How to stop losing

First they came for the socialists — and I didn’t speak out, because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists — and I didn’t speak out, because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for Andrew Bolt — and I didn’t speak out, because I thought he had it coming, to be honest. Go right ahead actually. Take him.

Please.

***

The closest I’ve ever had to a proper job was a self-employed gig as a VCE English tutor. The money was good, demand was fairly steady, and, best of all, the work itself was relatively repetitive.

99% of VCE English tutoring was just delivering rehearsed answers to formulaic questions about the English syllabus, over and over again:

Q: “What does *insert Shakespeare vocabulary* mean?”
A: “Well, what he’s really saying is…”

Q: “How would you answer *insert essay topic from practice exam*?”
A: “I’d tackle it by…”

Q: “Do you think I could get a *insert unrealistically high study score* if I work really hard?”
A: “Dream big!”

Occasionally though, I’d get a curveball — a question that, rather inhumanely, forced me to think on my feet and divert from the script.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about one of these questions, and the answer I ended up giving. The student was John (not his real name — I take tutor-client confidentiality very seriously), and we were working on language analysis, an exercise where students analysed the arguments and techniques used in a piece of persuasive writing.

The article we were analysing was an Andrew Bolt hit-job on the School Climate Strikes, and the little ‘context-box’ adjoined by his teacher noted that Bolt was a ‘right-wing commentator.’ John had obviously heard the term before, but wasn’t totally clear on what it meant, so he asked me to describe, as best as I could, what it meant to be ‘right-wing.’

At the time I told him something generic about “small government, civil liberty and incremental change” but John — if you’re reading this — I’d like another go at answering.

Because being right wing in 2020 means attacking women, black people, and rape victims, defending fascists, paedophiles, and conspiracy theorists, and dedicating a segment on your self-titled TV show to your own lack of media representation.

It means boasting about fiscal prudence while funding renovations for North Sydney rowing clubs, slamming corruption in unions while equivocating about corporate wage theft, and accusing progressives of ‘elitism’ while pushing to cut welfare and slash top marginal tax rates.

It means inciting hate with impunity while catastrophising the left’s ‘cancel culture’, basing your newspaper’s editorial strategy on Das Reich while calling out left-wing media bias, and melting down over lolly packaging (Redskins) while criticising a culture of offence.

But above all, it means winning elections.

Right wing parties have won 3 consecutive elections in Australia, 8 of the last 11 elections in Britain, 8 of the last 13 presidential elections in America, and elections in Germany, Brazil, Italy, the Philippines and Austria to boot.

If right wingers are as morally repulsive as we know they are, why are they so bloody good at beating us?

I’ve been grappling with this question for a while. I don’t profess to have all, or even many of the answers, but I have some thoughts.

I hope to post a few of these, looking at different countries’ political climates, but for now, here’s America.

On Trump and the American Right

The Problem with Apu is a documentary written by comedian Hari Kondabolu, unpacking the offensive tropes and stereotypes embedded in Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons, an Indian storekeeper voiced by the very-much-not-Indian Hank Azaria.

The documentary was compelling, and in January this year Azaria announced that he would no longer be voicing Apu, saying “once I realised that that was the way this character was thought of, I just didn’t want to participate in it anymore. It just didn’t feel right.”

This is certainly a positive development.

But here’s my issue — my Problem with the Problem with Apu if you like.

Over the last century, the Left has moved away from traditional-Left issues of economic redistribution to non-material social issues. In other words, class is no longer the sole fault line in left-right political debates. Race, religion, sex, sexuality, gender-identification, and disability have all (correctly) been identified as markers of privilege and disadvantage.

Within this broad shift, there’s been another shift in recent years. LGBTQA+ activists may once have limited their focus to tangible forms of legal discrimination — the criminalisation of homosexuality, discriminatory marriage laws, or the mis-gendering of the trans community in the penal system — but they have now shifted attention to more elusive forms of homo- and trans-phobia in the media and popular culture.

They now focus on not just explicit laws or acts of discrimination, but on the power of everyday homophobic language, on homophobic ‘micro-aggressions’, on the representation of LGBTQA+ people in pop culture.

This type of social analysis isn’t brand new, but the traction it’s gained in mainstream political circles certainly is. When right-wingers talk about the ‘Left’, it’s generally this strand of left-wing politics that they’re talking about — the strand that problematises words like ‘loony’ and ‘blind-spot’, and TV shows like The Simpsons and Fawlty Towers. The ‘PC’ strand.

