CHAPTER EIGHT

Why the culture wars didn’t end

In 2006, a year before he won office, Australia’s new opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, published a long and thoughtful essay in the Monthly about John Howard and the culture wars. In particular, he identified the seeming contradiction at work in the culture wars’ virtuous circle — the tension between the conservative emphasis on values and the amorality of neoliberalism.

‘Whether it is “family values”, the notion of “community service” or the emphasis on “tradition” in the history wars,’ Rudd wrote, ‘“traditional conservative values” are being demolished by an unrestrained market capitalism that sweeps all before it.’

For Rudd, this contradiction provided an opportunity for the ALP, a way to do politics differently. Labor, he suggested, could end the culture wars by building a diverse coalition against neoliberalism, spearheading a moderate alliance of those opposed to the disruption engendered by unfettered market forces.

‘Given that John Howard’s neoliberal experiment has now reached the extreme,’ he concluded, ‘the time has come to restore the balance in Australian politics. The time has come to recapture the centre.’1

Rudd’s emphatic victory in 2007 — and then the triumph of Barack Obama over John McCain and arch-culture warrior Sarah Palin in 2008 — proved, in the minds of many commentators, the validity of his critique.

‘The culture wars are over,’ proclaimed Richard Nile in the Australian.2

‘I doubt the culture wars will have much of a future,’ agreed Mark Bahnisch on the ABC blog Unleashed.3

After Obama’s win, the argument emerged internationally. In the Guardian, Paul Harris detected ‘signs of a fundamental shift away from the so-called “culture wars” that have raged across American public life’.4

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency in early 2007, he did so in Springfield, Illinois, in front of the old state capitol, the setting for Abraham Lincoln’s iconic ‘House Divided’ oration. In the speech he delivered, Obama declared his opposition to the Bush agenda. He reminded listeners of his unease about the war in Iraq; he voiced his determination to fight climate change; and he denounced the cruelty of the Republican economic agenda.

Like Rudd, Obama emphasised the possibility of social unity over culture-war rupture. He’d learned, he said, the possibility of ‘disagree[ing] without being disagreeable — that it’s possible to compromise so long as you know those principles that can never be compromised; and that so long as we’re willing to listen to each other, we can assume the best in people instead of the worst’.5

A new kind of politics — a moderate, civilised alternative to what Rudd had dubbed the neoliberal ‘Brutopia’ — seemed possible, in part because, by the end of the Howard and Bush years, anger was growing everywhere against those with genuine power.

Immediately after 9/11, conservatives had used the War on Terror to paint their opponents as effete, if not actually disloyal: a fifth column assisting the jihadis on the cultural front. But by the mid-2000s, that no longer washed. The military interventions championed by Howard and Bush had proved catastrophic. Trillions of dollars had been expended in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, rather than liberating the populace, the deployments had turned both nations into charnel houses. Denunciations of the cultural elite as soft on terror no longer worked in quite the same way when so much of what the conservative leaders had promised turned out to be patently false.

Then came the Global Financial Crisis.

Teachers, social workers, and academics — those familiar stalking horses of the culture war — couldn’t be blamed for wrecking the economy, no matter how snooty they were. As the stock market plummeted, the finger of blame pointed inexorably at the financiers and corporate chiefs who’d become fabulously wealthy even as the system over which they presided lurched into the greatest economic slowdown in a generation.

Under these circumstances, culture war no longer seemed credible. Yet the approach articulated by both Rudd and Obama — the formation of a broad, moderate coalition to undo the conservative agenda — contained its own contradictions.

Certainly, the market worked to dissolve the traditions, customs, and values associated with cultural conservatism. Many of the changing mores that affronted right-wing Christians, for instance, stemmed directly from the commodification of sexuality, which, in turn, derived from the neoliberal insistence on the cash register’s applicability to every aspect of human behaviour. Pornography — the bête noire of the Christian right — was an obvious result of market theory, the inevitable result of the economic policies promoted by candidates for whom the Christian right had voted.

