Think like a citizen

Three years is a short time in politics

I’ve been paying attention to politics since Whitlam and the thing I’m only just coming to terms with is that no election ever settles anything. No landslide is big enough to stop the river flowing and no result is ever so final that all arguments are settled. This is a good thing, because the nature of democracy should be that it is responsive to the indivisible diversity of a self-governing people and nothing should ever be set in stone.

“The Temple of Time” (1846) by Emma Willard — Source

Nonetheless, such fluidity must be contained, because if it isn’t, that way madness lies.

So people form parties and make laws and build institutions in order to impose manageability. It is the most necessary and most dangerous aspect of balancing the individual and the collective life of the nation, nation being another social container we hide inside, like the concept of the citizen itself.

What includes also excludes.

The collapse of American democracy is a sort of exhaustion with keeping up the demands of this constant balancing act, of containing and freeing diversity in ever-widening and narrowing arcs. A significant plurality of the population in those fifty states have opted for the security and breathing space provided by King Donald and, just like Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, many of them have found they really do love Big Brother.

Trump said the other day that he wasn’t sure whether he needed to obey the Constitution, but I don’t think he has any doubt about obeying the edict O’Brien sets out for Winston Smith:

'You are ruling over us for our own good,' [Winston] said feebly. 'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-'

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a thing like that.'

He pulled the lever back and continued:

'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'

But as the Preacher said, time and chance happenth to them all, and even Donald Trump will eventually be swept aside, hopefully before he destroys the world.

Our federal election was allegedly a rejection of such exhaustion, of Trumpism, and I hope that is true. The system handed Labor a landslide, but it also confirmed the shift away from the major parties. It showed us the problems of a two-party system, of party politics more generally, in both the decisiveness of Labor’s win and the concomitant collapse of the Liberal Party. It showed us the problems of trying to do politics without parties in a system that rewards them.

I’m working on two bigger pieces at the moment. One about the consolidation of Labor’s neoliberal turn into something I am thinking of calling neolaborism. I’m also researching another piece that I will likely call ‘The Silent Holocaust’ and yep, RFK Jr. will feature heavily.

In the meantime, I’ll let the dust settle. Seats are still in play, even if the final result isn’t. Whether this Labor government—uniquely unencumbered by the usual threats and constraints of an influential media and a viable opposition—turns into the progressive vehicle of our dreams remains to be seen.

The only certainty is that power reveals—as Robert Caro once said—and make no mistake, all will be revealed.

In the meantime, consider this an open thread.