On Blogging Politics

Whither The Common Sense?

You might find this hard to believe but I don't much like politics. I don't like reading about it or arguing about it or even blogging about it. The fact that I do is an indication of how irritated I am with just what is being reported as going on.

And in most part when I do blog about politics here I'm not arguing a point so much as pointing out the abject stupidity of politicians. In that sense conservative politicians are a gift to bloggers like me because there's no shortage of fodder for ridicule. The problem of course is that there is no avoiding politics and that difficulty extends from the extent of policies enacted through to the hyperactive news cycle which keeps pumping headlines at you.

I am, however, an information junky and quite possibly a text junky so I can't resist reading the new thing as the headlines appear; and when conservative politicians are true-to-form, well, I'll find something to blog about here. Yes, I did blog a lot about politics in the Rudd-Gillard years and there was much stupidity and mayhem in that era so maybe it's not fair to just beat up on conservatives in this country. It has to be said, there are plenty of nice people in the conservative camp.
But in most part, politics gives me the shits, and the worst of the lot is the deficient mentation that passes as conservatism.

This feeling of resentment and irritation extends quite a way through many areas and subjects. The two party system in the Westminster system does offer a great deal of institutional stability but is also a great instrument for reducing issues to their crudest talking points. Maybe this is a feature of democracy that cannot be bypassed. The fact that the Weimar Republic could give rise to Nazism through sheer electoral fatigue doesn't bode well for a sophisticated political discussion. Maybe it is better to reduce any complicated argument down to the simplest, idiotic sloganeering although that is tremendously difficult to embrace. It's a bit like arguing that in order to avoid the big stupidity of totalitarianism, we must commit to a daily dose of endless, minor stupidities, and even there is no guarantee we won't be visited upon by the "big stupid" such as Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Pol-Pot-ism, Ayatollah-sim, Islamism, or any radical crackpot ideology that would rob us of the joys of sex, alcohol and satire.

Republics with Presidents fare worse than the Westminster system. Many of the military juntas of the last 100 years (up to and including the fictional Star Wars one) are in effect failed Republics. If anything is learnt in modern history, it is how frequently democracy fails and gives rise to crappy juntas, dictators and chairmen of the secretariat who control from behind the scenes. Nobody plays by the rules for long, so the calls for eternal vigilance are certainly true. We can put forth cultural and temporal explanations to explain it post factum but ultimately power is its own logic.

Up until recently, and by this I would say the last 5 years, politics was enacted by those who exercised as much gravitas and respect for institutions. It was operated by people who knew full well that precedents were problematic things and that devising the new to be fair, was the utmost difficult thing. Institutions had to be respected, convention had to be applied, tradition had to be carried forth and thus the apparatus of government was protected from the kinds of change that give rise to senseless radicalism.

Suddenly, around the world we see that there are these figures who want to play hard fast with the very things they should be protecting and nurturing in a democracy. US Republican congressmen inviting Netanyahu to deliver a speech to the House of Representatives; 47 US Republican Senators writing a letter to Iran; Tony Abbott denouncing the Human Rights commissioner an then the United Nations; Shinzo Abe trying to rewrite the constitution in Japan; there's a lot of weird stuff going around. This is against the context where the global economy has been in uncharted waters since the GFC and economic growth is hard to come by and various central banks are in currency wars.
It hasn't been normal for a long time. Worse still, what can you do about it?

About the only thing you can do is to keep track of it and fight the rise of stupidity at every turn. In Australia, we're already at the point where we've allowed some kind of stupid to enter the centre of power, to be elected and enact stupidity. It's rabid, feral and unwholesome - and relies upon the electorate being seduced by the simplicity of being anti-intellectual. Otherwise, how does one explain the wilful blindness towards facts and science by this government?

And so believe it or not, it really isn't my thing to be blogging about politics so much; but in some subtle, digital, internet-era way, the fight has arrived at my doorstep. There's just too much stupidity to tolerate out there. That is why I've been blogging about politics so much recently. Believe me when I say I want to go back to movies and records and baseball. We are living in interesting times. The side effect is that we end up doing things we don't want to do.