But Rudd’s plan for a pragmatic alliance against the culture warriors failed to grasp how the internal contradiction he recognised had been managed during the Howard years.

In particular, neither Rudd nor Obama recognised the centrality of rage to the culture-war virtuous circle. When Pusey’s ‘battlers’ and ‘Hansonites’ voted for Howard or One Nation, they did so precisely because they felt the organising principles of their lives coming apart — and were accordingly looking for someone to punish. They voted out of desperation; they voted because they hated and despised the cultural elites they identified (wrongly) as responsible.

Their anger — and its regular venting against carefully chosen targets — completed the culture-war virtuous circle. By channelling political energy against the liberal elites, the right could ensure the election of pro-market candidates, who would, in turn, lay the ground for further culture-war rage. By simply focussing on contradiction — and not how that contradiction was resolved — Rudd’s analysis missed the totality, something that doomed his solution to failure.

Obama’s formulation about ‘disagreeing without being disagreeable’ — a version of Rudd’s pragmatic-coalition idea — might have sounded like common sense, but in people who’d lost their houses in the GFC — or who, like those Pusey interviewed, simply found the modern economy unbearably stressful — exhortations to be agreeable were likely only to generate further outrage, particularly when they were couched in the supercilious style of smug politics. Such people didn’t want politeness. They wanted redress — and if they couldn’t have redress, they’d settle for revenge.

Obama had pledged to undo the Bush agenda; he’d also promised to replace rancour with what Harris described as ‘moderation and toleration’. But it wasn’t possible to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without tackling the militarists who’d launched them. Guantanamo couldn’t be closed without a campaign against the conservatives (and many liberals) who’d made support for arbitrary detention almost a question of principle. Carbon couldn’t be reduced without challenging the fossil-fuel corporations and their lobbyists. Most of all, any serious challenge to inequality meant conflict with the corporations who profited from the status quo.

In a different era, a strong peace movement might have built on the hostility to the Iraq war, insisting that the troops come home at once and that the leaders responsible for the debacle be held to account, just as a healthy trade union movement might have capitalised on the anti-corporate sentiment to push for wage increases and wealth distribution.

But with the organisations of the left in disarray, Obama began abandoning or watering down his key promises almost at once. Rather than fanning the hostility against the elites responsible for war and economic chaos, he urged unity and reconciliation, which, ironically, provided the perfect conditions for the revival and intensification of right-wing culture war. If the material elites weren’t held to account, an obvious opening existed to shift the blame for America’s circumstances to Obama as the leader of the so-called cultural elites.

‘I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America … Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash-landing because this plane is coming down because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees! Most likely, it will happen sometime after Christmas.’6

That was Glenn Beck, the Fox News presenter who, perhaps more than anyone else, personified the revived outsider anti-elitism of the Obama era.

On his show, Beck portrayed Obama as a vengeful black militant, a man who, he explained, had ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture’.7

Racism provided an obvious way to organise hostility against the nation’s first black president, and Beck — and others like him — exploited racial tensions to the hilt. But they did so within the familiar new-class framework, using Obama’s blackness to signify the broader agenda of the politically correct elite who were white-anting traditional America.

The continuing decomposition of political authority and institutions — as well as the disastrous record of the Bush presidency — had weakened the appeal of the old insider anti-elitism. Symptomatically, while Beck was certainly conservative, he wasn’t a traditional GOP operative. A former alcoholic who’d sobered up through a conversion to Mormonism, he’d launched his media career as an apolitical radio personality specialising in stunts and gimmicks — and he put that experience to good use when he transitioned to political commentary.

