thesouthcoast

My new blog

2007-07-01T13:18:00.000+10:00

I have decided to set up a WordPress blog at geoffrobinson.info/blog. I have also set up a general page at geoffrobinson.info which includes the material currently on my University staff page (which due to University policy is shielded from access from any search engine).

American Muslims

2007-05-23T21:13:00.000+10:00

Interesting Pew research on American Muslims. In summary:

Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society. Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live. A large majority of Muslim Americans believe that hard work pays off in this society. Fully 71% agree that most people who want to get ahead in the U.S. can make it if they are willing to work hard. The survey shows that although many Muslims are relative newcomers to the U.S., they are highly assimilated into American society. On balance, they believe that Muslims coming to the U.S. should try and adopt American customs, rather than trying to remain distinct from the larger society. And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society. Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others. Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified. Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world. A majority of Muslim Americans (53%) say it has become more difficult to be a Muslim in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most also believe that the government "singles out" Muslims for increased surveillance and monitoring. Relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism, and many doubt that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Just 40% of Muslim Americans say groups of Arabs carried out those attacks.

International comparasions show the US and France as closest, which bolsters the assimilationist case. On broader policy American Muslims are liberal on economic policy but socially conservative rather like African-Americans overall (who make up the largest group of American-born converts).

Mitt Romney's limited prospects

2007-05-23T20:29:00.000+10:00

Recent polls indicate that Mitt Romney's support is rising among the Republican pack. The hypothesis that Giuliani’s electability and his muscular rhetoric in the war on terror would win over conservatives may be incorrect, perhaps his divergence from the Republican base on social issues will sink him, whereas McCain despite his conservative record on policy suffers from his estrangement from the 'conservative movement'. Doubts about the sincerity of Romney's conversion to conservative position inspire the search for alternative candidates, hence the curious spectre of significant support for Fred Thompson, even although he is not an official candidate. Maybe Romney will win the nomination. However then his problem will be not just his religion but the problem that that he will be an identikit Republican candidate in a Democratic year, to win the Republicans need a candidate with a broad appeal. It is a concern that both Giuliani and McCain have done well in match-ups against potential Democratic candidates but Romney does poorly. This conclusion is supported by a recent Pew analysis that suggests that mcCain and Guilani's strong performance in match-ups suggests that:
crucial personal dimension in a period of national discontent, is whether the candidate is seen as an agent of change. And at this early stage in the game, the Republican front runners might just fill that bill. A recent Pew survey found that most voters make a big distinction between both John McCain and Rudy Giuliani and President Bush. Both candidates are seen as less conservative than Bush, and much closer to the average voter's own political beliefs. ..Another piece of evidence for the potential appeal of the Republican frontrunners is the support they draw from political independents--the group that was so eager for political change in 2006, and played a decisive role in the Republican congressional defeat. A recent Pew poll found that as presidential candidates both Giuliani and McCain were about as appealing to independents as were Clinton and Obama, even though a plurality of independents say they lean Democratic these days...Of course, the very appeal of Giuliani and McCain as more centrist and politically distant from Bush threatens their viability in the GOP state primaries races where independents are often barred from voting and voters with strongly held conservative beliefs are most likely to turnout. Indeed, Republicans in Pew's survey placed themselves very close to President Bush on the liberal-conservative continuum and quite a bit to the right of where they placed the candidates they now say they are most likely to support for the Republican nomination...The message of the horse race polls for the Republican Party may be that while McCain, and Giuliani might be perceived as insufficiently conservative for a majority of GOP voters, ultimately only they, or someone else with centrist appeal, may be able to hold off the broad advantage the Democrats have going into this election. For the Democrats, the message may be that, while there is broad discontent with Bush, which has hurt his party, their own potential nominees are not so strong that they can rule out being beaten by a Republican who is seen as an agent of change.
Could Peter Costello appear as an agent of change?

Ideas and realities

2007-05-22T20:09:00.000+10:00

Not usually in business of critiquing newspaper articles and the obsessive pursuit of right-wing MSM commentators by lefty bloggers but even I was struck by the Gerard Henderson column this week and Paul Kelly's contribution. Paul Kelly's The End of Certainty highlights Henderson's influential role in Liberal policy formation in the 1980s as Howard's Chief of Staff and his coining of the term 'industrial relations club'. Henderson left Howard's staff in 1986 because he felt Howard was too indecisive on industrial relations. Both Henderson and Kelly have suffered the experience that Communists were once familiar with, being left down by their favoured foreign government. The Hicks plea bargain reveals that the US has made up policy as it went along. Both Henderson and Kelly retreat to the ground of criticising Hicks' defenders, Kelly at least tries to balance this by some vague criticism of the Australian government but also bewails 'purist line of the human rights lobby'. Henderson at the end of his column admits: 'The Howard Government could have better handled the Hicks matter', if so how? Both Henderson and Kelly somehow think that wrong statements by individuals they dislike are somehow equivalent to real physical actions by the agents of governments. It encapsulates the view of politics as a verbal debate disconnected from the real worlds of human experience. Most supporters of the Iraq war have retreated to scouring the comments of the war's opponents for those they can criticise, they are sometimes successful in this, but making a foolish, or even a morally repugnant statement, is not the same as taking an action those real consequences for flesh and blood humans. What we see is a tendency to blur the distinction between perceptions and reality, so Greg Sheridan can note Al-Qaeda’s success in constructing a global narrative of Islamic victimisation but then attribute this success to the malign influence of ‘pro-terrorist’ Western commentors.

Bloggers vs the MSM?

2007-05-16T20:19:00.000+10:00

The dichotomy between the continued run of favourable polls for the ALP and the perception of many press gallery journalists that the government has begun its fight back with a politically clever budget, aided by the ALP’s alleged disarray on industrial relations has provoked much excitement among bloggers. Some of this excitement seems a reliving of Kevin Rudd’s election triumph even before it has occurred, but it is an instalment in the ongoing battle between the ‘mainstream media’ and bloggers, which is longstanding in the US. Been thinking about these issues whilst reading the greatest monument of the MSM: Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty. It is a work relentlessly devoted to arguing for a particular set of polices as desirable. The Australian’s extraordinary crusade against Labor’s IR policy is in this tradition. But Kelly’s book is also an exercise in high politics, ordinary voters appear only in focus groups, in particular his discussion of the shift to enterprise bargaining ignores the problems of worker resistance to the wage restraint of the 1980s. The book’s elite focus supports my view that one reason for the gallery’s view on IR is a resentment of social actors from outside their narrow world, this is why both the Greens and One Nation received such media hostility, because neither were inclined to accept press gallery advice, to a degree the National Party suffers from this. Nevertheless it passes the test of being a worthwhile book, it is a valuable source of information. The IR debate reminds me of how Hawke’s promise to protect Kakadu was a vote-winner despite being disparaged by the media. We see too that Howard was not always a political genius. It does remind us that governments can come from a long way behind, Labor’s 1987, 1990 and 1993 victories could all have been defeats. In part the gallery is aware that public opinion can change. It would be useful if more examples than 2004 and 2001 were considered. My view is intermediate between the MSM and the bloggers, high support for Labor reflects both perceptions of which party is best to deal with particular issues and which issues are prominent in voters’ minds. As the election approaches economic management will gain a higher profile, this will benefit the government, but its advantage over Labor has shrunk noticeably. Are private sector managerial-professional voters (a group which has shifted rightward since 1996 as I show here (third article)) more concerned with IR or with broadband? Voter perceptions on party performance are slow to change. The Coalition’s attempts to reverse perceptions on education and the economy are unlikely to be successful. It is not that voters have stopped listening to the government, in fact they never listen much, circumstances have changed.

The Third Way and politics

2007-05-13T18:54:00.000+10:00

Much of the discussion of Tony Blair's departure fails to place his government in the context of political history. In the 1940s politics in Europe shifted fundamentally to the left, due to the prestige of the Soviet Union and the perception that pre-1939 capitalism had been a failure. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was another leftward shift. In both cases conservative parties anxiously sought to accommodate themselves to the leftward shift, and they tried to seek justification for this pragmatic accommodation in aspects of their core doctrines. Thus reformist British Tories blamed Whigs for laisser-faire, whilst in the early 1970s the Australian Liberals as Denis White and David Kemp (see his essay in here) complained took up concepts of positive freedom to justify support for an expansionist state in social policy. Since the mid 1970s however the centre of gravity on economic policy has shifted to the right. In Britain this shift was particularly marked, reflecting a broader shift in public opinion (discussed here) due to the disappointments of the 1970s. 1979 in Britain was a turning point, like 1980 in US (and 2007 in France?). Of course this has not meant a minimal state, public expenditures levels have remained high and contrary to some silly arguments economic policy has not converged across developed countries. Thus pragmatic politicians followed this centre to the right, in the case of British Labour the shift has been most apparent given the party's early 1980s leftism (for the obverse of the majority shift to the right in the 1970s was a minority radicalisation), electoral defeat and the general zeitgeist contributed to a general demoralisation, but the centre on other policy areas has shifted to the left and New Labour followed this, devolution and human rights legislation were seen as dangerously radical by the Labour moderates of the 1970s. Blair is particularly prone to justify pragmatic centrism by extravagant rhetoric (see his works here and here), hence his arguments that the Third Way was not a shift to the pragmatic right on economic policy. The events of the 1970s traumatised the British political class, and made the reduction of trade union power a policy that attracted consensus support, even if in Labour's case after the fact. Even Blair’s view that Thatcherism had economic achievements to its credit was anticipated by some British Marxists who saw in Thatcherism not crazed economic irrationality but an attempt to restore the conditions for capitalist accumulation. Even the extravagance of Third Way claims to represent all interests, except a few old thinkers, is shared by the revolutionary left’s implausibly broad definition of the working class.

Word class or 'no frills'?

2007-05-10T18:03:00.000+10:00

One of the depressing facts about public life is that individuals or groups can get away with entirely hypocritical poses, 1950s Communists presented themselves as campaigners for peace whilst Stalin continued his war on the Soviet people (some interesting comments on the post-war famine in this biography of Zhdanov). Al-Qaeda is seen by some as a defender of Muslims whilst it slaughters them in vast numbers. Thus we have Stephen Schwartz, Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor, who in an article declares that Australian universities must escape from their 'Soviet' model:
Universities will be free to determine how many students they will teach when funding follows students and prices are deregulated. Some will opt for high price and restricted access. Others will go for a low price and a high volume of students. Our leading universities will compete with the best in the world. Other universities will offer a low-cost, no-frills, mainly vocational, education. Some universities will teach at nights and weekends while others will take learning to the workplace. Competition for students, who will control the purse strings, will produce better student services.
What exactly would a 'no frills' education mean for the students that I teach at a struggling provincial campus? For Schwarz and his co-thinkers the world-class is confined for a very few, the rest will be penalised. It is appropriate he evokes the Soviet example for the post-Communist Russian economy has seen the mergence of massive income equality and dramatic fall in life expectancies for the poor. Would a Labor government offer any effective opposition to the plans of Schwartz and co.? Doubtful if the example of the good Labor man Glynn Davis at Melbourne is any example. Indeed Schwartz's metaphor is remarkable, we know that Soviet levels of productivity and quality were far below best practice. Is Schwartz seriously claiming that the skills and abilities of Australian university graduates are as far below best practice, that productivity levels in Australian universities are of a comparable level?

Democracy vs. liberalism?

2007-05-09T18:06:00.000+10:00

The experience of the Tampa saga in 2001 was deeply depressing for the Australian left. Many despaired at popular support for the Howard government. The Herd quoted one poll in their famous song 77%:
77 percent of aussies are racist
And if you're here, I'll say it your faces
Rich redneck pricks still hold all the aces
The Turkish protests raise the question of the relationship between liberalism and 'democracy'. One argument by a critic of the demonstrations argues that poll evidence suggests that Turkish voters do not see a threat to secularism and that 'secularism' is an ideology of the affluent privileged fearful of the mobilisation of the periphery. One wonders if respondents have different interpretations of secularism, to some it might imply the absence of Iranian-style regime (which I suspect has little popular support even among the religious) but to others it might imply a broader range of policies. In the US the issue was raised by Lipset's thesis of working-class authoritarianism, articulated in Political Man, but his argument for the populist origins of McCarthyism were challenged in Rogin's The Intellectuals and McCarthy. More recently populist conservatism has challenged the American left in its heartlands. Thus the only commentator to consider these parallels is an American M. J. Rosenberg who confesses:
I wonder if I'm alone in my conflicted view of all this. I am all for democracy and for the military keeping its nose out of politics. On the other hand, there is something I like about a political order which has secularism as; you'll forgive me, an article of faith.
Perhaps we can resolve this contradiction by recalling the Marxist critique of capitalist democracy, to Marx socialism would be a radicalised democracy that would enable humans to fulfil their full potential through collective self-government. We are not obliged to support capitalist democracy when it reduces the ability of hums to fulfil their full potential. Democracy, as James Bryce noted long ago, has won support as a means to an end. We can however be sure that Communism was a massive regression on capitalist democracy. We cannot be 'all for' democracy as currently constituted.

Conservatism against law

2007-05-08T18:27:00.000+10:00

The question of the relationship between contemporary conservative ideology and the rule of law that I have considered earlier is addressed by Glenn Greenwald in reference to an article by conservative intellectual Harvey Mansfield. Says Mansfield:
Now the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule. The first is that law is always imperfect by being universal, thus an average solution even in the best case, that is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot, who can judge particular circumstances. This defect is discussed by Aristotle in the well-known passage in his "Politics" where he considers "whether it is more advantageous to be ruled by the best man or the best laws." The other defect is that the law does not know how to make itself obeyed. Law assumes obedience, and as such seems oblivious to resistance to the law by the "governed," as if it were enough to require criminals to turn themselves in. No, the law must be "enforced," as we say. There must be police, and the rulers over the police must use energy (Alexander Hamilton's term) in addition to reason. It is a delusion to believe that governments can have energy without ever resorting to the use of force. The best source of energy turns out to be the same as the best source of reason--one man. One man, or, to use Machiavelli's expression, uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he regards it as necessary to maintaining his own rule. Such a person will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant.
The ghost of Carl Schmitt’s exceptional sovereign stalks the White HouseAs Greenwald points out here; American conservatives have come to embrace models of flexible constitutional interpretation that they purport at other times to reject. We are reminded of the interwar German judiciary, contrary to Hayek’s claim that a supposedly hegemonic ideology of legal positivism legitimated the capitulation of the German legal establishment to Hitler it was actually their tradition of flexible interpretation, when turned to the right, which justified their conduct. Hitler seemed not just any sovereign but a plebeian and sometimes crude bearer of the good old cause of conservative illiberal nationalism. On German law see Stolleis . Here too we see a linkage across to WorkChoices, the absolute authority of the employer, who has shown himself to be superior, must be defended. Capitalism as Ellen Wood argues privatises political power.

Turkey and Australia

2007-05-06T19:40:00.000+10:00

More secularist protests in Turkey (picture from here). Once again they seem to have attracted little attention in Australia. media coverage tends to point the Islamist's success in attracting lower income voters, although I suspect the division is driven by region and history, and success in on the ground campaigning and the provision of social services. One revolutionary left interpretation is simply to dismiss the demonstrators as evil educated middle-class people. Adherents of this seem to be a minority on LBO however. Interesting article in New Left Review on Turkey by Cihan Tugal that shows the Islamists' political success based among other factors in the discrediting of the old parties. The problem is that the secular nationalist project is exhausted, Nasser and Ataturk no longer offer guidance in the present, and as Tugal shows the Turkish army has a very dubious record. The hint of military intervention can be compared to those on the Australian left, such as new NSW Labor MP Verity Firth who argued last year that a Bill of Rights in NSW would provide a protection against anti-union initiatives by a conservative government. This is weak shield indeed, what the left needs to do is to develop social institutions and widely shared social values that will ensure that any conservative government is constrained. Federal Labor shows little sign of this. Its proposed Fair Work Australia would presumably be abolished by a conservative government; a reinvigorated Industrial Relations Commission would have more prospect of survival.

Religion in Turkey and New York

2007-04-30T21:40:00.000+10:00

I see the secularist protests in Turkey (picture from here) and hints of intervention by the military on behalf of the secular cause, have received little coverage in the Australian media which thinks Europe stops around Berlin. The conservative record in all policy aspects of the ruling Islamist party provides further confirmation, if any was needed, of the perfect compatibility of political Islam (and of course political Christianity) with economic conservatism. Would-be business modernisers seem to have little time for the secularists according to business-friendly commentary here. Nor it seems does the European whose Enlargement Commissioner stated:
This is a test case if the Turkish armed forces respect democratic secularism and the democratic arrangement of civil-military relations.
Well, for a start note that the Islamist ruling party won a landslide parliamentary majority with only 34.3% of the vote.
On a slightly less serious note Elliott Spitzer, the first Jewish Governor of New York, has generated outrage from Christian groups as the only state governor not to support a National Day of Prayer. See outraged comments here.

Law and democracy

2007-04-22T15:49:00.000+10:00

A predictable boilerplate criticism of human rights charters by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian. But such charters can always be revised by governments, the fact that democratically-elected governments chose not to do so is their decision, as has been the case with the Racial Discrimination Act probably the closet to an Australian bill of rights. The bogy called up by conservatives of individual pieces of legislation being struck down as contradicting rights charters is a largely mythical one. WE could point to the hypocrisy of those who are happy to see government’s constrained by international trade agreements, but there is a more significant point. Their real concern is administrative law, that decisions might be challenged as unlawful. Says she:Now it's true that, armed with a charter, a judge will be able to hijack government policy. Therein lies the problem. You may disagree with some government policies, but at least you can boot out politicians when they get things wrong.Notice the use of 'policy' rather than 'law'. The point is not that one might disagree with a policy, but that a policy might be unlawful. A 'government' actually consists of thousands of individuals and agencies, and it is quite possible that one of these could act illegally according to legislation that a government has passed. In 1988 I was a Tax office clerk, should anyone who disagreed with my decisions have simply voted against the federal government in 1990? Perhaps Albrechsten accepts the argument of George Bush and Hugo Chavez for that matter that executives can legislate by decree. There is a current of left-wing opinion that counterpoises good 'law' to evil 'politics', but much of the right has its own demagogic view of a good 'politics' (=governments they like) versus evil 'lawyers' never law. A pragmatic view would be that there is range of manners in which the state’s legitimate violence can be exercised, courts are part of the state but have distinctive roles. There are right-wing discourses that do oppose law to politics; Hayek’s work and right-wing libertarianism, but the later in particular is not taken because of its lack of popular appeal. Its proponents such as Peter Saunders (some of the time) fantasise about a political consensus for right-wing libertarianism that given barriers to entry in the political market would be undemocratic, just as was the desire for a bipartisan consensus on the republic.

