Australia’s political tribes
What the failed referendum reveals about the cleavages in Australian society
It failed because those who have power – leaders in politics, business, the law and academia – believed they could deploy it to help a group which, in aggregate, is profoundly powerless. The failure of the Voice represented a backlash against elite influence. The proof can be seen in the electoral map.
Aaron Patrick, AFR
In the defeat of the Voice referendum on Saturday, clearly racism played a major part. Class did too. So did disengagement, geography, and age, along with a melange of all the above, weighted in different ways in different circumstances.
Tim Dunlop,
The Yes campaign triumphed in the ACT and in wealthy suburbs, where people know that they can influence policy and outcomes, and can trust that they have little to fear from more bodies and bureaucracies. Everywhere else it was rejected. The rest of Australia is not so sure that they are safe from expanded powers being exercised against them.
Parnell Palme McGuinness, SMH
The cultural elite has long treated Indigenous Australians as ‘victims’… And there is no question that terrible crimes were committed against our Aboriginal peoples… [but] welfare dependency – taken together with needless demands for separate rules, norms and institutions – has led to a permanent underclass in remote communities where about 15% of the 980,000 Aboriginal Australians live.
Tom Switzer, CIS
There is white-hot anger directed towards some of our big corporate entities – BHP, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers, the big four banks and others – which, without consultation or consent from their shareholders, dived into the middle of a bitterly contested political dispute… The participation of these big corporations was a significant factor in ensuring the Yes campaign was a resounding failure – voters hate being lectured at.
Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen or heard the word “elites” over the last week, I could… well, take early retirement and spend all my time churning out increasingly unhinged rants about neoliberalism, Boomers, open-borders advocates and the rising threat of China.
I agree that the failure of the Voice referendum was down to recalcitrant non-elites failing to follow the lead of their social betters. But the elite/non-elite binary, which I’m as guilty as anyone of deploying, is overly simplistic. I believe Australia has three, arguably four, political tribes that politicians, activists and ‘concerned citizens’ need to take into account when they are either advocating for or mobilising against change.
Tribe one: The plutocrats
Given there is only ever a vanishingly small number of individuals in any (capitalist) society with the economic clout needed to significantly influence political decisions, I hesitate to apply the word “tribe” here.
As far as I can tell, most of Australia’s plutocrats didn’t feel they had a dog in the referendum fight. If they did take an interest, it appears they were just as likely to fund the Yes campaign as the No one.
The more narcissistic plutocrats revel in public and media attention, at least when everything is going well. But most prefer to wield influence behind closed doors, living by the maxim that “nobody should know what you look like; everybody should take your calls”. While I have interviewed plutocrats on occasion, I don’t pretend to have much understanding of how this tribe coterie operates. In any event, there’s little evidence the nation’s tycoons were quietly pulling strings behind the scenes. So, let’s move on to three tribes that Australians are much more familiar with.
Tribe two: The cultural elite
I sometimes wonder if representatives of the Left and Right got together in the early 1980s – possibly in some smoke-filled back room in Davos – and hammered out a Church-State settlement. Under the terms of this settlement, the Right would be allowed to impose its economic agenda and the Left would be allowed to go nuts with identitarianism.
Of course, no such meeting did or could take place. But here we are in a world where young people in Western countries can choose which one of 58 genders they want to try on today and also look forward to a future of modestly remunerated, insecure work. This work is already often too modestly remunerated to make property ownership/marriage/children seem feasible and may soon be automated away.
Over the last few decades, the Left has seized control of the cultural means of production. That’s given the Left a lot of influence, though probably not quite as much as those on the Right imagine. The cultural elite has – in terms of social policy, at least – been largely successful in implementing its agenda over the last half-century.
So successful that when the Great Unwashed fail to vote in the ‘correct’ manner, cultural elitists simply can’t process it and must treat it as a category error. It’s never that the hoi polloi (note: it means poor people, not rich ones) didn’t buy what the cultural elite was selling. It’s that they were disastrously misled by Russian misinformation, or a bus promising more NHS funding, or shameless liars whipping up hysteria about an entirely innocuous proposal to treat four per cent of the population differently from the other 96 per cent.
Interestingly, nobody ever claims the commoners were bamboozled when they vote in accordance with the wishes of “right side of history” crowd.
As a rough estimate, I’d guess around one in ten Australians are ‘cultural elitists’. The Greens – the party most in tune with the cultural elite – typically get about 10 per cent of the vote in Federal elections.
