The Breaking Of The Middle

...And The Disintegrating Centre

I was at a party surrounded by many active thinkers and writers. You could say they were the best minds of this generation once upon time ago, who had gone on to do their respective important things in their lives. It's almost humiliating to be the guy who didn't do much except this blog here, but hey, that's life. Not everybody gets what they want in their life.

Most were academics and teachers, and those that weren't were owners of white-collar businesses and authors of note. What was interesting with this crowd is how they were once centre-left moderates on University of Sydney's campus a few decades ago, and until very recently had stayed moderate and centre-left, but had decidedly turned to the hard Left in the last 2 years. They're now telling me they were going to vote for the Greens at the next election. They're abandoning the ALP.

I listened to what they had to say and it boiled down to a no confidence motion towards the entire ALP as it stands today. Bill Shorten wasn't cutting it as their leader. It's not surprising given the brain power of the people at this party - Bill Shorten isn't impressing them any one bit. Shorten's mumbled position of small-target-until-election-time isn't going to strike a cord with these intellectuals. The Gillard government essentially burned through their patience with the ALP already, so Shorten was essentially getting no leash from these people. The vision they had was for the Greens under Dr. DiNatale to step forward as the senior partner of a Broad Left alliance with the ALP reduced to a junior role. They said they couldn't wait for the ALP to reform while there were pressing issues. They needed a Leftist party with which they could throw their lot in.

They're not growing conservative with old age, this lot. They were strengthening in their conviction, as they decided to move to the left, abandoning the ALP. And these were the people who grabbed me back in my youth and took me to the Centre-left in the first place. They've now vacated that spot and decamped further away leaving me sort of holding the ALP bag. Basically it looks like the ALP lost the campus and intellectuals to the Greens.

What this means is that the centre is being vacated by the left, while the ALP itself is left stranded without its traditional base. The ALP might end up fading and disappearing.

Bob Ellis Thinks The Liberals Will Disintegrate

Bob Ellis thinks there won't even be a Liberal Party by 2020. What's interesting about his post is that he seems to think the centre is crumbling for the Liberal Party as well, as they too shift, but further to the political right. As the great brains trust was explaining to me at the party, if Christopher Pyne and George Brandis represent the moderates in the Liberal Party, then the right end of the Liberal Party are nutjob rightwing fascists. The stupidity of the fascist position is being played out daily with the incessant appeals to fear through beating the drum of the security issues. Quite simply, the Liberal Party has long vacated the middle and gone to the right, and that should be leaving the middle the the ALP. Yet the ALP has been so inept it is losing its base as it occupies the middle.

Demographically speaking, the Pre-Boomers who support the conservatives are dying out. That vision of Australia is vanishing daily with the elderly checking out of Life Hotel. In its stead are the Baby Boomers heading into retirement, but they haven't changed their politics a great deal. There's a large chunk of them who are still on the political left, and so the demographic certainty that the Coalition had during the Howard years where they could rely on the passive grey vote, is not likely to hold in the near future. This leaves the decidedly ideologically right fascists - and this explains the scary three ring circus that is the Coalition government today, where the motivated members of the political machine on the right are not conservative in the older sense but ideological fascists.

Naturally one wonder just how much fascism can appeal to wider Australian electoral sentiments. One Nation with its clocked Bogan moron-o-cratic ideas indicates that it can be dressed up in jingoism and sold to a portion of the population. Yet One Nation never really made inroads into the middle enough to last. Independent senator David Leyonhjelm is a 'Liberal Democrat' in name but is essentially running a radical libertarian line - and I don't think he's having any more of an impact than Brain Harradine did in his day. This leads one to suspect that if the Liberal Party does fade or disintegrate due to demographics, then we will be seeing a particular vision of and for Australia, passing into history.

All Of This Is Very France In The 1930s

I like to remind people of Jean-Paul Sartre's book 'Age of Reason' in such instances. In the context where fascism was rising in Spain, the main character Mathieu is approached to joining the left in the Spanish Civil War. Mathieu turns them down because he judges it to be not yet his own war. And until the war come to his doorstep, it is not for him to take up arms.

The hardening of the fascist position in Australia is only in its second phase at this point in time. There arena weapons and signs of armed conflict. Yet if this is enough to provoke the Centre-Left moderates to move to the Greens, then we're seeing a replay of that dynamic. What concerns me the most is that all of these people moving to the left know how student politics played out in the late 1970s and they are totally cognisant of the players involved in that event, now being in Parliament. They are not taking chances. So while we may not descend into a civil war, we may descend into utter chaos when the middle ground totally dries up and there is only the hard right and hard left.
And frankly, this is now possibly on the cards for Australian politics.