Democracy defined

2007-04-19T19:27:00.000+10:00

So far Australian involvement in Afghanistan hasn't evoked the debate of Iraq, unlike Canada where the opposition parties have become increasingly critical of their involvement, although there is some anxiety about continued support for the war. Defenders admit that: While the democratically-elected Karzai government might be struggling to satisfy popular demands for law and order and public services, it is undoubtedly a better option than the two likely alternatives: a return of Taliban medievalist theocracy or rule by unstable coalitions of corrupt, brutal and incompetent local warlords. Yet we must ask why a democratically elected government seems to face such increasingly effective opposition. Both the Iraqi and Afghan governments are so dependent on their foreign backers that they do not exercise sovereignty. This is a statement of fact. The fact that parliaments were democratically elected does make them a democratic regime. If elections alone were enough, Imperial Germany was much more democratic than the United States of Woodrow Wilson. No doubt the current governments are infinitely preferable to those who would replace them. There was an argument after the Iraq war about wether not democratic regimes could be established by force. We could imagine a democratic government repressing by force a violent minority insurgency with its own military forces, but if the battle is conducted by military forces not under its control than this government ceases to be sovereign. Overall the Iraq debate has suffered through a failure to define terms and a tendency to use 'democracy' as meaning that which is desirable. So one side Adam Carr: Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed on 9 April and Iraq came under American and British military occupation. The occupation continued until July 2004, when authority was handed over to an interim Iraqi administration. Elections were held in 2005 and a fully democratic government established, despite a continuing terrorist campaign by remnants of the former regime and jihadists from other countries. Yet it is true that current Iraqi government is a 'puppet regime'. Perhaps it has no choice, but if a government is elected democratically and is then unable to exercise effective sovereignty the result must be disillusion. There is a broader point about democracy. Marxists have traditionally tried to strike a balance in the definition of democracy between form and substance. The mere holding of reasonably free and fair elections is likely to indicate a regime that is a considerable improvement on a regime that does not hold elections. However there have to be effective opportunities for subordinate classes to mobilise and influence policy. Sometimes traditions of deference can demobilise subordinate classes, the low levels of electoral turnout in early post-independence India or as Peter Lindert notes in many of the new European democracies of the 1920s are examples. Recent discussion of democracy either regards the liberal aspects as all that is significant, or it goes to the other extreme and dismisses all democracies as frauds, a position sometimes oddly combined with nostalgia for a imagined past of true democracy.

Liberalism in 1984

2007-04-07T12:03:00.000+10:00

Recently read Liberals face the future a collection of post-defeat reflections by Liberals and sympathisers published in 1984. Maybe it sheds some light on where the Liberals might go in opposition. Most of the contributors are no longer politically active, although editor George Brandis is of course and so is Louise Asher. Overall it is an attempt to defend what the contributors saw as 'liberalism' against the conservatism that they associated the Fraser years with, although John Hyde and David Kemp (whom the editors criticise) do have contributions. The philosophical essays by Brandis, Tom Harley and Don Markwell criticise economic libertarianism for a focus on absolute economic rights rather than pragmatic balancing of outcomes, which sounds promising, but as we have seen recently this could justify a suppression of human rights. Denis White criticised Snedden-era Liberalism to which this books looks back to for its absense of any political criteria beyond the pragmatic. The chapter on industrial relations by Phil Gude sees the only alternatives as arbitration or collective bargaining. Andrew Peacock's chapter isn't brilliant, or particularly bad, and in its recognition of the need for change in Australia stated what Labor was concluding at the same time. Ian McPhee supports a phased reduction in tariffs. Nothing on national identity or education. Overall the book represents a transitional stage in the migration of Australian liberalism to the left side of politics, a 2008 version would emphasise much more the Liberals as a conservative party.

Liberal anti-unionism

2007-04-07T11:40:00.000+10:00

It seems to me a gap in industrial relations research that the emotional foundations of Coalition hostility to trade unionism are not examined. To a section of the Coalition and its support base trade unionism is self-evidentially a bad thing; the way to a much smaller section of radical opinion capitalism is self-evidentially bad. Business groups have seized the opportunity to advance managerial prerogative with delight, but this political crusade isn't economically driven. Is it a product of the close partisan alignment between unions and the ALP? However it didn't occur under previous Coalition governments when this was the case. Arguments about productivity don’t address this fundamental motive. I think the core theme is that managers and employers always know best and they have demonstrated themselves to be better people than those beneath them. There are signs of this in earlier Liberal argument; Menzies’ dismissal of the organised masses in his forgotten people speech, but in Menzies view the virtuous middle-class are separate from the organised masses, today’s Liberalism sees them as in a closer relationship of necessary dominance and subordination. Howard's 'enterprise worker' musings are related to this.

On trials

2007-03-28T11:21:00.000+10:00

Thinking about the Hicks case I saw resemblances to the problem of trials at war. In a time of war, hot or cold, people can be put on trial for notably ill-defined offences. In Australia two examples are the IWW trials of the First World War, in which IWW members were arson attacks in Sydney. Described in Ian Turner's Sydney's Burning. Those convicted were eventually released following a Royal Commission that highlighted prosecution reliance on perjured witnesses. Some of the convictions particularly those of Donald Grant came close to convicting on the basis of verbal statements alone. The Rosenberg trial has some similarities; they were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage but effectively convicted for treason for giving away the secret of the atomic bomb this responsible said the trial judge for the deaths of the Korean War. Now Hicks faces the danger of being sentenced for September 11. Ominously judges in espionage cases in the early 1950s sometimes imposed harsher sentences than those that even the prosecution asked for. On the other side the 1944 sedition trial of former members of the German-American Bund, which in some aspects as Richard Gid Powers argues presaged the post-war trials of the left. The Australian First case during World War two also. The extreme example of such political trials was Soviet show trials, conducted according to the Stalinist principle of politics as war (like the US military commissions) which relied on the confessions of the accused. On one hand these were macabre farces but they reflected a belief, sincerely held I think by their organisers that the accused were up to something, or potentially up to something or potentially thinking about it. There is a recollection of a Menshevik victim recalling a former Bolshevik friend saying this in the early 1930s in Libebich's From the Other Shore. Confessions are dubious. Richard Posner, I think in Breaking the Deadlock comments that if a conservative who has been mugged, a liberal might be a conservative who has been arrested. Consider the fate of Martha Stewart.

Iranian questions

2007-03-24T13:50:00.000+11:00

Via Doug Ireland an interesting article by Scott McElmee in conversation with Danny Postel on whether some American progressives are failing to provide sufficnet opposition to the iranina regime. Sya Postel:
Due to intellectual laziness, a preference for moral simplicity, existential bad faith, or some combination thereof, lots of leftists have opted out of even expressing moral support, let alone standing in active solidarity with, Iranian dissidents, often on the specious grounds that the latter are on the CIA’s payroll or are cozy with the neocons.
Would this be a fair point in Australia? Green Left Weekly has given coverage to the protests of Iranian feminists and the Greens have been vociferous agaisnt the deportation of asylum-seekers back to Iran. See also Rodny Croome here.

Conservative dilemmas

2007-03-23T13:36:00.000+11:00

On ABC Gippsland I was asked to comment on whether the government was as right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt claimed on the ABC's Insiders showing the scent of decay (bolt repeats the claim here). It seems curious, after all in the real world of policy the government is active; consider the Murray-Darling initiative. But I suspect that the Australian right, when they occasionally look above their worship of Howard, would like the Liberals to be reformed on the lines of the US Republicans towards a Christian moral conservatism. Yet in the US this agenda is running out of steam. One sign is the shift in voter identification towards the Democrats. But it is also apparent in public opinion according to a recent Pew survey:
Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway. At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the Republican resurgence in the mid-1990s have moderated, according to Pew's longitudinal measures of the public's basic political, social and economic values. The proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994, while the proportion of Americans expressing strong personal religious commitment also has declined modestly.
There remains strong support for many conservative positions but opinion is shifting. In many respects contemporary conservatives have to be radicals concerned with reversing current trends to moral collapse, but what if voters don't feel that life is getting worse. Still however a long way to go in the US where the Texas House of Representatives has voted against Governor Perry's praiseworthy initiative to add HPV vaccination (which parents can opt out of) against cervical cancer to required immunisations for children.

Infrstructure and monopolies

2007-03-23T13:16:00.000+11:00

Most of the press analysis of Labor's broadband plan shows why the authors are journalists talking rather than developing policy. Peter Hartcher is profound:
Labor could have found other ways of achieving the same internet policy aim without having recourse to the Future Fund. Instead, it has handed the Government a clear line of political attack. This is an avoidable political error.
But note how the IPA have used it to renew their crusade against access requirements for infrastructure. Says Alan Moran:
Rapid adoption of telecommunications advances is essential to our competitiveness. But by requiring any company undertaking the risky business of building a network to accept that it will be defined as an "essential facility" subject to government control is a sure-fire way of ensuring it will never be built by the private sector but be sorely missed. Peter Costello has accused the Opposition of economic irresponsibility, but the Government must share some blame. It has been in the thrall of a regulatory policy that seriously hinders the building of new infrastructure and it is within its power to correct this. To refuse to do so will make it inevitable that taxpayers again fund these facilities, with all the risks and inefficiencies that follow.
Yet voters would prefer that is if there are natural monopolies they be operated by the public sector. There were real reasons why infrastructure was provided by the public sector it wasn't just due to some mysterious zeitgeist of statism. We see a pattern with the renationalisation of state railway systems.

Stalin's lieutenant

2007-03-22T19:34:00.000+11:00

Finished reading Kes Boterbloem's The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov 1896-1948. Always useful to read books that remind you of how bad communism was in practice. The most educated of Stalin's close associates Zhdanov comes across an ordinary climber which makes his willing and dutifully enthusiastic participation in the crimes of the period noteworthy. Mass executions are an entirely routine form signing process. As ideological hatchet man he was embarrassed by Lysenkoism because his son Iurii was a party official and a scientist but died before the worst of the Lysenko episode. I saw some parallels to contemporary conservatism in the ideological debates of high Stalinism; 1) an emphasis of 'culture', seen in terms of a very stereotypical middle-class respectability with realist and banal tastes in arts; 2) concern with reforming the school curriculum to emphasise a positive historical evaluation of the national past; 3) competing groups of ideological hatchet men who contested for Stalin's favour such as Mark Mitin and Pavel Yudin; 4)perhaps most of all Lysenkoism so similar to the organised critics of the global warming concerns.

Three liberals

2007-03-19T21:09:00.000+11:00

Preoccupied with study leave haven't been posting much but will return to the fray. Three biographies I have read recently shed some light on Australian L(l)iberalism. If the neo-liberal right wants a hero they might look at Robert Lowe, the albino English barrister, who came to Sydney in search of briefs in 1842 and left in 1850 after a stormy career in local politics. His classical Benthamite liberalism made him a foe of authoritarian governors and briefly a popular hero, until his supporters were disillusioned by his laisser-faire politics and hostility to democracy. The book is by Ruth Knight, one of those female historians who never published anything else, an example of how women's opportunities were denied, others in this group include Joy Parnaby, author of a brilliant thesis on the Berry government, and Phyllis Peter, author on an excellent thesis on NSW in the great depression. Lowe seems to have been consistent, not what could be said of George Reid, but perhaps unsurprisingly he has become the hero of the alleged standard-bearers of 'classical liberalism', see Greg Melleuish's chapter in Liberalism and the Australian Federation, there was even a 'Reid Group' formed in 2003 in the name of a liberal liberalism opposed to John Howard. One day I hope to address this myth, but here Gerald O'Collin's biography of his grandfather the South Australian free trader and contemporary of Reid Patrick McMahon Glynn is interesting. It relies largely on his diaries and is somewhat unimaginative; his late marriage to a women he had hardly knew is largely unexplored. But Glynn had been a radical, a supporter of land nationalisation and he was a (sceptical) Catholic. he was unhappy with Reid's negative 'anti-socialism' and with his sectarian anti-Catholic appeal, thus despite his talent it took the Fusion to enable him to enter the ministry, having been passed over by Reid to accommodate conservative protectionists, he was shocked by Reid's promise of a campaign against 'Romanism and revolution' and his opportunist acceptance of protection. Genuine classical liberals would find him a better model than Reid. Glynn was also central to debates about the waters of the Murray-Darling. On the other side of the tariff debate was Isaac Isaacs, Zelman Cowen found time to write his biography as a Vice-Chancellor in the late 1960s when university management was lower pressure than now. Isaac's activist social liberalism land his insistence that courts should be the 'living organs of a progressive community' led him to favour expansive government powers, sometimes at the cost of civil liberties. Contemporary legal liberalism would take a different tack. But I was struck by the Coal Vend case where Isaacs wrote a massive judgement of 270 pages upholding the validity of Commonwealth action against the Vend, a cartel of coal owners, under the Australian Industries protection Act the first Australian anti-monopoly legislation. The fact that the original legislation was passed by a social liberal government with Labor support is rather neglected in some accounts of the history of Australian economic policy. The subsequent overturning of the decision by the court majority in a single judgment delivered by contemporary conservative hero Samuel Griffith gutted competition law in Australia. It is appropriate that contemporary conservatives follow in Griffith’s footsteps in their campaign against National Competition Policy, see here and here.

History repeats

2007-03-02T16:53:00.000+11:00

Watching the Brian Burke controversy in WA I was reminded; 1) of the controversies about Morgan Ryan in NSW and his alleged influence back in the early 1980s. This involved lots of taped conversations as well and much discussion of 'links'. One view is in Jenny Hocking's biography of Lionel Murphy; 2) Brian Burke's father, Tom Burke, was a federal Labor MP 1943-55. Initially close to Chifley he shifted towards the Grouper camp and played a key role in the Federal Executive decision of September 1951 to have Labor support the Communist Party dissolution legislation; 3) Brian Burke as WA Labor premier played a key role in the Hawke government's abandonment of Labor's commitment to national land rights legislation. Still if the pro-Labor swing in the recent Peel state by-election is any guide it won't do Rudd any harm.

Conservatives in conclave

2007-02-27T19:10:00.000+11:00

Interesting NY Times article on the Council for a National Policy, a secretive meeting venue of prominent American conservatives, where some Republican contenders for the nomination spoke (the Council does not have a website but speeches delivered to it are here). The mission of the Council seems to be to keep the conservative coalition together, although its founder Tim La Haye is a thoroughgoing fundamentalist. Says one speaker, former Reagan energy secretary Don Hodel:
What is important to me is that neither economic nor social conservatives can hope to elect candidates without the substantial support of the other. And, in addition, we have to deal with the fact that within the Republican Party there is a liberal faction which though smaller than either the economic conservative or social conservative blocs. This liberal faction can be the swing votes in Congress and among the electorate in some states, and, therefore, this troublesome faction has disproportionate influence on our policies. Be all that as it may, I am distressed by the apparent and seemingly growing hostility between conservatives. Most recently I have learned of campaigns where the leaders of the party have reacted strongly against a campaign because it chose to raise the issues of life and marriage. In mid-September someone I admire and consider to be a strong and wise economic conservative, Dick Armey, wrote an op-ed piece in the WSJ in which he was critical by name of Christian conservatives in a way which can only offend and upset them. We do not need to drive wedges between us if we are seeking to prevent the Left from capturing the government.
The NY Times report is particularly interesting for its suggestion that the perceived challenge of radical Islam preoccupies its members as much as their moral and economic concerns. The comment of CNP member Grover Norquist is revealing:
Mr. Norquist said he remained open to any of the three candidates who spoke to the council or to Mr. Romney. He argued that with the right promises, any of the four could redeem themselves in the eyes of the conservative movement despite their past records, just as some high school students take abstinence pledges even after having had sex. “It’s called secondary virginity,” Mr. Norquist said. “It is a big movement in high school and also available for politicians.”
This is an example of how Giuliani could make himself acceptable to the right perhaps, even if some members of the CNP would continue to oppose him.

Terrified of Teddy?

2007-02-20T19:03:00.000+11:00

Explanations for John McCain's unpopularity with much of the conservative base of the Republican Party, despite his best efforts to ingratiate himself with them, for which he is justly criticised by liberals, tend to focus on his past quarrels with George W Bush and his support for campaign finance reform. But how much reflects dislike of his political hero Teddy Roosevelt? He is regarded with hostility by conservatives as a standard bearer of progressivism and big government; see the book denouncing him here and a more thoughtful critique here. Martin Sklar and Gary Gerstle in unusual senses try to reclaim aspects of TR's legacy for the left, although the racism and imperialism certainly makes this difficult. Another interpretation might see TR's themes as appealing to the elusive centre:
To the extent that his ideology survived in the following decades—and in many respects it did not—it was in the "liberal Republicanism" of Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller. These Republicans were internationalist where their party's "Old Guard" was isolationist, supportive of the welfare state while the right denounced "creeping socialism," and confident in the rule of enlightened elites even as their more populist party-mates denounced the effete, striped-pants liberals of the New Deal….Given how much things have changed, this makes sense. Calls for moral renewal and the strenuous life no longer go hand in hand with demands for an active regulatory state. The few souls in our pro-market culture who still denounce "malefactors of great wealth" certainly don't champion the "Americanization" of hordes of immigrants. Conservative Progressivism has become an oxymoron. ..Yet the alignment of the political parties along ideological lines has also created a bloc of independent voters who aren't thrilled with either party's platform. Ross Perot and John McCain supporters and other "disaffected" voters dislike both the Republicans' coziness with big business and the Democrats' lack of mettle. One reason for all the TR talk, then, is a wish to reach this independent center, once occupied in part by liberal Republicans, by appropriating Roosevelt's willingness to stand up today's too-powerful trusts while adopting a muscular language of virtue. Those who can pull off this trick in the coming months and years may win more than the battle for TR's legacy. They may get themselves elected.

Wisdom from Keynes and Menzies

2007-02-19T19:23:00.000+11:00

Just finished reading Robert Skidelsky's Keynes biography. Even I found the last volume heavy going and it gives the impression of running out of steam towards the end. Still it is a very impressive piece of work. It does show that Keynes was not as left-wing as many claimed in particular explaining the 'socialisation of investment phrase'. His interpretation reminds me of Martin Sklar's depiction of the modern American corporation as a form of socialism, perhaps in the sense that Marx might have intended it. The Australian left has been much too prone to yoke Keynes to their banner of populist underconsumptionism. Could we again see an intellectual’s intellectual such as Keynes playing such a role today I doubt it very much? One aspect that the last volume touches on is the controversy among the allies towards the end of World War II about the plan of US Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau to de-industrialise Germany after defeat, the prospect of the German people being reduced to starving peasants and the possible deportation of the 'surplus' population was seen as a justifiable punishment and protection against another war. More on the plan here. The absurdity and inhumanity of it was protested by Keynes and others and it did not come to pass. I was reminded of a speech by Menzies in 1944 in which with the boldness of an opposition backbencher he said that post-war:
we should work not only for our own prosperity and that of allies of our allies, but for a prosperous Germany and a prosperous Japan. This - which would appear the very ecstasy of sentimental folly to the unthinking - is, of course, no more than another illustration of enlightened self-interest.
Difficult to imagine our current know-nothing conservatives adopting a similar approach. Unfortunately wars are usually the occasional for grim and joyless intellectual holidays as W. K. Hancock noted in one of the greatest books ever written by an Australian; Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs.
Skidelsky an interesting figure who followed the road of some of his generation from left to right, although never as far from one side to the other and is now a Lords crossbencher. I admire his attempt to cross disciplinary boundaries. Some interesting reflections in his retirement speech:
history does, in a different way, just what economics does: it offers a standard by which to judge contemporary arrangements, only this standard is set in the past, not the future, and consists of facts not models. I came to believe that not only did they do things differently in the past, but often better. But this liberating touch is also a trap. Historians are inevitably disposed to view the present as a repetition of the past, and thus to the view that the past can never be overcome.. It was Gibbon who said that history is nothing but a record of the ‘crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’. This was admittedly written before our civilisation had acquired a strong sense of Progress. No historian today would say that we are condemned to repeat the past, certainly not in any simple sense. They would acknowledge that we have areas of freedom to make our own history. But the historian’s tendency is still to believe that this freedom exists within the confines of what has already happened...History is the most deficient of all social studies in the art of invention, because its ideas are all backward-looking. And though history is very important as a brake on folly in rulers-Communism wrecked the societies it ruled by its claim to be able to transcend history –it does not, as I thought at the age of eight, ‘explain the whole thing’.