On a typical episode, Beck drew frenzied chalkboard diagrams to represent the forces arrayed against patriots. He warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might herd conservatives into camps; he explained that the UN was seeking to an install a One World government through its Agenda 21 program; and he claimed that environmentalists were praying to the Babylonian god Baal.8

Most of all, he mirrored and amplified the anxieties of his viewers, sobbing uncontrollably before making maudlin promises to die for his country. Even as Obama and his supporters sought to dampen the public’s rage, Beck (and a growing number of imitators) amplified it. He agreed that a tiny minority had benefited from the disastrous economy; he, too, thought something had gone terribly wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. But rather than attacking those with real power, Beck blamed the so-called ‘cultural elite’: the cosmopolitan liberals who, he said, were preparing a politically correct form of totalitarianism.

Outsider anti-elitism resonated in the wake of the GFC, precisely because its extremism suited the mood of the times. When Beck attacked a liberal academic as ‘anti-white’, he didn’t make an old-fashioned conservative argument about the need for a different curriculum. Instead, he implied that the entire educational system had been infiltrated by globalists — and that the PC elite were deceiving Americans about the real state of affairs.

‘President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?’ he cried, in another typical monologue. ‘For the love of Pete, what are you doing? Do you not hear — do you not hear the cries of people who are saying stop?’9

The formation of the so-called Tea Party provided an even starker illustration of the weird dynamic of outsider anti-elitism.

In 2009, Obama launched a program of subsidies intended to help homeowners to avoid foreclosure. In the abstract, such a measure might have resonated with a populism of the left: a movement in support of measures assisting the victims of the downturn. But that wasn’t what happened. After the administration had expended billions bailing out Wall Street, the piecemeal subsidies provided to poor — and disproportionately black — householders came too little and too late to inspire a working class still buffeted by the GFC.

The policy did, however, enrage financiers. In particular, the program inspired the CNBC personality Rick Santelli to deliver an impromptu rant broadcast live from the Chicago stock exchange.

‘This is America!’ he shouted, to cheers from the traders. ‘How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage?’10

Santelli urged listeners to fight back against Obama’s ‘socialism’. He didn’t, however, call for a vote for the Republican Party. Instead, he invoked the Boston Tea Party, the incident in which American revolutionaries dumped British goods into the harbour rather than comply with the authorities. It was time, Santelli said, for a new Tea Party.

Santelli’s rant circulated widely, promoted by the Drudge Report and various conservative bloggers. The initial Tea Party protests were comparatively small until Fox News threw its weight behind demonstrations scheduled for Tax Day 2009. The movement that ensued was explicitly pro-capitalist and financially backed by big conservative advocacy organisations such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks (an organisation funded by the billionaire Koch brothers).

Yet, as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson stressed, the Tea Party couldn’t be dismissed as merely an ‘astroturf’ creation of corporate money. ‘This take on the Tea Party as a kabuki dance entirely manipulated from above simply cannot do justice,’ they argued, ‘to the volunteer engagement of many thousands of men and women who travel to rallies with their homemade signs and, even more remarkably, have formed ongoing, regularly meeting local Tea Party groups.’11

The available data suggested that members of the movement were white, relatively wealthy (‘comfortably middle-class’, as Skocpol and Williamson put it), well educated, and middle-aged or older. Furthermore, they were inspired by the insurgent sentiment invoked by Santelli. A Washington Post survey of Tea Party activists in 2010 found that, while 92 per cent said that opposition to Obama helped build the movement, 87 per cent also spoke of dissatisfaction with Republican leaders.

The rank-and-file Tea Partiers were, in other words, nearly as hostile to the establishment right as they were to the Democrats, so much so that they’d go on to threaten a shutdown of the federal government — much to the horror of traditional capitalist lobby groups such as the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce.

The loose structure of the movement meant that the Tea Party quickly became home to views rather more esoteric than that expressed in Santelli’s original pro-market diatribe. Religious conservatives, along with various libertarians and fringe parties of the far right, such as the Oath Keepers and the John Birch Society, recognised the recruitment opportunity. As Neiwart says, the formation of the Tea Party was ‘when the paranoid alternative universe of the conspiracist Patriot movement began to meld with the world of Fox-watching conservatives’.12

Again, though, outsider anti-elitism might not have proved so successful for the right had the left not been unwittingly reinforcing some of the main culture-war postulates.