So what’s my issue then? Am I on an Andrew Bolt unity ticket? Do I think PC culture has gone too far?

The opposite actually.

I think that PC culture hasn’t gone far enough. Or more specifically, I think the PC left has quite a glaring, forgive the problematic word, ‘blind-spot.’

You see, there could quite easily be a spin-off to the Apu doco called The Problem With Cletus, centring on Cletus, the dumb, gap-toothed ‘slack-jawed yokel’, who ticks every box on the ‘lazy-condescending-stereotype-of-dumb-hicks’ checklist.

Because while liberals in America will unhesitantly chide others for their ‘problematic’ representation of women, gay people, or Indian store-keepers, there is one problematic stereotype that they still find endlessly amusing.

Rednecks!

Haha, they don’t speak good English!

Haha, they farm the land!

Haha, they’re so dumb and prejudiced!

Haha, they live in shacks!

Look closely, and you’ll see this stereotype everywhere in American pop culture. In movies, TV shows, in the analysis of pundits on the news.

The most egregious example is the skin-crawlingly smug comedy career of Jordan Klepper, who made a name for himself on the Daily Show by attending Trump rallies in the mid-West, finding the lowest IQ ‘yokels’ he could find, and asking them policy questions.

The questions were straight forward, but that doesn’t make the substance of the joke any less condescending and awful.

Lol, aren’t they stupid?

Omg, they’re stumbling over their words!

Share this post, tag your friends, guys — this shit is wild!

Revelling in the stupidity of others is, in any case or context, arrogant and elitist, but it’s even more baffling in the current political climate in America.

When will coastal liberals finally realise that Trump’s electoral success was as much as a reaction to them, as it was to the oft-touted issues of trade and immigration?

Trump voters hate you, because everything you’ve done for the last 20 years — in politics and pop culture — has signalled that you hate them.

At the same time as you’ve been lecturing them for laughing at offensive representations in the media, you’ve been laughing at offensive representations of them in the exact same way. Trump voters might look stupid in Jordan Klepper videos, but they’re perceptive. They’ve noticed, guys! They know what you think of them! They’ve seen your tweets!

Trump, in his own brazenly hypocritical way, shone a light on the hypocrisies of the modern American Left. Because when liberals cried foul at Trump calling politicians, veterans and journalists stupid, Trump voters chorused: you do that to us!

When liberals cried foul at Trump’s bald-faced lies and unfulfillable promises, Trump voters chorused: what about the decades of broken promises from Democratic presidents, senators, governors and mayors?

When liberals cried foul that Trump had no concrete plans, Trump voters chorused: what’s your plan for fighting unemployment in towns decimated by free trade? What are you going to do about systematic poverty in the mid-West?

When liberals called Trump a hypocrite, Trump voters didn’t even know what to chorus, so baffled were they by liberals’ total blindness to their own inconsistency.

Now, none of this is to say that American liberals are in any way morally equivalent to Trump — Trump is fundamentally amoral, and liberals aren’t.

Liberals have morals and principles, but the problem — The Problem with the Left — is that these principles are only selectively applied.

To quote Billy Bragg, who was quoting Jesus, “do to others as you would have them to do to you.” The contempt shown by many Trump voters to liberals, to minority groups, to journalists and commentators, is how those voters feel that they’ve been treated.

Though Democrats themselves seem blissfully aware of this fact, the Democratic Party inhabits a bubble. If America is ever going to heal, Democrats need to not only escape that bubble, but reckon with the fact that everyone outside the bubble is sick and tired of their constant inability to realise they’ve been in a bubble this whole time.

That’s a lot of confusing bubble talk, but I hope it gets the point across.

Mirage of success

If, as just about every poll in existence shows, Joe Biden going to cruise to victory over Trump, why should we care about any of this?

Well, to incorporate another aquatic-type metaphor (non-bubble based, don’t worry), I firmly believe Biden’s success is a mirage.

Bar another October surprise, Biden should win, and win comfortably. But is winning enough? Or more specifically, is winning the way that he’s going to win, with the electoral coalition that he’s assembled, enough?

Many people have called Biden a ‘centrist’, and maybe he used to be, but the truth is that he’s nothing of the sort this election cycle. The only way to classify Biden in his current iteration is ‘anti-Trump’.

Biden is an anti-Trump chameleon who changes tone depending on what group of Trump-disaffected stakeholders he’s talking to. If he’s talking to suburban swing voters, he’s a cautious moderate planning incremental reforms. If he’s talking to refugees from the Bernie campaign, he has the most progressive platform since FDR. When he’s talking to both, he’s just good old uncle Joe, who you can definitely trust not to tweet as much as the other guy.