Community Development Employment Program

2007-02-19T10:21:00.000+11:00

The federal government has flagged the abolition of the Community Development Employment Program, the 'work for the dole' indigenous employment program, in regions where unemployment is below 7%. There is little attention to the existence of substantial discrimination against indigenous job seekers, even when education is taken into account. An analysis of the 2001 census data by Boyd Hunter: Indigenous Australians in the Contemporary Labour Market revealed this. He argues that the key to entering the mainstream labour market is education and an effective response to the discrimination problem. The later is not adequately addressed by the individual complaints focus of current anti-discrimination legislation. The problem with CDEP is that it may act as a disincentive to education.

Religion at work

2007-02-15T16:55:00.000+11:00

A depressing story from the BBC about proposed antigay legislation in Nigeria that would impose five-year sentence for anyone convicted of being openly gay or practising gay sex. It is supported by Christian and Muslim organisations. More on it here. Would be interesting to see how our Christian conservatives would respond.

Ecologically Sustainable Development

2007-02-13T18:18:00.000+11:00

One of the benefits of a historical approach is that you realise there is nothing new under the sun. In 1992 all Australian governments adopted the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development which is still there on the Department of Environment and Heritage site. This is supposed to underpin national policy, but on a Factiva search it doesn't seem to have been mentioned by anyone recently. As Elim Papadakis points out in Politics and the Environment it was an attempt to ster an alternative both to the doomsayers and the cornucopians. The Strategy says:

The Goal is:

Development that improves the total quality of life, both now and in the future, in a way that maintains the ecological processes on which life depends.

The Core Objectives are:

to enhance individual and community well-being and welfare by following a path of economic development that safeguards the welfare of future generations
to provide for equity within and between generations
to protect biological diversity and maintain essential ecological processes and life-support systems

The Guiding Principles are:

decision making processes should effectively integrate both long and short-term economic, environmental, social and equity considerations
where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation
the global dimension of environmental impacts of actions and policies should be recognised and considered
the need to develop a strong, growing and diversified economy which can enhance the capacity for environmental protection should be recognised
the need to maintain and enhance international competitiveness in an environmentally sound manner should be recognised
cost effective and flexible policy instruments should be adopted, such as improved valuation, pricing and incentive mechanisms
decisions and actions should provide for broad community involvement on issues which affect them

This seems a good starting point for current policy.

Phoenix falling

2007-02-12T12:02:00.000+11:00

Interesting article in the NY Times about the woes of the University of Phoenix the enormous American on-line private University hyped by some in Australia as the future of higher education:
According to federal statistics and government audits, the university relies more on part-time instructors than all but a few other postsecondary institutions, and its accelerated academic schedule races students through course work in about half the time of traditional universities. The university says that its graduation rate, using the federal standard, is 16 percent, which is among the nation’s lowest, according to Department of Education data. But the university has dozens of campuses, and at many, the rate is even lower. But many students say they have had infuriating experiences at the university before dropping out, contributing to the poor graduation rate. In recent interviews, current and former students in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington who studied at University of Phoenix campuses in those states or online complained of instructional shortcuts, unqualified professors and recruiting abuses. Many of their comments echoed experiences reported by thousands of other students on consumer Web sites...The complaints have built through months of turmoil. The president resigned, as did the chief executive and other top officers at the Apollo Group, the university’s parent corporation. A federal court reinstated a lawsuit accusing the university of fraudulently obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid. The university denies wrongdoing. Apollo stock fell so far that in November, CNBC featured it on a “Biggest Losers” segment. The stock has since gained back some ground. In November, the Intel Corporation excluded the university from its tuition reimbursement program, saying it lacked top-notch accreditation.

Green discourtesy

2007-02-09T15:42:00.000+11:00

Bob Brown and the national Greens’ call for a cessation of coal exports can be seen as an attempt to establish a clear Green position separate from Labor on environmental policy. Perhaps it reflects a frustration with the Greens failure to increase their vote in recent polls despite the high profile of environmental debates. But it also indicates the strength within the Green federal leadership of an ecological politics rather than the more leftist current associated with some of their recent recruits. It also shows a disdain for the CFMEU mining division, whose members have been under sustained attack by employers and the Coalition for over a decade. Here's a union that has avoided the workerist posing of the Forestry division and advocated engagement with environmental debates. As it said in November:
The CFMEU has been involved in the climate change issue since 1990, when it led Australian union involvement in the Federal Government's Ecologically Sustainable Development Working Groups. In 1992 it wrote one of the first union publications on climate change (anywhere in the world) for the Australian Council of Trade Unions: The Greenhouse Effect; employment and development issues for Australians. Also in 1992 the CFMEU represented Australian unions at the UN Earth Summit where the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted. The CFMEU was also present as part of an international union contingent in Kyoto in 1997 when the Kyoto protocol to the UNFCCC was adopted. The CFMEU did not "oppose Kyoto" (and never has). It has argued for social justice to be a key consideration in the development of climate change responses. In 2001 the CFMEU co-wrote the climate change policy of the international union of workers in the mining and energy industries - the ICEM...With the launch of the new climate change position paper the CFMEU renews its call for all stakeholders to work together to address the threat to humanity and the environment that is posed by global warming.
It seems the Greens aren't interested in getting the votes of working-class people whether they are being bashed by employers and the Coalition, as with the miners, or being let down by the dire performance of state Labor governments.

Lessons from Aceh and Serbia

2007-02-09T13:22:00.000+11:00

Irwandi Yusuf, a former leader of the Free Aceh movement has been sworn in as governor after the elections of last year. The Ache government site is here. The settlement between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh movement was the only positive outcome linked to the tsunami, as the international aid program forced greater scrutiny on the region. From conversations with some involved in the peace process it is interesting that although the Indonesian government imposed Sharia law on the province, in an effort to appeal to presumed local sentiment, the overtly Islamist parties actually polled poorly. Interesting BBC profile on the Serbian Radical party and its efforts to distance itself from its past of ultra-nationalism and ethnic cleansing. The Radicals managed 28.6% of the vote at the January 2007 elections. But note that Milosevic’s old party the Serbian Socialists are now done to 5.6% perilously close to falling below the 5% threshold for parliamentary membership. They were a conspicuous example of a post-Communist party going down the road of xenophobia and 'national socialism' rather than turning to social democracy, although the party now claims to be social democratic. In the long run not a winning formula, its vote was 41.6% at the first free elections in 1990. The Radicals' campaign appealed more to economic themes:

The SRS has also made social security and the economy, not Greater Serbia, the focus of their campaign, promising new jobs, a crackdown on corruption, support for agriculture, reform of pensions, the renationalisation of commercial banks and a shake-up of the judiciary. In the party's economic programme, voters can learn that the party supports "brownfield investments as well as small and middle-sized companies and a relaxed monetary policy, which would lead to lower rates". As one Belgrade observer remarked, "Every day they sound more like Social Democrats than the Radicals."

Rudy Giulinai: the American Phillip Ruddock?

2007-02-07T13:29:00.000+11:00

Australians will remember the transformation of Phillip Ruddock from Liberal 'wet' to the hero of the Tampa, perhaps Giulani is similar. Giuliani 's entry into the race poses challenges for the left. Up to now their focus has been McCain, with ears pricked for any hint of bipartisanship they complain about the sympathetic coverage he has attracted at times from more centrist liberals. However in the polls (limited in meaning as they are this early out) Giuliani and McCain are the Republicans with the best prospect of victory, see the graphs here. If 2008 is a simple Democratic vs. Republican contest the Democrats win, they lose if it becomes a liberal vs. conservative contest (which seems unlikely) or if the Republican candidate has a special non-partisanship appeal than the Republicans can win. Giuliani has to market himself as an election-winner. Glenn Greenwald argues that many Republicans conservatives are more concerned with foreign policy and an anti-Muslim crusade than personal moral standards and:
Giuliani's talent for expressing prosecutor-like righteous anger towards "bad people" -- as well as his well-honed ability to communicate base-pleasing rhetoric towards Islamic extremists -- are underappreciated. I don't think any candidate will be able to compete with his ability to convey a genuine hard-line against Middle Eastern Muslims ...there are few things that are clearer than the fact that Christian conservatives care far less about a person's actual conduct and behavior (and specifically whether it comports to claimed Christian morality standards) than they do about the person's moral and political rhetoric, and even more so, a person's ability to secure political power....there are, of course, some Christian Republican voters who will not vote for Giuliani exclusively because of his position on social issues. But the influence of those type of voters -- single-minded social issues voters -- is often overstated. There is a reason he is leading in most Republican public opinion polls. A significant part of the Republican "base" cares more, perhaps far more, about hawkish Middle East policies than about gay marriage and abortion. They are still looking for their Churchillian hero, and Giuliani's crime-busting, 9/11-hero-posturing, prosecutorial toughness (staring down mafia leaders, terrorists and Wall St. criminals) makes him the most credible authoritarian Leader figure in the field. There is often a view of the "evangelical Republican" voter that is more monolithic than is warranted; they crave "strong" authoritarian leaders as much as they crave anything else.
It is true that 'official' spokespeople for the Chritistian right, such as the Family Research Council, don't like Giuliani. But for many conservatives it is their dislike of 'liberals' not even liberalism that is central. A writer in the ultra-conservative Human Events suggests that:

A liberal on key social issues may not have been able to win in previous years. But this may just be the right year for such a candidate to win, provided that candidate has sufficiently strong conservative credentials in other critical areas. First, the role of Republican primary voters who vote primarily on social issues is somewhat overstated. .. According to a 2006 Pew poll, white evangelicals make up about a third of the overall Republican electorate. In 2000 they only made up 20% of the vote in the critical New Hampshire primary, where a majority of voters thought abortion should be legal (although Independents can vote in this primary). In fact, an exit poll question from Pew in 2004 revealed that only 3% of voters named abortion as their top voting issue, 2% named religiosity, and 2% named gay marriage. Nine percent cited the more amorphous "moral values." In the same poll, 27% cited Iraq, 14% cited the economy, 9% cited terrorism, and 5% cited honesty/integrity. While the "values-first" voters are likely disproportionately represented in the Republican party, they likely are not a majority of the party. Moreover, many pro-life/pro-traditional marriage voters are more traditionalist than evangelical; these voters will find some solace in Giuliani's successful campaigns against smut peddlers and prostitution, as well as his record of decreasing actual abortions in Gotham...By the time Republicans have their first big round of primaries on February 5, Democrats may well have selected a candidate after holding elections in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Faced with an oncoming Hillary Express, will social conservatives really pull the lever for a long-shot like Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee?
Another view of the conservative electorate, perhaps a broader constituency than the softer part of the Republican base comes from Hannah Rosin, she argues that 'values voters' are less concerned with specifics than with a narrative of redemption and that Giuliani plays well to these:
About 13 percent of the population constitutes what we think of as the hard-core Christian religious right; beyond them are a vaster number of what could be called “values voters.” Values voters are generally Republican and less rigid on the usual cultural issues—they might accept gay civil unions, for instance, or abortion under certain circumstances. They don’t shout their demands from the steps of the Supreme Court, nor do they much want them shouted. When they evaluate political leaders, they’re often looking for different, more subtle cues. They might want to know that a candidate’s faith was deepened by a personal experience, that his or her life can be summed up as a story of struggle, redemption, and growth. Or they might just tap into a candidate’s general sense of optimism and contentment—a belief, rooted in Genesis and coloring all of life, that things happen for a reason. “Creationism Lite,” you might call it—an affirmational creed that carries its own emotional and intellectual style of thinking and speaking.
This insight parallels some of the better analysis of John Howard, only a minority of voters are hard core nativists, but there is a broader group beyond this that Howard appeals to: see Goot & Watson’s analysis here.
On McCain there is a scpetical conservative portrait from the Wall Street Journal here that stresses his admiration for Teddy Roosevelt here. Teddy was an interesting figure, see Sklar's Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism on his atitude to corporate capitalism and Gerstle's American Crucible on his attitude to ethnic diversity.

Giuliani and the conservatives

2007-02-06T18:05:00.000+11:00

Rudy Giuliani’s filling of a statement of presidential candidacy has made it to the Australian media. He is the object of debate in the American media, despite leading in many polls of Republican supporters as their preferred presidential candidate, some commentaries rule him out, in particular because they presume that his support of civil partnership rights for gays (not marriage however) and his personal pro-choice position, not to mention his two divorces would him unacceptable to the conservatives who actually turn out to vote. In some aspects he is the Republican version of Clinton potentially popular with swinging voters and moderates generally but problematic to many party loyalists. Even his New York achievements that his conservative backers emphasise (see along defence of him here): reforming government, zero-tolerance policing, cutting welfare etc. have Clintonian overtones. But lately there is the suggestion that conservatives might, provided he can finesse his position sufficiently on some key issues (for some advice on how to do this see here), prefer him to McCain because of his record of loyalty to the Republican leadership, McCain's position on immigration and his potentially greater delectability than any of the other non-McCain candidates. Comments on the blog of the Posneresque Ann Althouse suggest some support among conservatives on these lines. Would a Giuliani nomination confirm that the influence of social conservatives in the Republicans is overstated? Or that Republican moderates will always have to bow to social conservatives eventually? Somewhere in between but closer to the later.

'Defending marriage' in practice

2007-02-06T16:45:00.000+11:00

A Michigan appeal court has ruled that the state ban on gay marriage, passed by referendum in 2004, means that universities cannot provide health insurance or other benefits to the same-sex partners of employees., the court also noted that this applies to unmarried heterosexual couples as the wording of the ban is “the union of one man or one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.” An example of what these bans mean in practice probably much more than many of those who voted for them intend, although I suspect it would be welcomed by those who placed these initiatives on the ballot in the first place. However the American Catholic Church as an employer and public voice is taking a different position on civil partnerships.

Greens on the wrong platform

2007-02-05T19:03:00.000+11:00

Recent controversy about public transport problems in NSW and Victoria. In NSW passengers have been forced to urinate in carriages due to the absence of toilets, along with chronic lateness (see here and here). In Victoria trains forced to travel at slow speeds due to lack of track maintenance. All of this is occurring under Labor governments, purportedly a party committed to quality public sector services. Although Labor governments are free of the know nothing conservatism that infests the federal government they rival it for relentless spin and short-termism. But Labor's would-be rivals to the left the Greens largely fail to challenge Labor on grounds of competence, when Liberal oppositions get their act together they will be left on the sidelines. It is easy for the left to make deserved fun of the NSW Liberals and I have pointed out their wallowing in the muck of sectarian politics, but at least they are campaigning on the poor quality of public services, see the many press releases on their site. The Greens ignore the issue, instead focusing on water, climate change and the environment, good but they won't be in a position to force action on these issues unless they increase their vote which requires that they position themselves as a real alternative to Labor.

Cold war memories

2007-02-05T17:43:00.000+11:00

Since September 11 we have seen the emergence of a strand of literature debating what position 'the left' should take on political Islam. I find much of this literature obsessed with questions of what people should think or so rather than what people should do. It is also prone to a political dishonesty identified by Max Weber long ago in his Politics as a vocation, in which people hold their opponents to absolute ethical standards whilst being pragmatic on their own. One side evokes political Islam as a vast powerful movement whose power, scope and danger is chronically underestimated by 'the left', either out of naivety or muddled sympathy with its anti-imperialist rhetoric. Here we retread much older debates, beginning perhaps with pre-1914 socialist debates over imperialism and national defence. The arguments of the minority of the British left that supported the Boer war, or perhaps more accurately loudly distanced itself from the explicitly 'pro-Boers' anticipate arguments about the Iraq war, then as now some found a humanitarian justification pointing to Boer racism. Pro-Boers rejected these arguments, and many of the comments in J. A. Hobson's Imperialism seem applicable to the Iraq war. After 1914 many socialists supported their respective governments. Then we had the debate between 'cold war liberals' and 'progressives' during the Cold War. My own view on this debate is that progressives were prone to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt and to fail to confront the appalling human rights record of the Soviet Union, although it is interesting that most mainstream conservative critics of the Soviet Union although they denounced Communism in general terms, actually gave little specific attention to human rights violations. However cold war liberals, outraged by Communist political duplicity were so keen to prove themselves tough-minded anti-communists that they demonstrated a conscious blindness to the sins of their 'own' side. The foreign policy implications of this are well-known, see Shattered Hope on the fate of the Guatemalan Revolution for example, but this accommodation was notable in domestic policy: Bensel's Sectionalism and American Political Development shows how mainstream liberal organisation de-emphaised race in their definition of liberalism in the interests of keeping the South in the Democratic fold. Overall a good judgment by Joanne Barkan:
Judging cold war liberalism by its laudable goals set in the late 1940s, one has to conclude that it failed in the 1950s. Those were not the glory days of “the fighting faith”: the warriors were neither valiant nor victorious. Long before the Vietnam War, their actions betrayed their principles so often that one would not expect them to be resurrected as heroes.
Yet more recent debates are also relevant. In the context of a resurgent cold war in the 1980s, the question of left-wing attitudes to the Soviet Union was again debated. John Keane accused sections of the left of a failure to face the oppressive nature of the Soviet bloc, in his essay 'In the Heart of Europe". Influential here was the Budapest school of dissident Marxists who ended up at La Trobe university in the 1980s, Frances Feher, Georgy Markus and Ferenc Feher and their Australian disciple Peter Beilharz. Feher's et. al. Dictatorship over Needs was a seminal work here.; it is a brilliant account of how the hyper rationalist promise of communism meant collective irrationality on the grand scale. But their emphasis on the malign nature of Communism, and its immense distance from their vision of socialism, perhaps led them to overstate the stability and threat of Communism. In Thesis Eleven Beilharz was dismissive of Deustcherian enthusiasts for Gorbachev and insisted on the persistent malign essence of the Soviet regime. Heller’s political writing such as Doomsday or Deterrence (1986) (for a critique see here) evoked the spectre of a Finlandization of Europe and suggested that the peace movement played into Soviet hands. But all this overstated the power of Communism which was in an advanced stage of decay. Andzrej Walicki's liberalism meant that he was distant from the concerns of revisionist Marxists. His Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom is more accurate on the thinking of European Communist elites in the 1980s, and how in the case of Gorbachev, the Poles and the Hungarians the Leninist mission was rejected. Political Islam will be even more a house of cards, even if with sharp edges.

Labor and industrial relations

2007-02-02T17:24:00.000+11:00

You would expect the federal government to exploit any hint of confusion in Labor ranks about what its industrial relations policies would be in government. But Labor can't just pledge a return to the pre-1996 position, because I don't think it was viable in the long term. In government Labor sought to shift the balance from industrial awards to enterprise bargains. The problem is that enterprise bargains require unions to negotiate them. Unions are correct to point out the gap between individual contracts (both formal and informal, although AWAs are pretty informal) and EBAs, but even if AWAs were scrapped how can unions negotiate enterprise bargains for all workers? In the old days union membership was higher but perhaps more importantly the award system levered up wages for those workers who did not engage in collective bargaining, either because they were not union members or because their unions were arbitration dependent, such as the SDA. In 1995 according to AWIRS only 26% of workplaces with over 20 employees had no union members and only 14% of employees worked in these workplaces. But what would it be now? Another survey would be useful but the government has refused to fund one. In 2001 according to the ABS in the non-agricultural private sector 46% of employees were in workplaces with 1-19 employees and 28% in those with 20-99 employees. Of total employing businesses 93% of them have less than 20 employees, a total of 0.54m businesses. How are their employees' wages to be set?

