A theory of Joy in politics

Or: why joy is the flipside of weird

My Australian roots were flaring during the telecast of the Democratic National Convention. The American propensity to cheer and clap and chant after, seemingly, every sentence uttered from the podium just about drove me insane over the course of last week. I often wished that the orgasming audience would shut up for a few minutes. For a few consecutive sentences.

In the next breath, though, I found myself admiring their enthusiasm. Wishing our political class could muster an equivalent zeal. Any level of positivity.

Commentators like Leigh Sales miss the point of what was happening in Chicago when they write tut-tutting pieces like this dismissing the whole Convention as lacking in substance. For one thing, such criticism misses the concerted, laser-focussed attack on Trump and his team that is an essential part of any strategy to beat the Trump-controlled Republican Party. Which in turn misses the point that, when you have a wannabe authoritarian, anti-democratic fascist like Trump on the ticket, such attacks are not just legitimate but substantive.

More to the point, it misses the way in which the Harris-Walz team is actually developing a coherent policy agenda, and this sharp piece by Jen Harris, who has served as the senior director of international economics on the National Security Council and National Economic Council, captures that fact in a way that Sales’s piece, and others like it, haven’t been able to:

Kamala Harris is beginning to offer the first definitive clues of a new economic vision — one with the potential not only to offer a unifying vision for the Democratic Party but also to serve as the foundation for a governing philosophy that crosses party lines.

In recent years, both parties have broken with a markets-know-best default setting.

…This new story has two themes — call them “build” and “balance.” The first focuses on pointing and shaping markets toward worthy aims; the second corrects upstream power imbalances so that market outcomes are fairer and need less after-the-fact redistribution.

All of this made me realise the extent to which Labor under Anthony Albanese lacks a coherent story, a way of explaining to people what the bigger picture is, let alone any organised way of taking people along with them. And this is worth thinking about.

As I have said often over the last two years, Anthony Albanese was gifted an opportunity in 2022 to completely reset Australian politics. The stink of the Morrison Government was still strong in people’s nostril’s and, after Brother Scotty’s ascension into the United States of Jesus, the Liberals installed the even-less electorally attractive Peter Dutton, a move that should’ve ensured Labor’s growing dominance.

People were fed up with the relentless negativity and smug obtuseness of the mainstream media and Albanese could’ve, once and for all, prized Rupert’s cold, dead-ish hands from the throat of the body politic.

The community independents had not only turned the Liberal heartland, they had reset the political zeitgeist from negative to positive. They carved out a huge space in which people were reengaging with the political process on the promise of addressing the neglect of the previous nine years of the LNP, and Labor could’ve ridden that wave to natural-party-of-government status.

To put it another way, Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party he was trying to build in his own image was weird and the independents and Greens showed—as have Harris and Walz—that the flipside of weird is joy and that you can win seats by giving people a hopeful alternative. The joy of participation and engagement mobilised people in a way that set the scene for a politics that reflected the diversity of the country and primed it for regeneration.

Instead of embracing this vibe, Albanese snapped into action by cutting the staff allowance for the crossbench. He let it be known that he would adopt a small-target strategy aimed at—magically, somehow, without actually doing anything—enabling a long-term Labor Government. As Sean Kelly explained after Labor’s first year in power:

One veteran strategist I talk to says there are three aspects of being prime minister. The first is the tone you set. The second is your governing purpose, communicated largely through your policies. The third is how you respond to events.

So far, the government has put a significant emphasis on tone. Albanese is explicit about this. “I think the first year in office is an opportunity to demonstrate the character of a government,” he told journalist Phillip Coorey. “And we have demonstrated a government that is consultative, that’s inclusive, that’s determined to deliver on its promises, that is mainstream.”

Kelly suggested that, after the first year of governing, “The public seems receptive. Voters, say Labor insiders, have been surprised at how well Albanese has done.”

Another year on, and the strategy has fallen in a heap and it has become apparent that Albanese and Labor completely misread the national mood.

Source: The Conversation

Journalist Royce Kurmelovs summed it up:

All the Albanese government had to do after winning the election was deliver meaningful justice for the Robodebt victims, raise the social security rate, do something serious about climate change and drop the tax cuts, and they would have been heroes. Instead…

Instead, the heartland feels abandoned:

The problem is, Labor has moved inexorably to the right. So, while they remain infinitely more progressive than the LNP, theirs is such a constrained progressivism that key constituencies feel abandoned, many of them in Labor’s western-suburban heartlands. The expulsion of Fatima Payman speaks to deeper problems with how they are responding to Gaza and dealing with diversity; the failure to prosecute, in fact, to hide from public scrutiny, those most responsible for the Robodebt fiasco is a huge betrayal of our most vulnerable citizens; and the toothless NACC is looking like a cynical fob. Meanwhile, things like the continuing prevarication on climate change and the ongoing neoliberalisation of housing and the NDIS are sapping the marrow of belief right from the true believers’ bones.

