As you can see, I’m about to lay into Greg Sheridan about a recent piece: Howard’s grand failure. Now, I don’t want to be one of those hatchet-pricks who simply slashes tires on the journo jeep for the fun of it. So, let’s start this by seeing where we share some common ground.
Well, can’t say I didn’t try. It’s rare that I find myself agreeing with you, Greg, on anything but the rawest facts. But you have it pretty much set until the end of the fifth paragraph. I can agree up to there. We can agree to disagree from there on in, regarding the relative competence of State governments. We can also agree to disagree on the relevant roles of the major broadsheets and the ABC in that state of affairs.
There is one thing though, Greg, which underlines this ill-formed and multi-directional screed, on which I really want to take you to task. This is something on which we cannot simply agree to disagree, because it is your philosophical foundation. This is one time where, quite obviously and blatantly, you are way off in the wrong orbit. In fact, the multi-direction incoherence of this piece of writing serves as a prime example of what I am going to talk about. It comes from the very failure of a central idea, a philosophical failure of neo-conservative thinking which underwrites your outpouring of epic despair in the above article. Your failure of understanding is in your espousal of the very idea of a culture war, and thereby the resultant possibility of losing one. It is in this idea of culture itself as a war.
Let’s consider this very notion of a culture war. Now, it’s an inherently neo-conservative idea of yours that I’m discussing here. This idea states that you can and should eradicate the opposition’s cultural values from society, thereby creating a great homogeneity of opinion. This apparently generates social cohesion. Such a move is called “winning the culture wars”. You, however, claim to be about to “lose the culture wars”.
That’s an interesting notion. My first question would be, when did you actually begin to lose? As Sun Tzu says, the wily victor wins the war without engaging the battle; he convinces his enemy to leave the field of his own accord. You didn’t try to win through actually moving the foundations of debate. Instead, you lot ran out into the land hungry for ideological blood. You gutted a political party and hoisted its carcass in the air as a puppet. And so, your culture wars were lost the minute they were declared. You lost when that feral abacus Hewson tried to economize the core of the nation’s identity into submission. You lost the minute Kemp drove McPhee from Goldstein. Most of all, you lost well before Hawke’s time, when the ever-tactical Howard turned to the newest wave of pseudo-intellectual fashion sweeping the right, and morphed into a new-born neo-con.
Greg, seriously. Here is the current problem for yourself as much as the conservative parties. Having become neo-cons, dedicated to winning a culture war, they aren’t conservative any more. They are radicals. Greg, you simply have to accept that the neo-cons, in attempting a homogeneity of opinion, in silencing dissent amongst their ranks, of promoting a leadership cult, of following ideologies blindly, are now the TROTSKYITES OF THE RIGHT. You can wiggle, you can declare this spurious, but you can’t get past that one, Comrade Sheridan. You are just as blind as they were (but thankfully not so murderous – …children overboard?).
We could stop here, but let’s kick this corpse for a little while longer, given the harm it’s caused our social fabric to date.
Why didn’t your neo-conservative views catch on outside the Liberal party and some affiliated associations in the business community? Why were institutions so resistant? The ideological danger becomes obvious over time, you see. Now, the public have become aware that the institutions you complain about were right all along to oppose you. Thanks to WorkChoices – the political own goal of the last hundred years – the Australian public are awakening to the fact that the current administration is full of dangerous ideologues, who are just as keen on WorkChoices as Chifley was on nationalized banks. Australians rightly reject ideologues. They rejected Chifley, his successors and the very Labor Party itself, delivering them 23 years of Opposition despair…
Your notion of a “culture war” now marks you to the Australian public as an ideologue, just as blatantly as selling Green Left Weekly and Che badges at the Queen Victoria Market on a Saturday morning. Being ideologues, your neo-con Liberals have therefore begun to head off towards the same irrelevance as the traditional Labor socialists face. The pendulum has swung, and your so-called left-of-centre is the centre after all. As it always was – funnily enough, it’s similar to where Menzies was sitting in the first place. Fiscal conservatism, leavened with social welfare, aimed at benefiting the middle class majority, with a strong dose of moral fibre.
Now, why do you think its likely that you all failed to see this coming? Simple. You failed because you let conformity of thought rule over creative intellectualism. Unlike the other parties, you have renounced the very intellectual fabric and diversity of opinion that could have helped you through this dark time, in favor of your own ideological sophistry and groupthink. Each of you, to a person, is a pseudo-intellectual of the worst degree.
Yes, your neo-conservatives are pseudo-intellectuals. Just watch how they handle scientific data or academic opinion. They even say that common sense (whatever that is) is better than a reasoned argument. For further evidence, let’s consider the bunch of rabid anti-intellectuals who dominate the Liberal neo-conservative ranks of today. My god, the tragedy that is Joe Hockey’s mind for one. Kevin Andrews, for another. Helen Coonan. Tony Abbott. Brendan Nelson. Mark Vaile. Christopher Pyne. Alexander Downer. Peter Costello. Malcolm Turnbull. From the Prime Minister downwards, intellectual lightweights, one and all.
That’s the fundamental reason why you can’t reform those institutions of which you complain so bitterly. You fail here because they are founded on academic values. And they reject this bilge for the nonsense that it is. Including anarcho-conservatives like me, who are no Labor Party friends. Why? Because when people trained in academic process view your opinions, they see them as the flimsy tissue of ideological bullshit that they are. And all you can sustain in putting forward such half-baked ideas is that you will attract idiots to your cause. You see, the ABC and the Public Services draw enormously on university graduates for their rank and file staff. These are people who learned about things like process and evidence, structure and logic, meaningful debate and the joy of intellectual work. These are the very values on which the western society you espouse is grounded. Why wouldn’t they reject you?
And so we get to the deep reason for failure, Greg, which we’ve both already hinted at: you lot actually have no world view at all. There is no sustainable neo-con world view. Show me one, Greg, I’m waiting. There is instead a necessarily parochial ensemble of political expediency and economic superstition – how can I best arrange the system to suit me, my family and those immediately like me, while adhering to ideological articles of faith for public show of Trot-like solidarity?
Now, you might argue that you actually do have a world view. But you haven’t demonstrated it. Not one bit. You’ve moaned about your lack of representation. You have complained, despite the fact that you have a media vehicle that many of us who comment online would die for, in your role at the Australian. So show us the world-view money, Greg. Stop whining and start demonstrating. Write a book about it, for God’s sake.
But for now, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you do have one, and you can show it. Sign me up for a copy. But even here, I know you will fall over too. This is because you won’t want to earn your place at the table of thought through academic rigor. Instead, you’ll insist you deserve one. This is because you have this fantasy view which states that just because you have a “world view”, you are entitled to equal coverage.
This approach – to be deserving of equal time, to be fair and balanced – is a common plea amongst those who can’t actually raise an argument: “We deserve equal time, simply because we present an alternative”. Now, where have I heard this approach before?
Hmm… what about Creationism?
Exactly. You’re that seriously shonky in the logic department. Please think again, because when you request a Griffith Review equivalent, I have to say: “On what grounds should we give equal time to your views, seeing as your claim to time is structurally indistinct to that of a Creationist?”
We could go on like this, but I want to end on a constructive note. I’ll finish by saying:
“Hey, Greg, it’s a free market, so go start your own university. If that’s too much an ask, then start your own academic journal or think-tank. John Roskam did that, to his credit. If you can’t do any of that, then just try for once to see why we might disagree with your socially divisive and anti-intellectual policies. And, failing that, you’ll have to lump it, sucker”.