Nuclear rhetoric from Regean to Ahmadinejad

2007-02-01T19:57:00.000+11:00

Some discussion in Australia of an article by Benny Morris evoking the spectre of a 'second holocaust' the destruction of Israel by an Iranian nuclear attack. Truly repellent as the Iranian regime is I'm inclined to agree with Robert Farley:
His analysis rests, of course, on the assumption that Iran will behave differently than any country with nuclear weapons has ever behaved, including the Soviet Union under Stalin, the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea under Kim Jong Il. He rejects any careful analysis of the decision-making of the Iranian state, building his argument around Ahmadinejad but failing to note that there is almost no chance that the current President of Iran will be in power when (and if) Iran develops a nuclear weapon. He notes in passing that the rest of the Iranian foreign policy elite also favors the destruction of Israel, which kind of makes me wonder why Ahmadinejad matters at all.
I don't follow the argument of Harry Feldman which seems to be that destruction of Israel wouldn't be a second holocaust as most Jews live outside Israel. Shades of the stolen generation not being a generation. What I am reminded off was Reagan’s 'joke' :
My fellow Americans. I'm pleased to announce that I've signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes.
Reagan’s rhetoric inspired understandable fear and alarm. Within the Soviet Union according to the evidence of Vasil Mitrokohn it led many in the Soviet leadership to fear a nuclear first strike by the US. The KGB had difficulty persuading the leadership that however dramatic Reagan’s rhetoric this was not the case. Fortunately they were successful.

Why Hillary will win (the nomination at least)

2007-02-01T19:13:00.000+11:00

Discussion of Hillary Clinton's prospects for the nomination has focused on the fact that party front-runners often stumble badly in the course of the nomination contest: Walter Mondale was challenged by Gary Hart in 1984; George Bush found it hard to shape off John McCain in 2000. She is the frontrunner (see graph from Political Arithmetick). But Hillary is different her gender and her name makes her an outsider as well as an insider candidate. In a way she has some of the same charisma that attaches to both George W Bush and Bill Clinton. Both began as centrist party insiders, seen by those further to the left or right within their parties as electable, and both were elected as this. But both then became heroes to the base, the Republicans made Clinton a martyr of the left (to the disgust of some of the left), Bush more deliberately tacked to the hard right. Howard and Keating are similar in some ways, who would have picked them 20 years ago to be rallying points of the culture wars? Why did Clinton become so popular? Here I look back to the rallying manifesto of the Democratic centrists in 1989 the progressive Policy Institute's The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency by William Galston. It's a document, rather like Mark Latham’s work, written to annoy, full of passive voice statements. Its approach encapsulated by:
Since the late 1960s, the public has come to associate liberalism with tax and spending polices that contradict the interests of average families; with welfare polices that foster dependence rather than self-reliance; with softness towards the perpetuators of crime and indifference toward its victims; with ambivalence towards the assertion of American values and interests abroad; and with an adversarial stance towards mainstream moral and cultural values.
Much of Clinton's polices responded to this analysis, but the American majority was more socially liberal than this analysis recognised about individual behaviour, particularly their own individual behaviour. Spectres of 'welfare dependency' and the underclass were influential, but voters but voters did not see these as the inevitable result of the social libertarianism that enabled some many of them to watch porn for example. Clinton was a man like themselves. Voters did not see themselves implicated in an overall moral collapse.

Nicaragua and Venezuela

2007-01-30T18:42:00.000+11:00

An interesting article in The Nation on Daniel Ortega’s victory in the Nicaraguan presidential elections. Although it tries to put a positive spin its hard work. The extreme negative view is represented by Marc Cooper who accuses Ortega of being an entirely corrupt, compromised figure who is the grave-digger of the revolution. Ortega’s inauguration was attended by the presidents of Venezuela and Bolivia. Controversy has attached to the granting of powers to Venezuelan President Chavez to legislate by decree. At least some of the proposed uses for these new powers don't seem particularly useful. How would nationalisation of private sector companies assist in the redistribution of income, particularly as it will involve compensation to owners? The Cuban precedent is not encouraging.

From Santamaria to Hizb ut-Tahrir

2007-01-30T18:11:00.000+11:00

More sentimentality about the disastrous B A Santamaria from Tony Abbott. In fact Santamaria and his acolytes represented an attempt to import into Australia an obscurationist and anti-democratic Catholicism in opposition to the pragmatic Christian democratic approach that had characterised the Australian church up until then. Fantasies about a Catholic social order (Gerard Henderson is good on how muddled this was), and the reversing of the Reformation were tangled up with a malign 'anti-capitalism'. In interwar Europe this style of Catholic politics with its constant trashing of liberalism, democracy and the Enlightenment, contributed to the collapse of European democracy. It’s all reminiscent of Islamic fundamentalist fantasies such as those of Hizb ut-Tahrir. This recent outburst of Santamaria nostalgia is however less silly (if that was possible) than the ludicrous 'left' faning over his alleged criticism of 'economic rationalism' in the 1990s. The socialism of fools indeed, like bin Laden's anti-imperialism. A poll of Australian Catholics in the 1930s would have been interesting would it have shown the same tendencies towards radicalisation among the young that appear in some Islamic communities today? As for Santamaria's personality, consider his distinctly creepy manipulations of older ill men from Mannix to Menzies.

A Muslim party? 1920s lessons

2007-01-23T18:36:00.000+11:00

NSW politics looks more like the 1920s everyday. Now we the unfortunate Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali flagging a Muslim party. Largely working-class, socially excluded and culturally marginalised many Australian Muslims have tended to Labor. Here their position resembles Catholics earlier this century that tended to Labor. But the Catholic-Labor nexus was always viewed with doubt by some Catholics, who complained that Labor did nothing for specifically Catholic concerns, in particular funding Catholic schools. These Catholics mobilised as the 'Catholic Federation', they hoped that if Catholics could prove themselves to be swinging voters than governments would respond to their demands. In 1913 the Catholic Federation endorsed the Liberal opponent of Labor Premier William Holman in his heavily Catholic Cootamundra electorate. Holman won easily, helped by his support for Irish Home Rule. Evatt describes the battle here. The conscription battle brought Labor and Catholic activists again together but in 1920 the catholic Federation organised a 'Democratic Party'. Although Michael Hogan describes it as a one issue party focused on aid for catholic schools, the federation president P. S. Cleary tried to develop a Catholic alternative to Labor's socialism based on the papal encyclicals. It polled 2.4% overall and won about a quarter of the catholic vote in the electorates it contested but won no seats. With fewer candidates it polled only 1.7% in 1922 but won one seat. These were probably from white-collar Catholics. The party encouraged a counter mobilisation by Protestants and Catholic leaders conceded defeat in their attempt to win Catholics from Labor (see Hogan's chapters on the 1920 and 1922 elections here). However the anti-Lang Federal Labor Party in 1930-35 had the support of some catholic intellectuals including Cleary. But italso failed to crack the hold of the majority Labor party on Catholic votes. I suspect a specifically Muslim party would be as unsuccessful as the Democratic Party.

John Edwards

2007-01-15T18:00:00.000+11:00

As the first Australian to mention Nancy Pelosi I consider John Edwards, current candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination, and 2004 vice-presidential candidate who has received zero media attention in Australia compared to the two unannounced candidates of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. What makes Edwards interesting is that he is trying to ride two waves: 1) the blogsphere outsider rebellion against the Democratic party establishment seen as too soft on Iraq and Bush and 2) the economic populist backlash that was significant at the last elections. Edwards has been appealing to former Howard dean supporters, an affluent and educated group. and relying heavily on the Internet, but he has also stacked out a position of opposition to trade liberalization in an appeal to blue-collar voters. The Washington Post has him at number 2 in the list of Democratic presidential contenders, but his performance will be a test of the 'new populism'.

Cuba: public opinion and economy

2007-01-15T17:47:00.000+11:00

Via Marc Cooper an interesting Cuban public opinion poll summarized as:
About three-quarters are positive about their country's education and healthcare systems but only one quarter say they are happy with "their freedom to choose what to do with their life." Cubans are also divided about the communist state that has ruled the island nation for nearly five decades. A little less than half (47%) say they approve of their government and 40 percent say they disapprove. Approval is highest among those aged 55 to 59 (61%) and lowest among young adults aged 25 to 29 (38%).
A rebadged Communist party might have a chance under democratic elections on this basis, but I suspect the leading circles of the Party are so bemused by their foreign cheer squad that they cannot plan for the future, even although support for the regime will continue to decline. It also shows that the survival of Cuban Communism has rested on its social achievements, there is a tacit pact between the people and the government. At best one can characterise the motives of the Cuban leadership as, in the words of Chris Harman:
Castro’s regime over the last 47 years has amounted to a dictatorship by a group who think they understand what the mass of Cuban people really need—a variety of modern ‘enlightened despots’.
Yet as Harman notes the economic growth record of Cuban Communism is abysmal. He cites evidence from a 2005 article by Frank Thompson in the Review of Radical Political Economics. As the graph from this article shows Cuban per capita GDP is not much above its 1950(!) level , from a Marxist perspective the superiority of socialism did not lie in its ability to share misery more equally, Cuban socialism failed this test long ago. What if the limited but real achievements of the Castro regime in social policy had been combined with reasonable growth rates, then Cuba could have been a real model.

Holiday reading lessons

2007-01-08T19:18:00.000+11:00

As usual I failed to estimate the number of books required for a Christmas with the family but was fortunately able to stock up in King St Newton at Gould’s and Elizabeth's. Some interesting points from two of my purchases. Dallek's John F. Kennedy discusses the Alliance for Progress. This was the expression of the belated American realisation that Castro’s revolution and the rise of communism in Latin America were a response to real grievances. Amidst much self-congratulation the Kennedy administration announced that US policy would now support social reforms and democracy. However fairly quickly it became clear that existing regimes were disinterested in this advice, and the threat of Communism continued to grow. Thus US policy, as distinct from rhetoric never really shifted from the agenda of supporting anyone against Communism, an agenda that made the superpower dependent on its regional clients. All rather like the fairly recent self-congratulation by the US cheer squad that past US support for undemocratic regimes in the Middle East was a mistake that was now in the past. Governments don't change policy that quickly. Dutt's India To-Day (1940 edition). Dutt was a Stalinist hack, the staunchest defender of Moscow in the British Communist Party. But this is his best book. Two observations he makes seem valuable. He describes how before 1914 British policy on India was emphatic that political reforms would not led to Indian self-government on Dominion lines. During the War however British policy verbally shifted to a position that India was to be prepared for self-government, but by 1940 very little progress had been made to this goal. Dutt highlights the contradictory rhetoric of British politicians. The Viceroy said in 1929 that 'the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress...is the achievement of Dominion status', but Lloyd George said in 1922 that Britain would under 'no circumstances relinquish her responsibility in India'. All rather like Iraq today, there is rhetoric that Iraq has self-government etc. Those troops will be withdrawn at any moment on the request of the Iraqi government, but this seems as distant as genuine Dominion status. It was only after 1945 that the British government fundamentally shifted its position. Dutt's Stalinist Marxism leads him to argue that British imperialism once played a progressive and modernising role, but with the rise of finance-capitalist imperialism ceased to do so and aligned itself with reactionary forces such as the princes. He describes how within Congress in the late 19th century those who opposed the leadership's accommodating position towards Britain however tended, in the absence of 'any scientific social or political theory', to accuse the Congress leadership of being 'denationalised' and thus exalted the most reactionary aspects of Indian society as truly national in a 'disastrous combination of political radicalism and social reaction'. Thus campaigns for cow protection and to keep the age of consent for marriage at 10 rather than 12. Lacking any social base the radicals could fall back only on individual terrorism. This combination of radicalism and reaction seems similar to Islamic fundamentalism today.

Texas and the future of Australian politics

2006-12-15T18:31:00.000+11:00

This week a delayed Congressional election, saw Democrats win a further seat in Congress in Texas on the Mexican border (map from here) with candidate Ciro Rodriguez over Republican Henry Bonilla. He had been the only Mexican American Republican in Congress but some called him a 'coconut', brown on the outside and white on the inside. The election was a run-off from the earlier national elections as neither candidate had an absolute majority then. Nevertheless the Republican incumbent had polled 48% on November 7 and the rest of the vote was split between several Democrats and an Independent with the highest vote being for Bonilla at only 20%. But Rodriguez won with 54%, this is a pretty impressive performance and he is a former social work academic. In part it reflects the collapse of Republication morale since the elections, and a reaction against Republican advertising that accused Rodriguez on being linked to Islamic terrorists. But the seat is majority Hispanic and Republican support for immigration restriction and the border fence was a major issue. Texas will become steadily more Hispanic in future years leading the American trend. The association of the Republicans with nativism may become increasingly counter-productive, even if a majority of voters express nativist views, those to whom the issue is central are more to be migrants and they will vote against the Republicans. This is the 'mobilisation of the base' strategy that the Republicans have used, but now it works against them. Even the ultra-conservative Human Events admits that:
Bonilla was also slightly harmed, and certainly not helped, by his embrace of the conservative position on the border security and immigration issue. Once again, it proved woefully ineffective in bringing out white voters, and whatever-sized effect it had among Hispanic voters -- who make up more than 60 percent of the new district -- it was a negative effect. Bonilla lost counties in the second round that he had never lost in any previous election. This race has implications for Republican hopes to win the Hispanic vote in the future.
Could Texas go blue as some speculate? Not soon but perhaps in the future. A similar situation may arise in Australia, despite the conservatives' best efforts in the silly citizenship test; the ethnic composition of the Australian electorate will change at an increasing rate into the future. The ethno-cultural politics of the right may become a liability rather than an asset. It is already the major reason for the marginality of John Howard's seat.

A passage to India (and Spain)

2006-12-15T18:08:00.000+11:00

Recently returned from conference at the University of Hyderabad on Challenges of Globalisation: Indian and Australian perspectives. Very interesting although I fear I disappointed two students when I explained that I was only a Marxist some of the time. My very long paper on ‘We have no role model’: Indo-Communism, globalisation and governance in the postcommunist era' is available here along with the PowerPoint that I spoke to at great speed. One theme of the paper is to ask whether the western tendency for cultural 'post-materialist' cleavages to supplant those around the economy in the determination of left-right divisions (an issue alluded to in previous post) has occurred in India also. Surprisingly despite the extent of poverty and inequality in India there is evidence of this. Left parties have increasingly made defence of secularism and opposition to the communal BJP their dominant motive, although the largest Communist Party I was advised at the Conference still considers homosexuality a manifesto of bourgeois decadence!. In this context an interesting article on the Spanish Socialist government in the NY Times here:

Previous Socialist Party governments tended to adopt moderate agendas to preserve the social cohesion that was painstakingly cultivated during the transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975. Mr. Zapatero [Prime Minister] has gambled that Spanish society is now stable enough and its democracy advanced enough that such moderation is no longer necessary. It is a significant wager, according to many. Mr. Lamo de Espinosa, the researcher, said Mr. Zapatero, 46, acquired political maturity when democracy was already established in Spain. “He takes democracy for granted, and he takes social and political stability in Spain for granted,” Mr. Lamo de Espinosa said. Mr. Zapatero has therefore been willing to openly defy the Catholic Church with his policies legalizing gay marriage and making divorce easier. He has also presented a legislative package condemning Franco’s dictatorship and honoring its opponents, taking sides in a conflict long considered too divisive for the government to address. And he has dismissed concerns he is flirting with the disintegration of Spain with his openness to greater autonomy for the regions of Catalonia and the Basque Provinces, whose separatist leanings — and the debate over how to contain them — have roiled national politics since democracy began here. Mr. Zapatero’s philosophy, rooted in what he calls citizen socialism, is based on near-pacifism in foreign policy, expanding civil rights and a preference for following rather than guiding the will of the people. “He is not a leftist,” said one friend, who spoke about him on condition of anonymity. “He is a radical democrat.”

Greens, leftists and socialists

2006-11-27T09:49:00.000+11:00

Lost far at the back of the pack in the Victorian election was Socialist Alliance. Launched with hopes of an electoral breakthrough to the left of the ALP. Now the Greens have monopolised these terrain, but this is not inevitable. But at the recent Dutch election the Socialist Party whose origins lie in Maoism won 26 seats on a platform that condemned the Dutch Labour Party for moving too far to the right. GreenLeft, the Dutch Greens (the 'left' comes from fact that the Communist Party of the Netherlands was a founding constituent of the party) won only 7 seats. The Socialist Party is one of the many 'left socialist' parties in Europe that have emerged since the collapse of communism. GreenLeft and the Socialists compete for the left vote, but the Socialists seem to be winning this battle. Radio Netherlands comments:
However, the SP has also modified a number of key points from its earlier election manifestos. The party was always opposed to NATO and the Dutch monarchy and called for both to be abolished - a stance which has now changed. The SP remains basically opposed to both, but is no longer calling for their immediate abolition. The party's support base has grown considerably and now includes people from all layers of society. One major change in policy which has played a role in this respect was the abandonment of the idea that rich people should pay income tax at a rate of 72 percent. Ewout Irrgang, mathematical genius and an MP for the SP, has described such old standpoints as 'symbolic politics' which did nothing to advance the party's cause. The GreenLeft party finds itself having to work harder to attract votes in this election campaign. The party ...has lost much support as a result of the current course being following by party leader Femke Halsema. Under her leadership the party has shifted somewhat towards a more liberal free-thinking approach. Ms Halsema has called for more individual freedom, personal development and emancipation. Currently the only female leader of a political party in the lower house of parliament, she describes her party as the only left-wing liberal party. Remarkably, Femke Halsema was recently proclaimed 'liberal of the year' by the youth organisation of the conservative VVD party (which is itself described as 'liberal' in Dutch).

Here we see an example of why the Australian Greens have been unable to crack key components of Labor's core as shown by their failure to win lower house seats in the Victorian election, still they have suceeded in the easy task of getting more working class votes than Socialist Alliance.

Nationals, Greens & Elaine

2006-11-27T08:56:00.000+11:00

Nationals a good performance overall, although outside their northern heartland poor, they ran behind Families First in Warrnambool. Since 1999 party has striven to develop independent identity, perhaps 1999 victory in Benalla a first sign. Water and environmental management issues can be new point of city-country tension. Strong Nationals performances in Benalla and Morwell influenced by water issues, Lake Mokkan in the later. But how compatible is this National approach with the aspiration to be in a Coalition government with the Liberals? Would a Liberal government impose harsher water restrictions in Melbourne to free up water for farmers? Doubtful. Thus the Nationals reject the idea of a Coalition in opposition although this is sought by some Liberals. But hard choices with have to faced if Labor loses a majority. Greens disappointing again, blaming Peter Garrett is bizarre but they were even doing this in conversation on the polling booth in Warrnambool and in blog comments. They have a constituency but it has peaked in the short-term. Friendly advice: drop this Melbourne obsession and focus on wining more Legislative Council seats. The quest for an Assembly seat has involved massive resources and questionable touchy-feely with the Liberals (not to support Labor's demagogic and dishonest campaign agaisnt the Greens either). Even if the Greens did fluke a lower house seat (and somewhere they eventually will) it unlikely they could hold balance of power, whereas they will come close to this in the Council. Speaking of the Council personal vote of 2504 for Elaine Carbines a rebuff to great minds of Labor Unity who dumped her from top of ticket. Victory for older women in politics. in Western Victoria we contemplate with horror the prospect that Labor preferences may elect a member of the DLP over the Greens.