Centrists, at the very least, have earnest beliefs in the importance of compromise and civility, but Biden — this election cycle at least — believes in nothing except winning. He’ll do whatever it takes, in whatever lane it takes, to beat Donald Trump and take office. It’s a ruthless form of electoral pragmatism that — although you can disagree with what he thinks it does and doesn’t take to win (as I do) — this political moment requires.

But while this ‘whatever-it-takes’ strategy should prove successful in November, it offers little hope for the future.

Because enough voters may vote for you to get Trump out of office, but why should they vote for you next time, when Trump (presumably) isn’t standing? What happens in 2024, when the chaos and carnage of the Trump years is a distant memory? What about 2028? 2032? 2036? I’ll stop listing election years now, but you get the point.

For all he talks about “healing the nation”, Biden has no actual plan to heal the divides between Trump’s rusted on base and the rest of America. What comes after anti-Trumpism? How does the Democratic party win over Trump’s base, made up, don’t forget, of a significant number of ex-Democrat voters?

Biden doesn’t know the answer. No one in the Democratic Party seems to know, mostly because they don’t think it’s a valid question.

States like Texas and Georgia are beginning to lean blue not because white Southerners are returning to the Democratic party in large numbers, but because of demographic shifts. In 10 years, maybe even 5, maybe even 2, the South will be majority black and Latino, and the Southern wall that has been red since Reagan will once again turn blue. The Democrats won’t need to win over Trump’s base, because this base will be electorally irrelevant.

Let’s assume they’re right. I’m no geographer, so I have no idea if there demographic assumptions are right, but let’s assume the Democrats will soon accrue a rusted-on, unbeatable majority. What then?

Is wilfully ignoring 40% of the public any way to run a country? Is it not symptomatic of the same condescending elitism that drove that 40% into the political fringes in the first place? Is creating an exclusive political ruling class not a recipe for revolution or civil war?

No, yes, and yes are the answers to those questions respectively. Anti-Trump might be enough for now, but it won’t be enough forever.

Eventually — not now, but soon — something has to change.

Let’s end this article

Like a lot of young people, I’ve become incredibly frustrated with politics.

Because of issues like climate change definitely, but also because, more generally, no one with power seems to get it.

Everywhere I look in politics and the mainstream media, people who get paid to have ideas seem to constantly miss the point. There are many hundreds of excellent commentators out there, but you have to go out of your way to find them — track them down on Twitter, listen to their podcasts, read their articles on crowd-sourced publishing websites like Current Affairs and Patreon.

But the people who write columns in national newspapers, the people who host segments on national television, the people who make actual political decisions, seem totally oblivious to the actual political reality they inhabit.

Trump won because of Russia. What we really need is for the major parties to just get along with each other. Compared to other points of history, we’re doing actually doing pretty well.

People with power seem to know about as much about politics as my English student John, only they don’t have the same humility he had. Rarely do they stop, take a step back, challenge their assumptions, and ask questions.

And the ones who do ask questions — the ones who have considered answers about the Trump phenomenon, and the future beyond ‘Anti-Trump’ — don’t seem to have power. They’re not the ones running mainstream political campaigns. Their columns aren’t front page material in national newspapers. They don’t get regular features on TV.

This isn’t a plea for power, nor do I think I have the right answers — this article is a collection of loosely connected observations, not a definitive set of recommendations

I frankly don’t how things change. I don’t know how we elevate the views of those who ‘get it’, and quieten the voices of those who don’t, stubbornly loud though they are.

I don’t know how the Left stops losing — even when, come November this year, we (hopefully) start winning elections. How do we stop losing support in communities that were once rusted on to the cause of the Left? How do we stop losing the moral high ground that, in the time of giants like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, our ideas occupied?

I know how we start this process — we have to wake up to the part that we’ve played in emboldening the rise of exploitative right-wing politicians. But I don’t know where we go from there, or where the process ends.

Maybe it’ll take a once-in-a-generation left-wing presidential candidate, a younger Bernie Sanders, who can bring fringe voters back into the fray with a compassionate, populist campaign for social justice.

Maybe that leader already exists (AOC!), maybe they’re yet to emerge.

And maybe this will never happen.

Maybe America will descend into civil war, and maybe the rest of the Western world will disintegrate with it.

Who knows?

I certainly don’t. I do know one thing though. If we’re going to avoid that path, eventually… we’re going to have to stop losing.