Tribe three: the corporate elite
For the sake of simplicity, I’m using the word ‘corporate’ but many in this tribe are business owners rather than C-suiters. The corporate elite aren’t plutocrats, though many aspire to be, and usually make a good living doing things for the plutocrats. Such as taking operational control of their businesses, designing their tax-minimisation schemes, putting braces on their kids’ teeth, etc.
Until about five minutes ago, the corporate elite was consistently right-wing – that is, big on free markets and social conservativism. (The ‘three-legged stool’ that supported Reagan in the 1980s was made up of foreign policy hawks, as well as tax-and tariff-hating businesspeople and the Religious Right.)
Corporate elitists are still on the Right economically. In fact, they are usually far further to the Right on economics than their New Deal-era predecessors of the 1950s and 1960s. Those predecessors would probably have begrudgingly conceded that unions had a role to play. They had also often seen their parents’ lives derailed by the Great Depression and maybe also fought alongside people from many different backgrounds during WWII, so their conservatism was intertwined with a rough and ready form of Communitarianism.
But the corporate elite has become vastly more socially liberal. Indeed, with a minimum of prompting, members of the tribe will declare that they are “fiscally conservative but socially liberal!” (i.e. ‘I’m down with drag queen story hour, but don’t even think about redistributing any more of my income to the lower orders.’).
There isn’t space to explore the causes and consequences of the corporate elite’s drift to the cultural Left here. But it should be noted that members of both the cultural and corporate elite have increasingly been forming (once unlikely) alliances now that the cultural elite has resigned itself to the historical inevitability of capitalism and the corporate elite has dropped its stodgy social conservatism.
As an aside – and I know of what I speak – it’s now not uncommon for members of the corporate and cultural elite to form personal alliances, up to and including marriage. If you’re a member of the corporate or cultural elite (hint: if you’re taking time to read dry Substack newsletters about politics, you most probably are), you can probably readily think of such pairings within your own social circle.
I’m not sure how things work in LGBTland. But with heterosexual relationships, it’s usually the man who is the well-remunerated corporate elitist and the woman who is the less well-remunerated creative or academic type. If women continue to outcompete men educationally and, in time, occupationally, it’s just possible we’ll see more female CFOs partnering with male aspiring novelists. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Judging by the success of the Teals in the last election, as well as my ‘lived experience’, I’d estimate that corporate elitists make up about 10 per cent of the population in Australia.
Tribe four: the masses
Cultural and corporate elitists like to imagine the masses are stupid and/or politically disengaged. American pundits even describe them as “low information” voters.
However, the masses are most certainly intelligent and engaged enough to understand that corporate and cultural elites have rearranged Anglosphere societies to suit their class interests. Maybe that wouldn’t be as much of an issue if the rising and widely shared prosperity of the post-war era had been maintained past the mid-1970s, but we all know how that story turned out.
As it is, ‘the man in the street’ thinks – not necessarily mistakenly – that the significant gains the corporate and cultural elite have made have come at their expense. They believe – not necessarily erroneously – that they’ve been served up one shit sandwich after another by elites over the last four decades. And as I might have mentioned once or twice in these pages, they are now – not necessarily unreasonably – aggrieved.
While we’re on the alleged feeblemindedness of the toiling masses, it’s perhaps worth considering who has been more likely to get the big calls right in recent times. I’ll invite you to consider whether it was the volk or the aristos who:
*Believed Russia would transform into a vibrant liberal democracy
*Believed China would transform into a vibrant liberal democracy
*Believed that the appropriate response to 9/11 was to invade Iraq and Afghanistan rather than Saudi Arabia
*Believed Iraq and Afghanistan would transform into vibrant liberal democracies
*Believed there was no harm in outsourcing your nation’s industrial base because globalisation had rendered major military conflict unthinkable
*Insisted that there was absolutely no way a dangerous virus could have come from a lab set up to manufacture dangerous viruses. (And, inevitably, levelled charges of racism against anyone who dissented)
*Thought it was no biggie for Western governments to place their citizens under house arrest for months on end. (And, inevitably, accused anyone who dissented of being a geronticidal maniac)
*Brushed away concerns that ever-greater mass immigration and ever-more muscular multiculturalism might just have some downsides. Like, say, hundreds of Australians – most of them presumably born and raised on the opposite side of the planet to the Middle East – choosing to chant “Gas the Jews” on the steps of the Sydney Opera House
*Thought there would be no political blowback to, or demographic consequences of, corporate elites strip-mining the wealth of the working and middle classes
To be continued
I had planned to get into how corporate and cultural elites failed to win over more than a small section of the masses in the Voice referendum, but I’ve gone on too long already. Barring unforeseen events, I’ll aim to pick up where I left off next time.
I look forward to the next one, mate.