Democrats and sectionalism

2006-11-27T08:23:00.000+11:00

Finished reading Richard Bensel's Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880-1980. A very impressive work that traces the division between the core and periphery of the American political economy and the changing alignments. Published in 1984 it predicts the electoral realignments of 1994 and 2006 that consolidated first the Republic south and then the Democratic north-east, reversing the 19th century polarity. All of this with no reference to culture wars, a triumph of Occam's razor. Curious to see the vehement anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Democrats, which would gratify the contemporary left, combined with a stalwart defence of white power in the south. Much of the book examines the New deal coalition and how the Democrats maintained southern bourbons and the northern working-class in one party by a brokerage system of strong Congressional committees. Bensel brings up how conservative was the old Democrat's southern wing, in particular extremely anti-union because they saw unions as threat to south's competitive advantage. Hence their 'conservative coalition' with Northern Reoublicans. But now allegedly conservative southern Democrats (a silly Australian run of this idea from Stephen Loosely here) are staunch champions of increases in the minium wage and legislation to facilitate union organising as noted by Nathan Newman. This marks the prospects of cross-party 'moderate' co-operation unlikely. Bensel predicted that 1980s politics would pit a protectionist North-Eastern core against a Southern & Western free-trade periphery. The working-class American south is in the age of globalisation part of the world economy core. Nevertheless the South is still more conservative as shown by graph from here. Cultural poltics is important.

The centre-left project

2006-11-27T08:18:00.000+11:00

The downside of concern about trade is that it can spill over into xenophobia, says Robert Reich who notes that global capitalism rather than communism is the fear:
Congress’s distrust extends beyond Vietnam, to other areas where global capitalism is expanding. Trade bills now pending with several poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are also in jeopardy. Don’t expect the next Congress to look on these trade deals more favorably. Many of the newly-elected members campaigned openly and vocally against free trade. Whether it’s a renewed fear of foreigners, or fear of job losses to them, this nation seems to be turning inward. Sadly for us, as well as for millions of poor people around the world, America may be on the brink of a new Cold War -- with the enemy this time not global communism but global capitalism.

The trade debate is part of a renewed concern on the left, even the ‘centre-left’ with economic inequality. Harold Meyerson describes two research projects underway to develop strategies to tackle growing inequality and ensure sustainable growth. One by the Economic Policy institute, aligned with the liberal-left and close to the unions, and another, the Hamilton project organised through the Brookings Institute) in which former Clinton Treasury secretary and Wall Street wunderkind Robert Rubin (current director of Citigroup) is a leading figure. The Hamilton Project seen by some as presaging a more interventionist approach by former Clintonites. Rubin notes that:
My recollection is, if you take the last thirty years, roughly speaking, that for twenty-five of them, real median wages have been stagnant despite rising GDP growth.

The Hamilton project argues against economic isolationism stressing the importance of reducing the budget deficit and refocusing public investment in growth-promoting areas. This is congruent with the Democrats’ rhetoric reinvention as the party of fiscal responsibility. It seems an attempt to combine some of the themes of Clinton Mark I on human capital and infrastructure with the Clinton Mark II emphasis on balanced budgets.

Populism in the US

2006-11-21T18:37:00.000+11:00

A major theme of American left commentary on the US elections has been the revival of populism. Of course this has received little attention in Australia. A representative sample is in The Nation:
Despite relatively strong growth, manageable inflation, high corporate profits and a bullish stock market, real wages continue to stagnate, productivity gains continue to be captured by the wealthiest 1 percent, income inequality has continued to get worse...None of these trends are new, but over the past six years the problems have grown so noticeable that even the neoliberal economists who crafted the much-celebrated Clinton economic agenda have begun to focus on correcting the perversely inequitable distribution of the fruits of economic success…Aside from opposition to the war, the Democrats focused on attacking subsidies to Big Oil, blasting the corruption endemic to a system in which corporate special interests call the shots and advocating for "fair trade" over the so-called "free trade" agreements that benefit capital over labor. ...At the national level, cable pundits almost immediately focused on a handful of winning Democrats with conservative stances on social issues--Jon Tester's A rating from the NRA, Bob Casey's opposition to choice and, obsessively, former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler, who defeated incumbent Charles Taylor in North Carolina's 11th District while opposing abortion, gay rights and a guest-worker program for immigrants. But what the pundits didn't mention was the role in Shuler's victory of the district's opposition to "free trade" deals. The area's textile industry has been gutted by NAFTA, so when it came time to vote on CAFTA, Taylor was caught between his district, which wanted him to vote no, and the GOP House leadership, which wanted him to vote yes. So he skipped the vote altogether and CAFTA passed by one vote. During the campaign, Shuler hammered Taylor for "selling out American families," and he wasn't alone in using trade as a wedge issue. A post election analysis by Public Citizen found that campaigns cut twenty-five ads attacking free-trade deals, and that trade played a significant role in more than a dozen House races won by Democrats. In the entire election, Public Citizen noted, "no incumbent fair trader was beaten by a 'free trader.'""Democrats have coalesced in favor of trade policy reform over the past decade as President Bill Clinton's NAFTA, WTO and China trade deals not only failed to deliver the promised benefits but caused real damage," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division.
The evidence on public opinion largely backs this according to a Pew study that found that Republicans were more divided on economic policy than Democrats and that outsourcing is universally unpopular, although public opinion is more evenly divided on trade agreements.:
It all sounds very heart-warming, but what about the view of some on the left such as Doug Henwood that trade liberalisation came account for only a small portion of increasing inequality in the US? The challenge for the left will be getting people like Shuyler to vote for measures such as the Employee Free Choice Act
that would enable union recognition when a majority of employees have signed cards. It is only by these reforms that the base can be laid for a long-term shift to the left. What are the lessons for Australia?

Focus group fluff and public policy

2006-11-20T19:38:00.000+11:00

Glenn Milne heaps praise on a speech by Michael Chaney of the Business Council of Australia to the National Press Club (official text here). Milne's report has Chaney quoting from focus-group research on popular attitudes (although this is not quoted in the text, presumably it has been shared with Milne). This seems to be focus-group fluff but what strikes me is not a single anti-union statement is quoted, it is full of profundities such as:
Keep the money cogs turning: "Money circulating through the system - through various taxations - so that then you can have the benefits, e.g. infrastructure keeps being improved."
Forward thinking: "If you don't look forward, you'll never get there."
There is solid social-science research on aspirationals (a forthcoming paper by Murray Goot of which an early version was delivered at the APSA 2006 conference), but of course this is ignored. David Peetz in Brave New Workplace describes how BCA research has become flimsier and flimsier in its attempt to link individual contracts to productivity gains, but relying on focus-groups to justify policy is truly bizarre.

Great moments in Communism

2006-11-20T19:23:00.000+11:00

Always good to be reminded of how Communist regimes operated. On the website of Revolutionary Democracy (an Indian Stalinist journal and 99% mad) in the April 1999 issue there is an interesting article about the activities of a tiny pro-Albanian group in East Germany: the German Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). It quotes the Stasi policy on internal disruption:
2.6.2: Effective Types of disintegration which may be used are:
- Methodically discrediting the public reputation, esteem and prestige on the basis of combining true, verifiable and discrediting facts with false but plausible, non-refutable and thus also discrediting facts.
- Methodically organizing professional and social failures in order to undermine the self-confidence of individuals.- Purposefully undermining convictions in connection with particular ideals, models, etc. and creating doubts about the persons perspective.-

Creating distrust and mutual suspicion within groups, groupings and organizations.
- Creating or making use of and increasing rivalries within groups, groupings and organizations by purposefully making use of personal weaknesses of individual members.
- Keeping groups, groupings and organizations busy with their internal problems with the aim of limiting their hostile-negative actions.

Anthony Downs and Victorian politics

2006-11-20T18:39:00.000+11:00

The American elections were a crash and burn for the strategy of polarisation and 'mobilizing the base', but maybe the Victorian elections will show that the opposite strategy of tacking to the centre may have problems also. Victorian Liberals are making progress in the polls. So far a good opposition performance, reminiscent of Bob Carr in 1991 and 1995 and likely to be as problematic in government as promises prove impossible to deliver. If you tack to the centre will the opposition eventually work out how to do the same and win? David Cameron's good poll performance in UK is an example. My thinking influenced by a very interesting book Redeeming the Communist Past on the political adaptation of former Communist parties in Eastern Europe. On one hand a bit depressing, mostly the road to political success for these parties has been through a Downsian pursuit of the middle ground and a mass party membership just gets in the way of this. Czech voters frightened off when door-knocked by elderly Communists who thought life had been great before 1989. But the author does argue that it can be rational for a party to develop on some aspects a distinctive position, even a minority one, both as a means of mobilising its core support and of differentiation in the political marketplace. For the post-Communist Polish left this was secularism and resistance to the Catholic nationalism of the right.

Indian lessons for Australia

2006-11-12T20:17:00.000+11:00

Currently writing a paper on Indian Communism. The largest Communist party the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has much material on the web. India has seen a sustained attempt by the conservative BJP to mobilise Hindu nationalist sentiment and an attempt to define Indian national identity not as civic but Hindu. Party supporters have encouraged pogroms and mob violence against minorities especially Muslims but also Christians. This has not stopped Australian conservative commentators such as Greg Sheridan praising the BJP. In Australia we seen the right also supporting an ethno-religious rather than a civic nationalism. Chaplains in schools is the thin edge of the wedge, not just a 'political stunt' much more dangerous. I certainly don't agree with the CPI(M) on many issues (as my paper will show) but they are good on the defence of secularism (both quotes from documents accessible here):
The secular principle is enshrined in the Constitution and the values of secular democracy are proclaimed by the big bourgeois leadership of the State. However, the practice of secularism by the bourgeoisie has been flawed. They try to distort the whole concept of secularism. They would have the people believe that instead of complete separation of religion and politics, secularism means freedom for all religious faiths to equally interfere in the affairs of the State and political life. Instead of firmly combating the anti-secular trends, the bourgeoisie often gives concessions and strengthens them. The threat to the secular foundations has become menacing with the rise of the communal and fascistic RSS-led combine and its assuming power at the Centre. Systematic efforts are on to communalise the institutions of the State, the administration, the educational system and the media…Our Party is, therefore, committed to wage an uncompromising struggle for the consistent implementation of the principles of secularism. Even the slightest departure from that principle should be exposed and fought. While defending the right of every religious community -- whether it is the majority or the minorities -- as well as those who have no faith in any religion to believe in and practice any religion or none at all, the Party should fight against all forms of intrusion of religion in the economic, political and administrative life of the nation and uphold secular and democratic values in culture, education and society. The danger of fascist trends gaining ground, based on religious communalism must be firmly fought at all levels…In conditions of capitalist exploitation the guaranteed rights to the minorities provided in the Constitution are also not implemented. There is the lack of equal opportunities and discrimination against the Muslim minorities both in the economic and social sphere. Communal riots and violent attacks against the Muslims have become a permanent feature. The RSS and its outfits constantly instigate hatred against the minorities and they target the Christian community also. This fosters alienation and insecurity among the minorities, which breeds fundamentalist trends and weakens the secular foundations. Minority communalism isolates the minorities and hampers the common movement of all oppressed sections. Defence of minority rights is a crucial aspect of the struggle to strengthen democracy and secularism. (2000 Program, 5.7-5.9).
The CPI(M) is for championing the legitimate rights of the minorities against discrimination and fighting off the attacks by majority communalism. At the same time, the Party stands for democratic and progressive reforms within the minorities. It opposes fundamentalism and minority communalism which seeks to ghettoize and breed intolerance amongst the minorities. The Party is for special measures to provide education and access to jobs for the Muslim minorities. Attention has to be paid to the rights and needs of the working people and the poorer sections amongst the minorities and to bring them into the common class and mass movements (Political Resolution, April 2005).

Capitalism and preferences

2006-11-12T19:46:00.000+11:00

How are we to understand decision of Victorian Liberals to preference to Labor ahead of Greens in the Legislative Council (tickets are here)? We can see the preference of the Liberals' business backers for majority government, as well as a fear that the Greens might pull Labor to the left. But also state governments of all persuasions seek good relations with capitalists. Voters like development projects and are less observant of subsidies and tax concessions. PPPs are an example of this kind of cosy relationship. A minority party in the Council is likely to push for greater accountability. Ted Baillieu himself would be particularly susceptible to such pressure. Of the current generation of Liberal politicians he is something of a throwback, it is rare for conservative politicians since the 1940s to be recruited from an elite business background. The businessman-politician was a 19th century type and their numbers declined steadily from Federation, Menzies reformation of conservative politics psot-1945 saw a final shift in the political leadership of capital to a stratum of professionals and the petty-bourgeoisie socially distant from the commanding heights of capital. I take this point from Class Structure in Australian History. The disjunction between economic and political class leadership was discerned by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Electoral failure however makes the Liberals more dependent on capital hence their willingness to damage their political prospects. If Labor controls the Council the prospects for inquires into Labor scandals evaporate as does the possibility of tagging a Green-influenced Labor government as too left wing. Good for capital bad for the Liberals.

Two ladies from Maine

2006-11-10T17:28:00.000+11:00

Maine voted 53.2% for John Kerry in 2004 but Olympia Snowe was re-elected Republican Senator with 74% over a Democrat with 21%. Snowe and fellow Republican Susan Collins are moderates. Their National Journal 2005 liberalism rankings were 52.7% and 53.2%, together with Arlen Specter they are the only Republicans slightly on the left. Some speculate they could shift parties on become Democrat-aligned independents. After 1994 two conservative Democrats joined the Republicans. It is an interesting study in political loyalty. Lincoln Chafee slightly more liberal than them lost in Rhode Island and was interviewed yesterday:
When asked if his comments meant he thought he might not belong in the Republican Party, he replied: "That's fair."… A lifelong Republican who succeeded his father, the late John Chafee, in the U.S. Senate, Chafee said he waged a lonely campaign to try to bring the party to the middle. He described attending weekly Thursday lunches with fellow Republican senators and standing up to argue his point of view, often alone. "There were times walking into my caucus room where it wasn't fun," he said. Chafee said he stuck with the party in large part because it allowed him to bring federal dollars home to Rhode Island. He said he did not regret not switching parties before the election because he felt it kept him in the best position to help Rhode Island to remain with what was then the majority party. He also described himself as a loyal Rhode Island Republican, and said he didn't want to communicate that he was suddenly "flying the coop." He said he worked to build the party since he was a child, when his father first won elected office when he was 3 years old.
One could be derisive of these musings, but even if misguided I think there is something worthy of respect in sticking to a project that had once achieved good outcomes in the past, maybe it’s why I've become less critical of Communists then I used to be. It's not an unworthy tradition that Snowe and Collins defend but it is an exhausted one and trying to keep it alive as Harold Meyerson argues only assists the hard Republican right. Says he:
Historically, the major parties in America have yoked together the most disparate groups for long periods. The New Deal Democrats were a party of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists. But once Lyndon Johnson committed the Democrats to civil rights for African Americans, the white South up and left -- a process that took 40 years to complete but that left the Democrats struggling to assemble congressional and presidential majorities and that converted the Republicans into a party where Southern values were dominant. Now the non-Southern bastions of Republicanism may themselves up and leave the GOP, seeing it as no longer theirs. Susan Collins may protest that she has a quarrel with the Democrats, but it's her own party that provoked this transformation. And in a larger sense, her quarrel is really with history.
Talking of principle and opportunism this is an accurate judgment on Harold Ford's campaign:
This election brought one overlooked blessing. There will probably be less public flaunting of private religious beliefs in campaigns. The voters in one state issued a firm rebuke to that. That’s one way to interpret the defeat of Harold Ford, Jr. in Tennessee. Good Lord, a political commercial filmed in church. Democrats must have sent silence prayers into the ether for relief from that stunt. The voters of Tennessee answered them. Please, let the curse of blunt displays of piety in politics initiated by Jimmy Carter thirty years ago, come to an end. If Jesus had cared that much about politics he would have delivered the Sermon on the Mount in Rome.
Australians politicians please take note.

California and debt

2006-11-10T12:47:00.000+11:00

In light of the shift by Australian state governments towards debt-fianced infrastructure this report from the the Los Angeles Times on the fate of California ballot initatives is interesting:
The voters' verdict on ballot measures was clear — no to taxes, yes to debt. Upholding a tradition they set in the Proposition 13 tax revolt of 1978, Californians nixed four proposals to raise taxes — even as they passed immense borrow-now-pay-later bonds for highways and other construction projects. Californians see state government as "a bottomless hole" of wasted money, Republican strategist Wayne Johnson said. But when weighing bond proposals, they say, "At least we're going to get some bricks and mortar, at least we're going to get some asphalt. At least we know what it's going for."

American election thoughts

2006-11-09T17:06:00.000+11:00

Pretty much as I expected, although the cards fell the right way in the Senate. Nathan Newman is right that this is a stronger Democratic majority than in the past when numbers were inflated by Southerners who were effectively Republicans. I wonder if Harold Ford's political cross-dressing came across as insincere. The policy ballots haven't received much attention. The anti-gay marriage wave continued but it is definitely ebbing as shown by the defeat in Arizona, and the lesser margins for the bans that passed. There is a good analysis here at the conservative-ish Volokh Conspiracy. The task is to continue to stress economic issues and to turn down the volume on social issues.
Should the Democrats write off the south and focus on the mountain west which is shifting from the Republicans? So argued Thomas Schaller just before the poll:
There seems to be a developing narrative which suggests that expected Democratic victories this year are somehow the result of Democrats "running as conservatives." Republicans, and conservative Republicans in particular, have an obvious stake in perpetuating such a narrative. But it is patently untrue. Pull back the lens and what appears to be happening this year is a regional-ideological partisan correction in which Rockefeller-Ford Republicans are purged from the NE/NW Rust Belt, and prairie progressives pick off selected seats in the Far West. The regional realignment over the past 40 years, which slowly converted Dixiecrats into Republicans, has now entered its final stage, as voters north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi provide a countervailing response to the southern-led Republican majority. This transformation is occurring at the Senate, House and gubernatorial levels. Indeed, because Rust Belt Republicans will be replaced by progressive Democrats, regardless of the final totals tonight, the 110th Congress, in both chambers, will become more progressive as the Democratic shares grow and less conservative as the Republican shares shrink. As just one indication of this trend, consider this stunning fact: If Pelosi gets her majority, for the first time in 52 years, the party with a minority of House seats in the South will the majority party.
There is a spirited argument against this on The Nation blog. The debate has relevance to Australia and the question of which constituency Labor should be targeting. Chuck Todd describes the regional realignment:
Forget "red" and "blue." The country is basically divided into four voting blocs: the Democratic Northeast, the Republican South, the populist Midwest and the libertarian West. Democrats probably have a decent grip on those populist Midwest voters for a while (at least until the area transforms completely into a new economy). As for the libertarian West (home of the first state -- Arizona -- to reject a gay marriage ban), this is a region that is more up for grabs than it should be. And it's because the Republican Party has grown more religious and more pro-government which turns off these "leave me alone," small-government libertarian Republicans.
One conservative spin is that many of the new Democrats are 'moderates', yes they are but a moderate Democrat is well to the left of a Republican (even most moderate Republicans). The neo-conservative Fred Barnes is partially right:
The media, however, is exaggerating the number of these unconventional Democrats. They are a handful, and the pattern of moderate and conservative Democrats when they get to Washington is to pipe down. Or, as losing Republican Congressman Chris Chocola said of his victorious opponent Joe Donnelly, they become "Nancy Pelosi."
The task for 2008 is finding a presidential candidate who strikes the right balance of being middle of the road on social issues with a populist economic agenda: John Edwards perhaps? For 2007 here the question is where is Australia’s equivalent of the American Midwest?

