’d helped build organisations led, inexorably, to a decline of the organisations themselves. From the 1980s on, union density steadily thinned — a trend mirrored within the NGOs, which had become increasingly incapable of activating their supporters in the old manner.

Though Labor had initiated the neoliberal turn, the implementation of neoliberal policies hollowed out the organisations upon which Hawke’s consensus rested. The acceptance of market relations as the key form of social interaction necessarily eroded structures originally established through collective processes: markets recognised only consumers, not citizens.

Then, when the conservatives came to power, the governmental support given to NGOs and similar bodies vanished, replaced by an overt hostility that continued throughout the Howard years.

On the left, the ideas associated with delegated politics remained dominant. Increasingly, though, they existed without the infrastructure from which they’d emerged and on which, in many ways, they had depended.

Ironically, the massive Iraq protests provide one of the more spectacular illustrations of the left’s weaknesses. For, despite the tremendous mobilisations, the invasion proceeded entirely on schedule, with John Howard telling Channel Seven dismissively: ‘I don’t know that you can measure public opinion just by the number of people who turn up to demonstrations.’16

In a previous period, the Moratoriums against the Vietnam War came as the culmination of a long campaign — one with the backing of the mass organisations built by direct politics. This meant that the individual demonstrations represented more than individuals on the street, since the participating groups spoke on behalf of broader constituencies. The existence of those groups gave the anti-war movement a stability such that it couldn’t be taken for granted.

By contrast, the rally on 15 February 2003 was co-ordinated by a tiny group of people, most of whom were long-term activists. Few belonged to political groups; fewer still held positions within the trade union movement. The people who attended the vast protests did so, by and large, as individuals rather than in organised contingents — and that rendered the movement innately fragile.

The astonishingly rapid decline of the anti-war movement reflected, in part, the speed with which the coalition captured Baghdad. Quite understandably, many demonstrators couldn’t see a point to further protests, given that the war seemed over almost as soon as it began. Yet, even when America’s initial success gave way to a bloody stalemate, the demonstrations didn’t revive, in part because the organisations that might have brought people back onto the streets had been atrophied by delegated politics.

This was the basis for the ironic, condescending tinge that came over progressive politics at that time — a mode most apparent in the left’s evolving attitudes to the masses. The activists in the early years of the social movements often assumed that the population as a whole was indifferent to political change. On that basis, many progressives oriented themselves to the well-educated, assuming that only lawyers or politicians or other professionals would be interested in reforms on matters with which ordinary people didn’t concern themselves.

The rise of direct politics depended on a recognition that the masses themselves could (and often would) fight to change society: that, in other words, the people were the motor of history. Conversely, the second phase of delegated politics corresponded with a different notion — a belief by activists that they were acting on behalf of a passive and perhaps indifferent constituency.

The new disdain for that constituency built, in turn, on the logic of delegated politics, at a moment in which that politics was collapsing. The notion that the population couldn’t be mobilised became the conviction that the population was the problem — that if people weren’t protesting the war, it was because they were idiots, gullible morons from whom nothing better could be expected.

The writer Emmett Rensin noted what he called ‘the smug style’ in politics in America, the propensity of progressives to identify the masses as stupid and perhaps dangerous.17 The evolution of delegated politics into smug politics in Australia correlated with the failure of the anti-war movement to revive even as the War on Terror descended into pointless atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Confronted with this failure — the inability to build an alternative to the carnage on the news every night — leftists could easily conclude the problem lay with ‘Joe and Jane Sixpack’, who were incapable of grasping the reality of the war.

Smug politics provided a context for Manne’s description of the Australian as mandatory reading for the political class. Many progressives now saw the masses not as a force capable of improving society, but as a foolish and slightly terrifying reservoir of cultural and political backwardness: in essence, a mirror version of the right’s culture-war portrayal. The Australian could act as a ‘national enforcer’, not because the battlers were roused against the left, but because activists in the political class, disoriented by the disappearance of their organisational base, had become convinced that they were. As the left lost confidence in the masses, the claims of the Australian — and similar institutions — to speak for the majority of the nation became more credible.