This is no longer the party of Gough, or even of Hawke and Keating.

Throw in the visceral hatred Labor party members constantly direct at the Greens—whose preferences are the key reason Labor were able to convert their meagre 32.6% primary vote into a governing majority in 2022—and the story Labor increasingly tells is that they are in the pocket of vested interests, that they are too easily swayed by a hostile rightwing media, and that in their desperation to appear moderate and seize the (non-existent) middle ground, they have allowed Peter Dutton to control the agenda in a classic illustration of the tail wagging the dog.

And the self-inflicted hits on their integrity and bone fides keep on coming, the latest being the decision to not count LGBTQ+ people in the next census. This, we are informed by Labor sources, is because “the government shied away from the change partly to avoid a possible backlash from the Coalition and faith groups. Changing the census questions would have required a Senate vote.”

FFS. This is the sort of cowardice that not only invites defeat but suggests Labor’s heart isn’t really in it.

Sure, Labor have pulled off some good policy decisions, but as the Jen Harris piece I quoted above notes, “policies do not make a story” and the Albanese Government is desperately in need of a story to tell.

And here’s the thing: such stories can’t just be marketing strategies, a series of slogans strung together based on asking focus groups “what they want”. It has to grow organically from a genuine commitment to certain values that are reflected in the general direction of policy across the whole of government. Labor’s huge inconsistencies on everything from the environment to Gaza, its tendency to say one thing and do another, makes them appear mean and tricky, an accusation once levelled at the Howard Government.

It makes it impossible for them to tell a coherent story.

Unless Labor gets their act together soon, the recent Northern Territory election is likely to be understood as preview as prelude. A similarly “pragmatic” Labor government dressed right on environmental and social policy and their vote split between Greens, independents and an actual rightwing party. The “sensible centre” they were aiming at once again showed itself to be a statistical will o’ the wisp and Labor crashed to one of their largest defeats ever.

The opportunity is still there for federal Labor to avoid all this and to tell a good story, and maybe there are some signs of it emerging. I welcome, for instance, Jim Chalmers recent attacks on Peter Dutton, because you really must call out the leader of the Opposition’s black soul and put it on the ballot.

But Labor is missing an opportunity in articulating a more positive flipside to these attacks. As Bernard Keane has been one of the few to note, Dutton is actually repositioning the LNP into a post-neoliberal space that Labor should fully occupy. “While the treasurer is talking about the 'fourth economy',” Keane noted, “Peter Dutton is living out the transition by attacking corporations for gouging consumers.”

Unless Labor wants to be outflanked on their left and confirm the growing image that they are in fact the party of neoliberalism, they need to quickly coopt this new LNP tendency and own it. Sure, continue with the attacks on Dutton’s blackened soul, but also welcome his conversion to consumer-focussed economics. Leverage what he has said about public ownership of nuclear power and government intervention in industries like the airlines and demand he apply the principle more broadly.

The successful strategy would be to call Dutton’s bluff and show the limits of his conversion, but Labor can only do that if they themselves genuinely believe in that sort of people-focussed governance.

Chalmers still sounds too much like a wannbe Keating, but there does seem to be some actual human warmth there. So, whatever the Labor message ends up being, for fucks’ sake, at least try and lean into that and have some fun with whatever you do, and this is what I will finish with.

The final chapter of my 2018 book The Future of Everything is called “Joy”, and the reason I honed in on that idea was because I had come to believe, after looking closely at the way people were trying to reengage with politics—a trend totally ignored by the mainstream political class—that joy was something that needed to be spoken about in a political context. I wrote:

So, here at the end of the book, I’ll bring together some ideas that culminate in what I will call a theory of joy. This is not just about pursuing change that makes us happy – though it is that – but about recognising that the pursuit itself can be joyous. It is about the shared joy of building a life in common.

Dunlop, Tim. The Future of Everything: Big, audacious ideas for a better world. NewSouth. Kindle Edition.

The concept is finally going mainstream, though a recent piece in the NYTimes had it that “Joy is not a Strategy”.

In fact, joy is the only strategy.

This is especially true in the US, a system in which it is difficult to vote and where a huge burden is placed on parties simply to get people to the ballot box. Joy is your best chance of getting progressives to turn out.

But it is about more than that.

In the fractured media and political environment in which we all live, people’s righteous frustration at being left behind can either be channelled into hate and blame or into joy and participation, and no leftist/progressive politics worthy of the name can do other than choose the latter.

Leave the misery-guts stuff to those on the right.

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