Party factions

2006-11-06T12:45:00.000+11:00

There are two official caucuses in the House Democrats, the moderate to conservative Blue Dogs and the Progressives. Some of the other belong to the New Democrat caucus (aligned with the Clintonite Democratic Leadership Council) but its membership does not seem to be available. Graph for Democrats shows the two caucuses and the rest. The self-defined moderate Republicans are in the 'Mainstreet Partnership' and Republican graph shows this group and the rest of the Republicans. Note there is less of a one-dimensional left-right split in the Republicans; this may be due to paeloconservative tendencies opposed to social liberalism and economic globalisation. Note that there are no economic and social libertarians in Congress, there are socially moderate Republicans with laisser-faire economic views, but they are socially moderate not socially radical. 'Sex, drugs and capitalism' might have a blogsphere presence but it is not an effective political force. Socially mdoerate Republicans probably seem more progressive than they actually are because they tend to be compared, by the media and even by themselves, to the ultra-conservatives in their own party rather than all of Congress.

Party overlap?

2006-11-06T12:29:00.000+11:00

I have an article on the US elections here in which I briefly sketch factions in the Democratic Party. Attached graph compares Republican and Democrats by economic and social liberalism, as we see little overlap between the two parties. The National Journal ranking for Nancy Pelosi on economic and social liberalism are 91 and 96 respectively. Note that Republican economic and social divisions are more independent of each other than for Democrats. More on this shortly.

Changing times

2006-11-03T10:20:00.000+11:00

In retrospect the Victorian election may be seen as significant for indicating emerging shifts in public policy, the focus on water and the renationalisation of rail freight are examples. Interesting to see John Roskam, of all people, criticising Public-Private partnerships, today. Says Roskam:
State governments, burned by the financial disasters of the 1980s, are now so reluctant to carry any debt whatsoever that they rush into any available scheme that promises debt-free infrastructure. Such thinking totally ignores the fact that not all debt is bad. Borrowing to pay for recurrent expenditure is bad debt. Borrowing to pay for long-term infrastructure that benefits more than one generation is good debt. The Victorian Government by refusing to countenance the use of responsible debt is asking current taxpayers to bear the cost of assets that will be enjoyed at no cost by future generations. The growth of a national economy has meant a corresponding decline in the ability of state governments to influence the economic performance of their own state. State budgets still count for something, but they are nowhere as important as they were 20 years ago. State government officials carrying economic functions now have less to do. PPPs have filled the void. Meanwhile financial and legal advisers have, not unreasonably, grasped the opportunity provided by PPPs. Multibillion-dollar projects generate millions in fees.
The left has been doing this for years but he doesn't acknowledge them. Roskam is not unintelligent, and I remember him complaining at the 2004 Australasian Political Studies Association Conference about how boring the Liberal Party was because everyone was over 50 (or was it 60?), but usually his work is partisan hackery, as in his wild overstatements of the level of self-employment (which I refute here). The fact that even he can criticise PPPs is a sign of the times. Will these new times be more favourable terrain for the left?

Moderate Democrats

2006-11-02T14:25:00.000+11:00

One theme likely to emerge from the elections is the rise of the 'moderate Democrat', the recruitment of candidates who market themselves as moderate such as Heather Shuler in North Carolina, or the 'Jesus-lovin' Harold Ford in Tennessee (for a bemused view of Ford from the left see here). Democrat stategists are encouraged by reports of defections of moderate Republican voters in Kansas and Washington, Oregon. Even although the Democrats will not depend on their majority for the south and this will be a change from pre-1994 electoral forces will pull them to the middle as Dave Oldenburg argues. How will factionalism play out in Congress? An indispensable guide is the National Journal 2005 Vote Rating that rank each member of Congress by how on average their voting behaviour is liberal or conservative across economic, social and foreign policy issues, a score of 90% for liberalism means that this member of Congress votes more liberally than 90% of his/her colleagues. In the run-up to the election I will use these rating to bring out lines of division and overlap. To start is economic and social liberalism correlated? Definitely yes according the chart that compares each memebr of the House of Representatives.

The onward march of (market) socialism?

2006-11-01T18:55:00.000+11:00

Not really, but I was amused by this story:
The Victorian Government has signed a deal to buy back the state's country rail network if it is returned to power at the election. Victoria's regional freight rail track was sold to Pacific National by the Kennett administration in 1999. Treasurer John Brumby says the Government would buy back the country rail line for $133.8 million. He says the privatisation of the rail network never worked. "It will mean better access for competitors who want to use the network and that's important, so it will drive more competition, it will mean better maintenance, we have committed to spend $25 million over the next year on maintenance of the country network," he said. The Victorian Liberal Party's transport spokesman, Terry Mulder, says a Liberal government would also want to negotiate a buyback of the freight rail network. "We are not in government, we don't have access to the commercial-in- confidence agreements that the government of the day have with Pacific National, we can't negotiate with them as an Opposition to buy, that's a role of government, but that is our intent," he said.
More seriously, policies such as this and the rise of the water issuse point to major changes in state, and potentially national politics. Have any of these trends been predicted by the media elite?

Return of the base not

2006-10-30T20:01:00.000+11:00

Conservative spin is now that the Republicans are recovering, as 'the base' flocks home terrified by the prospect of Nancy Pelosi being speaker, I place more value in this poll in Newsweek:
On the issues, Republicans have staunched their own political bloodletting, pulling even with Democrats on signature GOP issues: for instance, 40 percent of Americans trust Republicans more on handling terrorism; 39 percent trust Democrats more—a statistical tie. And when it comes to which party voters trust more on moral values, Americans are evenly split at 38 percent. The GOP has slightly narrowed the trust gap on other issues, but the Democrats still lead—on Iraq (45 to 33); the economy (47 to 34); health care (53 to 26); immigration (40 to 32); federal spending and the deficit (47 to 31); and stem-cell research (48 to 26). They even tie, statistically, on what used to be bedrock Republican issues: 39 to 37, in favor of the Democrats, on guns; and 38 to 36 in favor of the Democrats on crime. On abortion, Democrats win 42 to 33 and on same-sex marriage, 41 to 33.
Consider the popular view that 'values' issues such as abortion and gay marriage are Republican pluses; it doesn't seem to be supported by this poll (although the argument will be made that they motivate key groups), I agree that on gay marriage and abortion the Democrats are all over the shop but their confusion and ambivalence mirrors that of the electorate.

Water wars and electoral reform

2006-10-30T19:38:00.000+11:00

Controversy 1) about the decommissioning of a dam in northern Victoria so that Lake Mokkan (pic from here) will be returned to natural wetland; 2) and water customers having to pay for infrastructure maintenance even when there is no water, later are not happy with government's offer of a rebate. We see that the introduction of proportional representation for the Victorian Legislative Council has forced Labor to be more responsive to these concerns. In the past Murray valley irrigators could have been ignored as they live in ultra-safe conservatives electorates but no longer, as now they live in the Northern Victoria province where Labor’s second seat is most at risk. Historically when large-scale irrigation works were introduced governments fairly quickly gave up incorporating infrastructure costs in water prices, these were written off as part of national development and farmers were only expected to pay for the costs of water supply, Bruce Davidson explains in Australia Wet or Dry?. Public infrastructure reform meant full charging but it remains unpopular it seems.

Minimum wage increase: a triumph of public choice theory?

2006-10-26T18:11:00.000+10:00

How are we to explain the decision of the Fair Pay Commission? The fact that its decision is close to the ACTU's claim is taken by the government as evidence we don't need the ACTU effectively, but it is probably similar to what the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) would have handed down (graph shows how its post-1996 decisions came closer to those of the ACTU over time, from Age, 7.7.05). Historically the AIRC and its predecessors were often guided by self-preservation. To retain role in wage-fixation it had to roll with market forces or employers and unions would collectively bargain outside the AIRC for higher wages. This didn't stop Treasury as Greg Whitwell shows often assuming that the AIRC had power to set wages of its own accord. Braham Dabscheck argued that the AIRC made a major error in its early 1990s opposition to enterprise which encouraged the Labor government to legislate to reduce its role, a policy which the Howard government carried further. In the early 1990s the labour market trends actually favoured the policy direction of the AIRC but not that of the government and it is the government which legislates. The Fair Pay Commission knows it will be legislated out of existence if Labor wins the next election, self-preservation dictates a Coalition victory, and this decision is favourable to that objective. Perhaps as public choice theorists would argue this is the only explanation we need. As the fate of ATSIC shows statutory authorities can not be too critical of governments. It is obvious Ian Harper and Judith Sloan the brains of the Commission, Sloan is the more partisan figure and my guess would be she calls the shots. When Harper was appointed many mulled over his work in search of guidance as to Commission policy, nobody commented on Economics and Ethics but it is very vague. The Australian can’t make up its mind and floats a negative income tax, I don’t doubt that some proponents of such a measure, such as the Five Economists, are sincere, but the Howard government is committed to many expenditure (vote-buying programs) programs and has no incentive to accept the advice of its friends on this issue.. Remember all of those sermons from Paul Kelly etc., who had obviously never read an AIRC minimum wage case, on how outrageous it was that the AIRC was not taking into account government payments, it all seems rather silly now that the Fair Pay Commission has been similar? Still the statutory independence of the FPC like the Reserve Bank could as Stephen Bell has argued for the Bank be convenient for governments.

Friends and enemies

2006-10-25T19:44:00.000+10:00

For some unknown reason I get the emails of Peoplepower, the new Victorian political party, basically rather like the Democrats including Stephen Mayne of Crikey fame and Vern Hughes (he used to be in Socialist Forum (for whose newsletter I wrote this) but now writes for the Institute of Public Affairs). An email today suggested that Victorian Labor was seeking a deal with the Liberals, that in exchange for Liberal preferences in the inner-city seats (which would dash any hope of Greens winning) Labor would preference to the Liberals in safe National seats. This would place many Nationals at serious risk especially Hugh Delahunty in Lowan. It is a plausible scenario, especially as Labor's Northcote candidate is unlikely to inspire local ALP branch members to campaign for her. Mary Delahunty (sister of Hugh) attracted votes that would have otherwise have gone to the Greens, as shown by her polling about 5% points better than Labor Legislative Council candidate in 2002. Alexandra Bhathal is a strong candidate for the Greens. Labor and the Greens are like Liberals and Nationals their ideological closeness encourages competition between them. Can the Greens stand up to Labor on this, their preferences give them some power over Labor but where can they go?

The strange case of David Burchell

2006-10-20T11:32:00.000+10:00

The Australian has a strange group of commentators and I noticed today David Burchell discounting Iraqi death counts. Along the way Burchell muses that the Lancet is 'not one known for its expertise in social statistics analysis’. neither is Burchell, he began his days as a Communist, by the time he joined the Communist Party it had long ago ditched the Soviet Union as far as it could, but it couldn't entirely do so and maintain a separate existence from the ALP. Burchell's political trajectory was towards the ALP like many Communists and the CPA's Australian Left Review of which he was the last editor was very pro-ALP. These shows on Burchell's part a certain intellectual comfort with the idea of exercising power or playing at being a court intellectual. Along the way he became a Foucauldian of sorts, like Peter Botsman, and thus was preoccupied with the 'how' of government ('governmentality') rather than the 'why' or outcomes. Like Botsman Burchell was a Lathamite. It’s an interesting career but when it comes to policy advice on Iraq Burchell can offer only:
Whether Western forces should stay or go - and this is a decision that hangs in the balance - may determine the fate of tens of thousands of lives.
I would have more respect for someone who argued a case one way or the other.

Bush, Howard and conservatism

2006-10-19T10:37:00.000+10:00

Among a few Australian economic liberals criticism of the big-spending propensities of the Howard government is a constant theme. Andrew Norton calls Howard a 'conservative social democrat'. This approach identifies state expenditure with social democracy; Howard might better be classified with the Catholic Christian Democratic tradition. But if Howard loses next year most of the Liberal factions will agree on criticising his taxation and expenditure policies, this will enable them to escape arguing about industrial relations or the Iraq war. Pressure will also come from the Australian supply-siders with their faith-based approach to finance (peter Reith has a trial run here). In practice this will play out strangely, the initial will be that tax receipts will rise as a result of tax cuts, then it will deficets don't matter, and then any constraints on public expenditire will be dropped. In the US criticism of Bush's alleged 'big government conservatism' have become a torrent among many conservative intellectuals. An interesting article in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard notes that all of Bush's conservative critics can agree on criticising his expenditure policy, but correctly argues that:
No doubt there is conservative disaffection today. But it failed to manifest itself during Bush's first five years in office, when he was no less of a spender than he is now. If conservative voters have turned against their president, it's because of his perceived incompetence--over Iraq and Katrina--and his support for immigration reform, not No Child Left Behind or the prescription drug entitlement. Indeed, if there's any lesson to take from Bush's sky-high popularity among conservatives for most of his presidency, it's that the movement's rank and file cares far less about government-cutting than its activists do...Or perhaps the rank and file just have longer memories. After all, Ronald Reagan, the man whose legacy Bush has supposedly betrayed, presided over a federal government that consumed 23.5 percent of GDP in 1984. Granted, this was at the height of the Cold War defense build-up, yet the figure far surpasses spending under President Clinton, which reached a low of 18 percent of GDP in 2001.

New material

2006-10-17T17:18:00.000+10:00

I have put the final version of my APSA conference paper; Herbert Spencer in the suburbs: class, ideology and the Australian petty-bourgeoise in the Howard years on my web page and also a presentation to a Faculty of Education conference on the history of south-western Victoria, 'A south-western history of the world' (title sampled from Kurlansky's A Basque History of the World) since the breakup of Gondwanaland in a global context. 45M years in 30 minutes, but some people liked it. Both are here.

Agrarian capitalism vs. John Howard

2006-10-17T15:58:00.000+10:00

Howard's statement that:
it is part of the psyche of this country, it is part of the essence of Australia to have a rural community...Not only would we lose massively from an economic point of view [but] we would lose something of our character. We would lose something of our identification as Australians if we ever allowed the number of farms in our nation to fall below a critical mass.
This is one in a long line of agrarian rhetoric from Australian politicians. But in the long run there seems no alternative. Increasing farm productivity means that fewer farmers are required to produce the same amount of output and demand for farm products does not increase along with income. In the long-run the drought is just a hiccup in this process. Western Victoria, and in particular the Mallee-Wimmera is now the heartland of commercial agriculture in Victoria with good land and land prices are kept down by the absence of alternative uses so farms can expand. But it is the wheat belt which is declining fastest in population and will continue to do so. When farmers can't sell (although blue-gum plantations provide a market) they might as well stay on the land but their children won't follow them and they end up as my students. On Victoria see the work of Neil Barr, in particular The Changing Social Landscape of Rural Victoria. Family farms are non-capitalist (score one to the poststructuralists), but in the long-run if they cannot provide a comparable standard of living to the capitalist non-farm economy, then people will leave them. People left non-capitalist East Germany for the capitalist West Germany. Capitalist innovation drives increasing living standards. The attached graph from the Productivity Commission on broad acre farm returns tells the story. Lenin and Kautsky in two of the great works of classical Marxism were right about capitalist concentration in agriculture.

More Comintern lessons

2006-10-16T18:20:00.000+10:00

Recently finished William Chase, Enemies within the Gates; the Comintern and the Stalinist Repression 1934-39, a collection of documents on the impact of the purges on the Comintern. The meetings transcribed are horrifying in which Communists turn on themselves in an orgy of self-blame and accusation. There must have been people in these meetings baffled by the insanity unfolding before them and the departure of their comrades to the execution cellars. Maybe not. Like the current insanities it all began with a single terrorist action, the 1934 Kirov assassination, and from then the documents shows how this spiralled out of control, even out of Stalin's control. It is an example of the limitless capacity of humans for self-delusion and for magical thinking where setbacks are not attributed to mistakes or even objective circumstances but conspiracies. No doubt soon we will be told that the Iraq war failed because of its critics who were objectively complicit with the terorists. Within the madness there are also hints of score settling, the apparatus figures who were purged were Popular Front opponents like Bela Kun and Osip Piatinsky. It does confirm E H Carr's historical skill in Twilight of Comintern, written long before the archives were opened, in teasing out the lines of Comintern division in the early 1930s.

North and South, East and West

2006-10-16T17:14:00.000+10:00

Inclined to agree with Ross Terrill that debate on North Korea has ignored the human rights implications of the continued existence of the appalling North Korean regime. Historically I am reminded of the debate about Stalin's 1952 offer to withdraw Soviet troops from East Germany in exchange for the formation of a united neutral Germany. The west rejected this proposal with little attention, maybe Stalin's offer was not genuine (Gerhard Wittig argues this in the 1994 Historical Journal), but if it was serious the Stasi and the Berlin Wall would have never happened. Millions would have been freed from Communism long before 1989. Even this small chance was worth pursuing. The subsequent history of East Germany doesn't seem to offer hope for Korean reunification however. The ostpolitik of West German governments was not successful in encouraging liberalization in the regime and it only collapsed once travel across the border was possible.

The strange case of William Lines

2006-10-16T10:32:00.000+10:00

The weekend Australian had an extract from William Line's new book in which he complains about environmentalists support for indigenous land claims accusing them of racial thinking. It seems The Australian will use any argument against indigenous people today, but it is curious they use Lines whose first book Taming the Great South Land blamed environmental decline in Australia on evil white males inspired by the Enlightenment and Adam Smith etc. etc. even the CIA rates a mention in this green armband tome. Is it such a preachy and dogmatic book that I don't use it as an academic resource.

Cardinal Moran and the culture wars

2006-10-14T19:49:00.000+10:00

Read Patrick Ford's Cardinal Moran and the ALP. I think it was the only book Ford, a Catholic priest ever wrote, published in 1966 it has hints of being an intervention in contemporary Labor politics and stresses Moran's role in steering Labor from the course of 'continental socialism'. Ford attributes Labor's poor electoral performance in the late 1890s to a reaction by Catholic voters against its socialism. I would see a more general reaction against the party, but my analysis of early Labor electoral support at the 2003 Labour History conference would have benefited by a consideration of Ford's work. Ford fails to see that Moran's political room to manoeuvre was closed off after 1901 by the rise of political Protestantism, he had to reconcile himself to Labor's moderate socialism to an extent he refused to do so in the 1890s because there was nowhere else for Catholics to go. From a contemporary view I think of current religious panics. Ford describes how in 1868 Australia’s first royal visor Alfred Duke of Edinburgh was shot at and slightly wounded by Henry O'Farrell. Premier Henry Parkes alleged a Fenian (to simplify they were the 19th century version of the IRA) conspiracy. O'Farrell claimed to be a Fenian but then retracted this and it is clear that he was deranged and acted alone. Parkes however claimed there was a conspiracy and someone had been murdered to cover up the conspiracy. This seems to have been a pure invention or hysterical imagining. Ford also brings out how the Free Traders under Reid played the sectarian card. Worth remembering when there is much silliness today from 'classical liberals' and others (such as the apparently defunct Reid group) about how enlightened the Free Traders were unlike those nasty racist protectionists. Protestant campaigners also argued that the practice of confession enabled Catholics to lie in defence of their faith and that Catholics were taking over the public service. Today exactly the same claims are made about Muslims by the inheritors of the old protestant right such as John Stone. However the contemporary revolutionary left should consider how Moran campaigned against socialism, and note that on the O'Haran case (where Moran's private secretary was cited in a divorce case) there was more evidence for the case against O'Haran than Moran or Ford admits, although this ABC account disagrees and takes a simplistic pro-O'Haran position.