In 2010, the comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert organised a rally of perhaps 100,000 people in the National Mall of Washington, DC.

Between 2002 and 2007, 65 per cent of income growth in the US had gone to the top 1 per cent of the population. The US Census Bureau then recorded that between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of the lowest fifth of income earners fell 50 per cent, rendering income inequality higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

By 2010, figures showed that the US was a less equal society than the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Pakistan.13 Some four million Americans survived on food stamps, and 50 million lacked healthcare, while, on 2009 figures, the top 25 hedge-fund managers earned, on average, more than $1 billion each.14

Under such circumstances, Stewart and Colbert might have mobilised their fans to call for income redistribution, or higher wages, or an investigation into the financiers responsible for the GFC (many of whom walked away from the economic wreckage with huge bonuses).

But that wasn’t what happened. Rather, Stewart advertised his event as a ‘rally to restore sanity’ — with Colbert, in character as a conservative pundit, hosting a parallel ‘March to Keep Fear Alive’. The intervention was intended to counter (and satirise) the hysterical rhetoric emanating from people like Beck and the Tea Party, under the slogan ‘Take it down a notch for America’.15

In and of itself, the rally was inconsequential — a media stunt by two comedians. But it provided a salutary illustration of a view commonly held by liberals committed to smug politics: the notion that a centrist constituency could be mobilised against culture-war extremism.

In the abstract, the progressive desire to quell social anger with calm and reason might have seemed laudable. Yet in the specific circumstance in which it was held, the rally was at best tone-deaf, and at worst entirely counterproductive. Beck and the Tea Party validated the anger of people terrified by economic uncertainty and pointless wars. To someone who’d lost their house in the financial crash — or who simply felt unable to cope in a system lacking mercy for the weak — the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ entailed wealthy TV personalities mocking their anger as insane and urging them to calm down.

Once again, the smug sensibility prevailing on the left reinforced the central contention of the culture-war right — the claim that liberals saw themselves as better than ordinary people.

Stewart described himself as ‘celebrating moderation’ at a time when many Americans felt desperate. By contrast, the shrill conspiracy-mongering and ostentatious empathy of Beck and similar culture warriors matched a prevailing sense among Fox News viewers that something had gone terribly wrong in America. The outsider anti-elitism that emerged in that time laid the basis for the emergence of Donald Trump.

In Australia, the situation played out slightly differently.

After Rudd’s victory, Robert Manne published an array of liberal intellectuals offering advice to the new PM under the hopeful title Dear Mr Rudd: essentially, a programmatic document for a resurgent delegated politics.16 In response, Janet Albrechtsen snarked that the elites were ‘pitching to the wrong man’, since ‘Rudd was the Labor Party’s perfect alternative conservative candidate’ — a man who, on almost every issue, had aligned himself with the Howard government.17

Both, in a way, were right.

Kevin Rudd’s ascent both reflected the institutional crisis within Labor and offered a partial solution to it. Rudd had campaigned on a wave of anti-Howardism, with the union-led campaign against WorkChoices playing an important role in his triumph. The centrality of the ACTU to the election echoed, for many, Hawke’s win in 1983. It wasn’t outlandish to imagine Rudd reaching out to the intellectuals of the left in a reprise of Hawke-style delegated politics.

Indeed, in early 2008, the PM announced the ‘Australia 2020 summit’, a gathering of prominent people intended to ‘help shape a long-term strategy for the nation’s future’ that echoed the Hawke government’s famous 1983 economic forum. Many in the progressive intelligentsia saw, not without reason, the 2020 summit as evidence that delegated politics was back.

