From The Mailbox

An End To The Culture Wars

One of the most traumatic and disconcerting things of the Howard regime was the way it would protest a bias in such venerable institutions as the ABC and then try to throttle it, threaten it, and install hostile-minded apparatchiks as quisling board-members to silence criticism. 11 and a half hears of that hateful idiocy later, Australia is only slowly waking up from the nightmare.

Anyway, this was sent in by Walk-off HBP and I think it deserves a read.

The thought that the culture war is over, and that Janet Albrechtsen, Christopher Pearson, Gerard Henderson, Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt et al can be left baying impotently at the moon while the rest of Australia gets on with life may comfort some. It is tempting to agree with George Miller, who declared at the AFI awards last week that sunny and wiser days are ahead.

But culture wars, like the war on terror in which the culture warriors have invested so much ink and newsprint, do not have definitive conclusions. We may be living in sunny and wiser days, but they are at most a time of truce for the drawing of new battle lines, not a general peace.

This is partly because some of the culture warriors have predictably rushed to misdescribe the decision that Australians made a fortnight ago, so that their preferred hate figures can continue to be accused of being somehow disconnected from, or even hostile to, popular sentiment.

Thus Gerard Henderson, in The Sydney Morning Herald last Tuesday, conceded that Kevin Rudd's victory was a "triumph for him and his family, as well as for the Labor Party and its dominant social democratic tradition" — and then proceeded to assure us that it was not necessarily a victory for the left, "the base of which these days is outside the ALP".

Henderson did not explain why he appears to think that "the left" can still be used these days to refer to a distinct and coherent movement with a "base", rather than being mostly a label for an otherwise amorphous group of people in cafes who are not avidly reading Christopher Hitchens on the war on terror.

Instead, having conjured up his straw person, he began a diatribe against Robert Manne, who had supposedly given "the left" its voting orders in a Monthly article published shortly after Rudd's elevation to the Labor leadership.

That article, as I recall, was chiefly an expression of hope that the forthcoming election would result in a restoration of decency in public life. How such a hope could fail to resonate with "the social democratic tradition", Henderson did not say. It was enough that he had evoked an image of his straw person, "the left", being rallied by hate figure No. 1, the insidiously manipulative puppetmaster Professor Manne.

Expect more of this. Spinning arguments to the effect that what some of you believe just happened is not what really happened, and that if you thought you had any part in it you really didn't, because it's not about you, after all, is what culture warriors do. There is not even a remote prospect that they will cease doing so just because the Coalition happens to be out of office. Apart from anything else, as members of the chattering classes they affect to despise it is their livelihood.

The spin may be finessed a little, perhaps by attempting to schmooze the new government, Henderson-style: e.g. an acknowledgement that the victory belonged to "Labor and its dominant social democratic tradition", in which the tradition is redefined to include people like Henderson but not people like Robert Manne or anyone else who might have thought they had some claim to be part of it. But otherwise it'll be the same old warrior waffle.

There is another side of the culture war that never ends which the warriors rarely acknowledge, perhaps because waging the war is their livelihood. It is simply this: that the waffle is so ineffectual. Appointments to the boards of public broadcasters and museums matter, because the boards make decisions. But all the sound and fury expended by the warriors in commentariat mode has evidently mattered much less. Indeed, the battlers whom they liked to extol as the opposite of the reviled cafe-lurking "left" proved immune to it.

I hope this change of government signals a greater shift away from tabloid thinking. Though I can't imagine the Angry Fat Man even conceding that the Howard government got kicked out because John Howard was past his use-by date. The problem now is that there are so many young people out there with tabloid minds and tabloid thoughts, ready to point the finger at the ABC of all things, screaming reporting bias.
The torture never stops.