US elections

2006-10-13T18:39:00.000+10:00

US congressional elections are finally getting some coverage in Australia. The Australian left has to share in the delight of its US counterpart over the Foley affair. Katha Pollitt is worthwhile on this as on most other matters:
Unlike White House press secretary Tony Snow ("naughty e-mails"), I don't minimize Foley's behavior. It's wrong for middle-aged men to come on to teenagers, even if they're of legal age and even if, as some of the IM exchanges suggest, the young person seems willing to play ("with a towel you can just wipe off and go"). Let the kids fool around with each other. But there's something unseemly about the festival of ritual humiliation: You'd think he was raping 5-year-olds, not exchanging dirty IMs with high school seniors who could, after all, just log off or not reply. The blasts of indignation sweeping the blogosphere seem awfully opportunistic: "deranged pedophile," "sicko," "children at risk." As the Republicans are eager to remind us, Dems are no angels: Gerry Studds slept with a page in 1973, ignored the censure of his colleagues and kept his seat until he retired in 1997; Mel Reynolds had sex with an underage female campaign worker, went to prison and was pardoned by President Clinton; Barney Frank--and we love Barney Frank--unknowingly housed his boyfriend's prostitution service in his apartment and was re-elected all the same. And don't forget former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy, the proud gay American, now promoting his tell-all as part of his healing process. Men with power: It's not a pretty sight… The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum thinks Foley will sweep the Dems back into power: Financial corruption like the Abramoff affair is complicated and boring, but everyone understands sexual shenanigans. Perhaps, but are the voters really so brain-dead? Is there no point trying to whip them up into a frenzy about some outrage that actually matters? Like, oh, Bush's refusal to declassify the full National Intelligence Estimate documenting how the Iraq War has created more terrorists. Or Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent--so much so that Senator Frist said he wants to put them in the government. Have we given up on habeas corpus, just voted away with the help of twelve Democratic Senators and twelve House Dems, including Sherrod Brown, often praised in this magazine? It would be interesting if someone mentioned the record Foley compiled on the rare occasions when he zipped up his pants and went to work--like his support for that stupid 700-mile fence along the Mexican border, and for denying public education to illegal immigrant children. Now that's what I call child molestation. It shows you how hapless and shallow the Democrats are that they find so little electoral joy in a principled coherent challenge to Republican rule. Instead, we get tactical theatrics over whatever comes down the pike: last month gas prices, this week Foley. I see why the Democrats feel they have to do it: They're too compromised, the contests are too close and the discourse has been dumbed down for so long, it takes something simple and splashy to get people's attention. But it doesn't say much for the party--or for the rest of us, either.
Some of us feel this way in Australia too...but back to the battle at hand. David Corn is cautious:
A storm is heading toward Congress on Election Day. And were the United States a European-style democracy—where voters tend to pick party representatives rather than individual candidates—the Republicans would expect to lose scores of House seats. But congressional districts have been so thoroughly gerrymandered to protect incumbents that only 40 to 50 House seats are considered to be in play. That means that the current political tides will likely affect merely 10 percent of the entire body.
But even in Britain large seat turnovers result from large vote shifts. In the US there have not been huge vote shifts in Congress. The extent of gerrymandering: 'stack and pack' can be debated. But it can't prevent all electoral tides, especially when seats are fairly equal in enrolment, indeed because gerrymandering involves spreading your vote thinly over a large number of districts, it seems to me that once your vote falls below a certain level it becomes counterproductive as it reduces your number of safe seats. It is possible that the Republicans are moving into this terrain. When the swing is on seats fall, it is possible to hold a majority on 48% of the vote, but almost impossible to do so on 46%

Equivalance again

2006-10-13T18:13:00.000+10:00

Another thought on Howard's speech, and a common error displayed in it. Howard identifies as philio-communists worthy of condemnation:
All those who did not simply oppose Australia’s commitment in Vietnam, but who actively supported the other side and fed the delusion that Ho Chi Minh was some sort of Jeffersonian Democrat intent on spreading liberty in Asia.
Let's not dispute that point, although you could, but there is the suggestion that thinking things which are naive, morally wrong etc. is the moral equivalent of actions which result in death and destruction on a vast scale. But they are not. Consider: John fantasises about killing his neighbour. Bill is a nice bloke who recklessly lights a fire in his backyard to burn off rubbish; the fire spreads next door and kills his neighbour. Who of Bill and John should be criminally prosecuted, who is more morally reprehensible? When the fire that has spread from Bill's place is raging do we attempt to extinguish it, or do we walk past and go and tell John that he is an evil man. Howard's atitude is not uncommon, much public debate on both sides in Australia is not a debate about what we should do, but what we should think about what other people are thinking about what other people are thinking or doing.

Striking a balance?

2006-10-11T18:40:00.000+10:00

Didn't think much of Howard's address to Quadrant, but it has raised that old question of 'the left' and communism, the 'black armband' view of Australian intellectual history. Who is this 'left': Bob Brown, Doc Evatt, Lance Sharkey? I agree you can't on one level be too critical of people who apologised for and denied the crimes of communism, even if at the same time you have to understand why communism gained support. But let's think about authoritarian regimes overall, there were the communist states but there were many on the right: South Africa, Suharto's Indonesia, Pincohet's Chile etc., and there is also the question of human rights violations in Australia. My guess would be that if you compared Quadrant and Arena from 1960 to 1990 you would find the following:
1. criticism of the human rights records of Communist regimes disproportionately in Quadrant
2. Criticism of the human rights record of authoritarian right-wing regimes disproportionately in Arena
So a pattern of both sides attacking the other, and perhaps a draw on points, but I would predict that:
3. Quadrant would contain many defences and apologias for authoritarian right-wing regimes
4. Arena would largely ignore Communist regimes altogether, perhaps there were some Maoist apologias worthy of condemnation, although its Communist Party antecedents probably largely insulated it against Maoism
5. Arena would have far more coverage of human rights violations in Australia.
If we added all these up I suspect Arena would come out a long way ahead in the moral scales.
A moment's Google search brings up this in Quadrant:
More was done in the quarter-century of Indonesian rule to improve the health and education of the Timorese than ever had been done in the years of Portuguese rule. Much of this was destroyed in the name of independence…by aliens presumably

Weasel words

2006-09-29T18:18:00.000+10:00

Not surprised but disappointed by the response to the Queensland coroner's report on the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. But what purports to a commentary in the Courier-Mail is a remarkably alarming piece of work. It does admit once that:
Hurley, the coroner believes, was fatally at fault and lost his cool after being hit by Mulrunji and beat him, rupturing his liver.
But it seeks to trivialise this fact by effectively equating it with a whole series of other events and process from the slow process of the enquiry, to the dysfunctional Palm island community, to the bungles of Liddy Clark, the 'overly prompt' release of the original medical report etc. Presumably the Courier-Mail would be correctly critical of someone who said that no one emerged with credit from the events of September 11, 2001? The terrorists did behave very badly but there was a context and they had been provoked etc. etc.

Post-communism adrift

2006-09-22T16:35:00.000+10:00

I am writing a paper on Indian Communism for a conference in December. One aspect will be a comparison with post-communist parties in Europe. They are not doing well. The Hungarian Socialists are battling riots after the Prime Ministers unfortunate video confession. A striking debacle was that of the Polish ex-Communist 'Democratic Left' fell from 41% in 2001 to 11.3% in 2005, probably the worst electoral collapse for a social-democratic party in history? The Polish election brought to power the rabidly homophobic Law and Justice Party, which draws support from anti-Semitic catholic extremists. Initial interpretations, such as that of Geoff Eley, of the surprising electoral comeback of ex-Communists saw them as a belated social-democracy trying to defend structures of social protection. But says the BBC on Hungary:
Despite greater freedoms, many Hungarians feel they have been marginalised and left behind in a fast-changing nation as a small and powerful elite get richer at their expense.
It seems similar in Poland; perhaps why 265,000 have emigrated to the UK after Poland joined the EU.
In Poland and Hungary the ex-communists seem to uphold the liberal banner against the nationalist and Catholic right. But their failure to deal with economic grievances has enabled the illiberal right to appear as the voice of the disenfranchised. Looks rather like how the failures of Arab left paved the way for Islamic fundamentalism.

Demanding the impossible

2006-09-21T18:00:00.000+10:00

Recently read the 1968-72 volume of Tony Benn's diaries. Interesting Benn convinced himself that the radical socialist left was the vehicle to achieve his values, but these values are actually very post-materialist ones of democracy and participation. In another era he might have been a third wayer and his son is very content in Blair’s cabinet. But you finish the dairy seeing why Benn could never attract majority support; perhaps like the Europhile social democrats who he opposed he was in Labour but not of it? Benn's crusade was a sign, and a contributor to, of the collapse of old Labour, of corporatism, bureaucracy, midnight strike-averting deals sealed over beer and sandwiches at No. 10 etc. Many of Benn’s criticisms of old Labour were appropriate but he seemed to believe that the good things about old labour could be salvaged from the wreckage. But it was Tony Blair not Tony Benn who became new Labour and it couldn't have been otherwise. Tax-and-spend corporatist labourism had its flaws but it was a package. This seems to be something that Mark Bahnisch, one of the ex-Lathamite 'waiting for Julia' crowd fails to realise. If you want to achieve the traditional goals of social democracy (as distinct from a generic radicalism' than tax-and-spend corporatist labourism is the way to go not cosying up to Crikey-ite stray economic libertarians, at best you'll get Tony Blair and then David Cameron.

Pru Goward and Communism

2006-09-21T16:44:00.000+10:00

I think neither Pru Goward or Greg Smith should stand down consequent on their (likely) endorsements as Liberal candidates. The Australian makes a reasonable case that for Smith given the standard of NSW politics:
Clinging to his office, no matter how pure his motives, will just end by turning the DPP into a circus.
But if you hold a position requiring objective and independent judgment you have to be able to separate your personal views, we all have views and opinions, but we can distinguish these from our official functions. It is a skill you have to develop but it can be done. If Smith and Goward don't display independence fair enough but they deserve a chance. Here I see an echo of the American debate (in Australia taken up by Greg Melleuish) where conservatives have claimed that because liberal Democrats are substantially overrepresented among college academics their teaching must be biased and hence a political balance must be enforced among academic staff. But academic teaching is like exercising a judicial role one is required to develop impartiality and objectivity. The best recent discussion of this issue was by Stanley Fish:

KEVIN BARRETT, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison...who has a one-semester contract to teach a course titled “Islam: Religion and Culture,” acknowledged on a radio talk show that he has shared with students his strong conviction that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job perpetrated by the American government. The predictable uproar ensued, and the equally predictable battle lines were drawn between those who disagree about what the doctrine of academic freedom does and does not allow. Mr. Barrett’s critics argue that academic freedom has limits and should not be invoked to justify the dissemination of lies and fantasies. Mr. Barrett’s supporters (most of whom are not partisans of his conspiracy theory) insist that it is the very point of an academic institution to entertain all points of view, however unpopular. (This was the position taken by the university’s provost, Patrick Farrell, when he ruled on July 10 that Mr. Barrett would be retained: “We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.”). Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor’s speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost everyone to be crazy or dangerous.
But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis...whether something is an appropriate object of academic study is a matter not of its content — a crackpot theory may have had a history of influence that well rewards scholarly scrutiny — but of its availability to serious analysis... it would not be at all outlandish for a university to hire someone to teach astrology — not to profess astrology and recommend it as the basis of decision-making (shades of Nancy Reagan), but to teach the history of its very long career. There is, after all, a good argument for saying that Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dante, among others, cannot be fully understood unless one understands astrology...The distinction I am making — between studying astrology and proselytizing for it — is crucial and can be generalized; it shows us where the line between the responsible and irresponsible practice of academic freedom should always be drawn. Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply. And this is where we come back to Mr. Barrett, who, in addition to being a college lecturer, is a member of a group calling itself Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an organization with the decidedly political agenda of persuading Americans that the Bush administration “not only permitted 9/11 to happen but may even have orchestrated these events.” Is the fact of this group’s growing presence on the Internet a reason for studying it in a course on 9/11? Sure. Is the instructor who discusses the group’s arguments thereby endorsing them? Not at all. It is perfectly possible to teach a viewpoint without embracing it and urging it. But the moment a professor does embrace and urge it, academic study has ceased and been replaced by partisan advocacy. And that is a moment no college administration should allow to occur. Provost Farrell doesn’t quite see it that way, because he is too hung up on questions of content and balance. He thinks that the important thing is to assure a diversity of views in the classroom, and so he is reassured when Mr. Barrett promises to surround his “unconventional” ideas and “personal opinions” with readings “representing a variety of viewpoints.” But the number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance. There is a world of difference, for example, between surveying the pro and con arguments about the Iraq war, a perfectly appropriate academic assignment, and pressing students to come down on your side. Of course the instructor who presides over such a survey is likely to be a partisan of one position or the other — after all, who doesn’t have an opinion on the Iraq war? — but it is part of a teacher’s job to set personal conviction aside for the hour or two when a class is in session and allow the techniques and protocols of academic research full sway. This restraint should not be too difficult to exercise. After all, we require and expect it of judges, referees and reporters. And while its exercise may not always be total, it is both important and possible to make the effort. Thus the question Provost Farrell should put to Mr. Barrett is not “Do you hold these views?” (he can hold any views he likes) or “Do you proclaim them in public?” (he has that right no less that the rest of us) or even “Do you surround them with the views of others?” Rather, the question should be: “Do you separate yourself from your partisan identity when you are in the employ of the citizens of Wisconsin and teach subject matter — whatever it is — rather than urge political action?” If the answer is yes, allowing Mr. Barrett to remain in the classroom is warranted. If the answer is no, (or if a yes answer is followed by classroom behavior that contradicts it) he should be shown the door. Not because he would be teaching the “wrong” things, but because he would have abandoned teaching for indoctrination. The advantage of this way of thinking about the issue is that it outflanks the sloganeering and posturing both sides indulge in: on the one hand, faculty members who shout “academic freedom” and mean by it an instructor’s right to say or advocate anything at all with impunity; on the other hand, state legislators who shout “not on our dime” and mean by it that they can tell academics what ideas they can and cannot bring into the classroom. All you have to do is remember that academic freedom is just that: the freedom to do an academic job without external interference. It is not the freedom to do other jobs, jobs you are neither trained for nor paid to perform. While there should be no restrictions on what can be taught — no list of interdicted ideas or topics — there should be an absolute restriction on appropriating the scene of teaching for partisan political ideals. Teachers who use the classroom to indoctrinate make the enterprise of higher education vulnerable to its critics and short change students in the guise of showing them the true way.
I would add that anyone who is a member of the 9/11 conspiracy movement bears the burden of proving that they can conduct themselves impartially in the classroom. It is clear that Barrett has failed his test. The fact that Smith and Goward are/will be Liberal candidate is not to me evidence of bias in pursuit of their duties. Would one dispute the ability of pre-Vatican II Catholics such as Gustav Wetter or Frederic Copleston (remembered now for his multi-volume history of philosophy and a debatewith Bertrand Russell on the existence of God) to teach non-Thomistic philosophy? It is less clear on pre-1956 Communists, but contrary to Sydney Hook, who argued:

According to Hook, anyone who remained a Communist provided "prima facie evidence that he is a hardened conspirator and that he accepts its orders and directives." Covering all bases, Hook concluded that anyone who was a Communist without being a "hardened conspirator" would be "ineligible on grounds of lack of intelligence for any responsible job."(p. 89) Since American Communists were members of "the international Communist movement" which is "a clear and present threat to the preservation of free American institutions and our national independence," they met the "clear and present danger" test for revoking any free speech rights. (p. 109)
I would argue Communist Party membership although it would raise suspicion of bias should not have disqualified one from teaching. It could depend, what did Andrew Rothstein prescribe as reading when he taught Soviet history? But Maurice Dobb (see his article here) and Ronald Meek obviously deserved academic positions. Those who want Goward and Smith to resign are adopting the same position that Hook did on Communists.

Blaming ourselves?

2006-09-17T19:14:00.000+10:00

An original but predictable take (via Michael Berube) on the question of who was to blame for September 11 by Dinesh D'Souza whose work guides many Australian 'liberal' intellectuals such as Barry Maley. D'Souza gave us Illiberal Education the guidebook of the campus culture warriors on how political correctness is destroying allegiance to the achievements of western civilisation. In his new The Enemy at Home D'Souza shows how:
<> In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left. D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture. The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D’Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.
As Osama Bin Laden said in his statement after 9/11:
We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.
Why is this crackpot politics so influential on the American right? Timothy Noah has an explanation:
the main driving force is the bankruptcy of contemporary conservatism as represented by the Bush administration. An aggressively interventionist foreign policy has stumbled badly; a sharp cutback in taxes has failed to bring prosperity to the middle class; and, since Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans, citizens have come to regard governmental incompetence less as a reason to vote Republican than as a reason to hold Republicans responsible for indifferent stewardship. Things have gotten so bad that the GOP may conceivably lose control of both the House and the Senate in the coming midterm congressional elections. When you don't have anything new to say, and what you've been saying in the past no longer has much plausibility, you have three choices. You can shut up. For conservative commentators, this is inconceivable, not to mention financially ruinous. You can re-examine your premises. This is not the conservative style. Or you can pump up the volume.
In Australia there those, such as Jason Briant, who want to see an American-style 'conservative movement'. For the time being Australian conservatives can ride on Howard's coat tails, how might they respond to a change of the political climate?

Values confusions

2006-09-17T18:33:00.000+10:00

This strange debate on Australian values is curious. James Jupp has said most of what needs to be said. Reflecting on this issue in context of writing a lecture on multiculturalism. We should remember that there has been along succession of statements on multicultural policy, all of whom have stressed that diversity exists within a framework of unifying values: democracy, the rule of law, English as the dominant language etc. The Howard government has talked about multiculturalism less and has added the prefix 'Australian' but its policy statements, which have been endorsed by Howard build on their Labor predecessors. the National Multicultural Advisory Council set up by the government (which has no members with any union background) was entrusted with the task of drafting a policy that stressed the objective of national unity, yet references to these policy documents seem to be totally absent from the current 'debate'. The government quietly let the Council for a Multicultural Australia lapse. When Howard talks about 'zealous multiculturalism' is he repudiating his endorsement of existing policy? If so it rivals Peter Beattie's performance on Queensland hospitals! The title of the discussion paper on the test is 'Australian citizenship; Much more than a ceremony' , isn't a marriage a ceremony, a funeral, Anzac Day? It gets more confused with an editorial The Australian to whom multiculturalism was something in the 1980s and 1990s (what about the Galbally report of 1978?) and with the would-be court philosopher of Australian PMs Paul Kelly who doesn't mention existing policy once. Adam Kotso (via Brad de Long) identifies a feature of conservative rhetoric as:
The "blank slate" -- the topic at hand is to be treated as though no one in the history of humanity had ever discussed it before this discrete occasion.
How much of this vendetta against existing citizenship rules is driven by annoyance at the fact that the more non-Anglo migrants are the more likely they are to take up citizenship? In 1996 it was 58% for British migrants and 90% for Vietnamese. Kelly tells us that:
As the debate about security and identity intensifies, successful nations will demand a unifying idea that transcends the "ahistorical notion of human rights" or a cultural pluralism based on individualism. This leads directly to Howard's emphasis on unifying Australian values.
When I see the term 'ahistorical' along with 'positive', 'organic' 'dynamic' etc. etc. I yearn even for the days of Hayek whose Road to Serfdom does a good job of skewering such meaningless adjectives. It is precisely the concepts of human rights and liberal democracy that provide the basis for a civic nationalism worth defending, why else would we be concerned about the rise of fundamentalism if not for this. Perhaps opposition to torture is one of the ahsitorical individualist principles Kelly rejects? What’s the real agenda? I see at least two: 1) population trends suggest that Australia’s ethnic composition will change drastically over the next century. This is an electoral challenge for the conservatives as for the US Republicans keeping people off the electoral rolls is one solution; 2) Kelly is a high immigration man, a citizenship panic could divert people from considering the economic consequences of skilled labour migration. Kelly almost admits the later:
Let’s remember that citizenship policy is a means to an end. The end is to allow Australia to keep running a successful high intake non-discriminatory immigration policy in coming decades. This is what the debate is about. It means maximising community support for immigration.
My translation: let them in but don't let them vote!