‘[T]he rhetoric has shifted and the faces changed,’ wrote David Marr. ‘These are the early days of the post-Howard era, but it’s already possible to grow a little nostalgic for elite bashing. All gone.’18

Yet, in another respect, the venture implicitly recognised that the post-Howard era would not be like the pre-Howard era. Hawke brought to his summit the weight of his authority as a former union leader. The meeting itself consisted of powerful organisations representing key constituencies: journalist Katharine Murphy noted that ‘newspapers [had] identified Hawke’s delegates not by their names but by their associations’. Rudd’s forum, by contrast, was purely advisory and, as Murphy said, ‘a celebration of rampant individualism’.19

Unlike Hawke and Keating, Rudd lacked a background within the labour movement. Rather than building a traditional factional fiefdom, his power within the party depended on his personal popularity. The 2020 summit was, in that respect, a reflection of Rudd’s basic approach. By staging the event outside parliament so soon after an election, Rudd posited the assembled celebrities as an alternative to a broken political system, in a gesture to the disaffected constituency of culture war.

At the same time, the whole forum reeked of a contempt for the electorate as a whole. Rather than presenting progressive ideas to the voters, the PM was inviting unelected worthies to dream up innovative policies once the election was safely over. In that sense, it was pure smug politics, predicated on an idea that ordinary people couldn’t accept radical notions, and that fresh thinking could emerge only when film stars, university professors, and journalistic high-flyers were encouraged to brainstorm, free of any democratic accountability.

Unsurprisingly, the event was a shambles, devoid of meaningful outcomes and memorable only for the footage of Rudd dandling Cate Blanchett’s baby on his knee.

On the one hand, Rudd represented a repudiation of Howard; on the other, he promised continuity with his predecessor, pledging to govern as an economic and social conservative. His personal popularity allowed him to float, for a while, serenely above the contradictions he embodied, even as they manifested themselves within his government as administrative gridlock.

Eventually, though, the contrast between Rudd’s huge promises and his unwillingness to engage in the struggles necessary to fulfil them allowed Tony Abbott to reprise Howard-style insider anti-elitism.

Rudd’s signature commitment to climate-change action illustrated the process. By positing global warming as the greatest moral challenge of a generation, he implied he’d lead something akin to direct politics: a prolonged campaign involving ordinary Australians in restructuring their society along environmental lines.

Rudd came undone not because, as the Liberals retrospectively insisted, the public didn’t care about the issue, but precisely because they did. When, in late April 2010, Rudd walked away from his much-touted ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme’, his popularity collapsed, leaving in its wake a growing cynicism about the whole issue. The gulf between rhetoric and reality made the climate seem less like an emergency and more like an affectation, a trendy cause espoused by sanctimonious politicians and celebrities — precisely as Abbott’s culture-war campaign insisted.

Julia Gillard’s eventual coup against Rudd failed to address any of the underlying issues wracking the government.

A career politician, Gillard lacked Rudd’s outsider appeal (as limited and partial as that had been), even as the ALP’s traditional base continued its slow disintegration. Gillard’s own inclinations come from delegated politics, but, without the mass organisations that made delegated politics viable, she, too, adapted the social and economic conservatism that Rudd had embraced.

Where American outsider anti-elitism drew upon a deep reservoir of racism, Abbott relied on traditional sexism to help revive Howard-style insider anti-elitism. Gillard was, after all, Australia’s first female prime minister. It was relatively easy for Abbott — and the various shock-jocks who assisted him — to imply that, as such, Gillard represented an inversion of the natural order and thus a personification of everything going wrong in the country.

Yet the sexist attacks on Gillard were symptoms rather than causes of the problems her government faced: essentially, the same as those that brought down Rudd. Without any clear support base for her program, Gillard could easily be portrayed as an out-of-touch insider installed by the factions, a Canberra elitist obsessing about PC shibboleths such as climate change.

Gillard’s eventual downfall, and the astonishing return of Kevin Rudd, showed that instability and culture war were the new norm.