From World War I to III (or IV?).

2006-09-15T12:06:00.000+10:00

When I saw the title of an article in the London Socialist History Group newsletter 'Revisionism and the new imperialism' I thought they had pipped me to the post on some thoughts of mine. Not so but the article claims that conservative historians are proposing a more sympathetic view of World War, in particular of the western front generals such as Haig, and equating the current war on terror to that against the evil German Empire. In Australia the old Anzac mythology of incompetent British generals etc. is echoed in some criticisms of the US. It is partly the latest version of the old left nationalist position. However few of the war on terror's critics explicitly refer back to WW I. On the 'other side' John Hirst published two articles in Australian Historical Studies years ago defending a Hughesite position on the war (themes repeated by him here) and occasionally Gerard Henderson has defended our involvement in the war. I see more interesting parallels: 1) Those on the self-defined 'pro-war left', such as the signatories to the Euston Manifesto (in Australia Pamela Bone) echo to me the argument of those socialists who supported their home countries in WW I. The level of personal acrimony, division and accusations of betrayal is very like that among socialists after 1914. Although there were those now forgotten who tried to steer a middle course; 2) how to understand imperial Germany. For along time the left position tended to see Germany as wronged as or no guiltier than the other powers for the war (these debates were linked to the evaluation of the treaty of Versailles and are sometimes raised today in debates about culpability for fascism and terrorism). After 1933 this caused tensions on the left between anti-fascists and pacifists. Views on Germany were challenged by Fritz Fischer's work in the 1960s he stressed the culpability of the ruling class for the war linking German expansionism to the elite's anti-socialist struggle at home. This was developed in the theory of the 'sonderweg' (separate path) that Germany had not experienced a bourgeoisie revolution and remained dominated by an archaic feudal elite hostile to liberalism and democracy. Fischer's work was welcomed by the German left because he seemed to suggest continuity between Wilhemite imperialism and Nazism. The right preferred to see Nazism as a horrifying aberration. Are the Middle Eastern Islamic countries archaic in this sense? But Fischer's evaluation of German society was challenged by Marxists such as David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley they argued that Wilhemite Germany was by any reasonable standard bourgeois, in their view Wilhemite imperialism and later Nazism were the results of capitalism rather than the reflection of distinctive pathologies in German society. Might we see Islamic fundamentalism and fascism as aspects of modernity and late capitalism rather than archaic and backward-looking movements? 3) German political structures. Defenders of the current pro-war position often stress the fact of elections in Israel and Iraq, but Wilhemite Germany has elections, indeed more Germans had the franchise than in Britain and the Wilhemite electoral system was free of the fraud and racial exclusion that operated in the US. But the German parliament did not exercise effective control over the German government. Neither does the current Iraqi parliament; 4) German political evolution. World War I in Europe was a democratising force governments had to appeal to the working class as Geoff Eley argues, and in Germany there was a steady trend towards democratisation, German trade unions, in exchange for their support of the war as Gerard Feldman shows gained increasing political influence. Was it a war for democracy by 1918?

Introductory chapter on Australian politics

2006-09-13T17:41:00.000+10:00

I have posted a draft of an introductory chapter, 'Australia: distinctive democracy' on Australian politics here. It is for AIX290 Australia Today an introduction to Australia subject for international and exchange students. Any comments valued.

American primaries & Mulims in US politics

2006-09-13T14:24:00.000+10:00

A big round of primaries just in. Lincoln Chafee the very moderate Republican Senator defeated his more conservative challenger in Rhode Island. Chafee despite often voting against his party was heavily backed by the Republican leadership would believed (surely correctly) that he was the only Republican who could hold Rhode Island (which last voted for a Republican president in 1984). It means that the Democrats will face a much tougher battle to win Rhode Island which would be essential to their hopes of a Senate majority. As a Democratic blog said 'damm'. Hilary Clinton easy victory against her anti-war challenger in New York. In Minnesota a Muslim African-American won endorsement for a safe Democratic seat, he would be not only the first Muslim congressman but also the first African-American from Minnesota. More on his primary campaign and background here. Some might anticipate a tough campaign for him, but the 2005 Pew public opinion survey (available from here) showed that 54% of Americans had a very or somewhat favourable view of Muslims compared to a total unfavourable of 24%. On the follow up from another primary Lieberman has a 13% lead over Lamont in Connecticut. Lamont is viewed more unfavourably than Lieberman, a sure sign he has let Lieberman set the agenda. I wouldn't think this gap is unbridgeable but this statement from Lamont’s communications director suggests a campaign in serious trouble and some alarming self-delusion:
"These numbers don't reflect what we've been experiencing out on the trail and in the community. We are not running our campaign based on the polls, and if we were we wouldn't be here at all."

Queensland conclusions

2006-09-12T18:59:00.000+10:00

Voters were more tolerant than I expected but I was right about Toowoomba North. Perhaps Toowoomba is going the full circle from old Labor country town alienated by Whitlam back to new Labor Brisbane suburb. Toowoomba South will be interesting when Horan retires if he has the personal vote some claim. Swing in Fitzroy may indicate impact of WorkChoices and Cunningham definitely blamed union campaign for her loss of support in Gladstone. Will make new federal seat of Flynn in central Queensland (includes Gladstone) interesting. Looks like Bundaberg is gone, the independent might be blamed but perhaps there was a vote against Labor that voters were determined to make given the hospital scandal, thus they were determined to vote for Nationals whether as first or second preference. The example of personal votes for other sitting MPs suggests the National may be around for some time. When I suggested health was going to have a bigger impact on Labor Mark Bahnisch said:
I very much doubt voters think the Qld opposition can do a better job on health. Based on the polling Graham Young and I have been doing, which is discussed on Currumbin2Cook, most voters accept that health is a complex area not amenable to quick fixes, and are sceptical of the quick fixes on offer from both sides.
Seems he was right, Labor like John Howard, can benefit by diminished expectations. There has been a rather pointless debate about increasing accountability in Queensland by restoring the Legislative Council. Proportional representation would be a better idea.

Queensland election

2006-09-07T19:03:00.000+10:00

The consensus seems to be an easy Labor victory in Queensland. I have my doubts as I have argued on the Pollbludger here and here. Labor is seen as performing badly on health, and health affects everyone. Much has been made of the bad Coalition campaign but how much does this actually influence voters, as distinct from the pundits? There are still voters to decide and I think they will break against Labor. Betting markets should pick this up but as they become more popular I think they follow the polls. I see opinion poll fetishism in the current analysis, a government in power for 8 years and with its record under challenge will lose ground. I actually think Beattie is the best of the current crop of Labor premiers but that is not saying much. If Labor holds Toowoomba North and Bundaberg I will be happy, these are my surprise predictions. I doubt Nita Cunningham had much of a personal vote in Bundaberg judging by the 2004 swing so I think Labor's margin is healthier than it looks for the retirement of a sitting member. After Cheryl Dorron being so unlucky in Hinkler in 1998 and 2001 it would be good to see a female member of the left win in the Bundaberg region. Toowoomba North might be the Labor equivalent of Keppel in 1992-2001; as well Toowoomba is being pulled into the Brisbane orbit.

Islamo-fascism confusions and Comintern lessons

2006-09-07T17:40:00.000+10:00

Useful article at CJR Daily on the strange career of the term 'Islamo-fascism'. In part this is linked to the silly comparison between now and the 1930s on which I have posted earlier. But the articles referred to are lacking in any analysis of the policies of Islamic regimes. It is as silly as the use of the term 'populist' by the left to identify politicians they dislike; John Howard, Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Jeff Kennett all received this treatment. Populism is a style of government but it does not provide the content of government policies, regimes of the left such as Peronism, Langism or even PASOK in Greece are not explained by designating them populist, see Sassoon on PASOK. Fascism is more than a style of politics, it is a specific form of radical populist conservatism that sweeps aside the traditional parties of capital, but has the reluctant acquiescence of capital in doing so. Fascism uses an anti-capitalist and revolutionary demagogy to gain popular support, even if most of its support comes from the electorate of the traditional right. Georgi Dimitrov correctly highlighted fascism's appeal in his addresses to the 1935 Comintern congress he saw the success of fascists in invading the rhetorical terrain of the left and the same argument was made by Franz Neumann. Stephen Schwarz at least sees that fascism has a relation to conservatism, but then seeks to distinguish it on the grounds that it replaces ruling elites, but fascism replaces the political elites not the economic ones. Katha Pollitt is better and highlights the modernising nature of the fascist regimes of the 1930s in contrast to fundamentalism. I would go further fascist ideology was not just uniforms they had a fairly coherent model of economic management based on Listian autarky as Michael Mann argues, Islamic fundamentalism has no program of disengagement from the capitalist world economy. Perhaps the major similarity between fascism and Islamic fundamentalism is that they are both in part the results of the failures of the left, something which Dimitrov did see. But even if fundamentalism and fascism are distinct they are both forms of populist conservatism. Similar tactical points arise: how to turn the ideology of the regime against it, how to use its rhetoric strategically, Palmiro Togliatti is good on this. Why do even 1930s Stalinists like Dimitrov and Togliatti show more insight than the contemporary revolutionary left?

US and Australian election outcomes

2006-09-01T16:12:00.000+10:00

Fascinating analysis of the relation between overall party support and seats won in the US Congress on Charles Franklin’s Political Arithmetik. In Australia the divergences between votes and seats won are the subject of intermittent controversy. Labor has sometimes (more often than the conservatives) won a majority of votes but not a majority of seats. On some estimates during the 1949-72 era of uninterrupted Liberal-Country coalition government Labor won a majority of votes three times. In this US case it is sometimes argued that all electorate contests are individual and unique and that it makes little sense to speak of a national vote. But polls are taken on the 'generic' vote and for months have shown the Democrats at least 10% clear. The Australian evidence would suggest that any election with a 55:45 split means a landslide majority in seats. Franklin shows how final overall democrat votes tend to be less than the generic votes recorded in polls. Why? Are these Democrat identifiers recording a personal vote for popular Republican incumbents? Then there is the Australian question of the relation between votes and seats. Franklin has a graph of the relation between Democrat votes and seats 1946-2004. I have done this for Australia using the two-party preferred Labor vote; this was not counted before 1984 so I have used the estimates here and seat percentages from here. The two graphs are not that different. Interesting, obviously weird and wonderful outcomes do occur in individual American electorates but overall these tend to cancel each other out. Note also that the Democrats do better at converting votes into seats, slightly over 49% of votes give them 50% of seats but in Australia a 50% Labor vote yields only 47.5% of the seats.

A book for the times

2006-09-01T14:34:00.000+10:00

Read Leicester Webb’s Communism and Democracy: a survey of the 1951 referendum last night. Very interesting. When I think of the Communism debate I tend to think of Soviet espionage, emphaised in the work of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. But what Webb brings out is that the debate was much more about the broader sedition issue. Communists had been jailed for seditious statements on the lines that Australian workers would welcome the Red Army etc. but the government focus was on industrial relations, it was the perceived meanings of actions (that is strikes by Communist-led unions) rather than words that were central. Webb shows how the Courts, even before the Communist Party case, were loath to read seditious meanings into actions. The discussion of newspapers is interesting Webb argues that although editorials and sometimes subheadings were slanted the major newspapers in competitive markets provided fair coverage of both arguments. From my examination of the Sydney Morning Herald in the early 1930s I would concur, it despite its wild editorial partisanship provides a better news coverage than The Australian today. Webb also discusses the controversy about the accuracy of Roy Morgan's opinion polls which over predicted the final 'yes' vote; again his son's polls are still in the news. Webb suggests that ethnic Germans may have voted 'No' and the Lutheran church recalled the WW I experience. His suggestion that Labor's thinking was informed by the experience of Chifley government's battles with Communist-led unions is something I had not though of before. I liked his statement that:
Those who know the political life of the labour movement, with tis mixture of idealism and corruption, of massive loyalties and bitter sectional feuds, of over-rigid disciplines and seething discontents, will recognise in its frequent surface agitations a sign, not of decadence, but of vigour and essential cohesiveness.

Nancy Pelosi and the Australian press.

2006-08-29T10:09:00.000+10:00

Interesting profile of House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi here,
The 66-year-old San Francisco lawmaker is an aggressive, hyperpartisan liberal pol who is the Democrats' version of Tom DeLay, minus the ethical and legal problems of the former Republican House leader. To condition Democrats for this fall's midterm elections, she has employed tactics straight out of DeLay's playbook: insisting other House Democrats vote the party line on everything, avoiding compromise with Republicans at all cost and mandating that members spend much of their time raising money for colleagues in close races. And she has been effective. House Democrats have been more unified in their voting than at any other time in the past quarter-century, with members on average voting the party line 88% of the time in 2005.
Pelosi may become the closest to the American equivalent of Prime Minister. A search on Factiva for references to her in the Australian press pulls up only 11 references all relating to appearances by Bush and the Iraqi PM before Congress. Nothing on her likely role after the elections. But of course the quality press is full of another American story.

Don Chipp

2006-08-29T09:11:00.000+10:00

I discussed Don Chipp on the ABC this morning. From a historical viewpoint the Democrats were the last of a long series of 'dissident right' parties, such as the citizens' movements of the Depression, the various 'middle-class' parties of the mid 1940s and even to a degree the early Country Party. But all of these formations were soon incorporated back into the right. The Democrats have survived (if only just) because the forces of radicalism in Australia now come from the right rather than the left. Their problem recently has been that with Labor now the party of Deakinite liberalism it is difficult for the Democrats to find a niche. Labor has taken over the Democrat's ground, this has made Labor vulnerable on the left hence the Greens.

'Marxist' muddles

2006-08-28T19:28:00.000+10:00

Via Brad de Long come some words of Jeff Winetraub I would largely agree with:
my appreciation of Marx has only increased over the years--a process in no way diminished by my growing awareness of the limitations, errors, weaknesses, and even dangers of his thought and influence. .. The major complication was that for decades Marx and his thought were surrounded by a cult. At every level from students to professors and in between there seemed to be hordes of academic Marxists, semi-Marxists, neo-Marxists, Marxologists and the like (as well as non-academic Marxist scholars and intellectuals, such as Perry Anderson for most of this period), most of whom tended to assume that Marxism of one form or another had an exclusive lock on reality, and that no idea could be taken seriously until it had first been 'translated', however clumsily or implausibly, into Marxist (or pseudo-Marxist) idiom. I must admit that I sometimes found all this a bit irritating and distracting--and occasionally comic. And out in the larger world, of course, Marxism remained a major world religion with millions of followers. But then, sometime in the early 1990s, these hordes of academic & intellectual Marxists suddenly became almost extinct.
The cult lingers on in a few tiny circles. Class and Struggle in Australia makes some good points but it won't convince anybody who doesn't want to be convinced.

History muddles

2006-08-28T18:47:00.000+10:00

The Australian misreads the history of:
the 1930s when elite wisdom in Europe held that having been hard done by at Versailles, Germany should be allowed to re-arm - despite Hitler's stated feelings about the Jews and easily discerned desire for global conquest.
Germany was hard done by at Versailles and this contributed substantially to the fall of German democracy, for democracy was seen by many as associated with national weakness and humiliation. Versailles sought to limit the size of German military forces. To impose this on a major European power was never a viable position unless as part of a general European disarmament. How once Germany began to rearm under Hitler could it be prevented from doing so except by a pre-emptive war? European public opinion, not just 'elite' opinion, was hostile to this. I don't think anybody, including Churchill, argued that a pre-emptive war should be launched against a rearming Germany. The only viable policy was to match the German military build-up. This was done but too late. 'Appeasement' as a policy was never a debate about whether Germany should be 'allowed' to re-arm. Hitler claimed throughout this period that his sole wish was to unite into one Germany Australia and the German areas of Czechoslovakia (the 'Sudetenland'). 'Appeasement' was about whether to accept this. It should not have been accepted. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of Austria and Czechoslovakia should have been guaranteed. Once it became apparent with the German conquest of the rump Czechoslovakia in 1939 that Hitler’s ambitions extended beyond the incorporation of German speaking areas into Germany the line was drawn by Britain and security guarantees were extended to countries under threat from Germany. If people want to argue for a pre-emptive war against Iran they can do so but don't misuse history. Picking through the history of politicians long past is of limited value, but Menzies strongly supported appeasement. It was also the case that the reluctance of the democracies to support Czechoslovakia owed much to the fear of the Soviet Union, because Soviet troops would have required for any defence of Czechoslovakia. It would be a better, but still I think incorrect, argument to claim that Israel’s control over the West Bank and Gaza, despite the wishes of their population, is justified on the grounds of secure borders as Czechoslovakia argued about the Sudetenland.

Generic vs. Individual votes

2006-08-19T14:44:00.000+10:00

Interesting comparisons of generic Congressional preference polls with individual polls in key districts by a GOP supporter. He argues that the Republican candidates poll well ahead of the generic vote.

Connecticut problems and potential lessons

2006-08-18T18:56:00.000+10:00

Interesting poll here suggests that Lieberman has been able to squeeze the Republican vote and combine this with a portion of the Democratic vote to carve out a 12% lead. Just as I predicted. The pollster describes this as 'astounding'. He should look to Australia where it is quite common for independents to squeeze the vote of one major party. Tactical voting is however unknown to a two-party system. Lieberman needs to be tied to Republican policies in the eyes of voters. His campaign to market himself as a 'moderate' may be infuriating given how the Republicans have tacked away from the path of moderation towards relentless partisanship, but progressives need to respond to this rather than allow the right to set the agenda. They should heed the words of William Galston:
it is hardly reassuring to learn that according to a 2005 Pew Research Center survey, only 29 percent of Americans regard the Democratic Party as friendly to religion, down from 40 percent a year earlier. Nor is it comforting that Al Gore lost the married vote by 9 points and John Kerry by 15. (Bill Clinton just about broke even among these voters in both 1992 and 1996.) And it is astounding to learn that Republicans are winning majorities among voters who are moderates on abortion...Because there are at least 50 percent more conservatives than liberals, Democrats can win national elections only if they gain supermajorities of voters who are neither liberal nor conservative. John Kerry's 54 percent of the moderate vote was good, but not good enough. And while moderates are a bit more like liberals than conservatives, their outlook and policy preferences are not identical to those of our liberal base, which gave 85 percent of its vote to Kerry. There is no - repeat - no-possibility that a politics of liberal purity that fully satisfies the base can garner a national majority anytime soon.