Sometime ago, two scholars – an American, and an Australian – discussed descriptions of populism and progressivism in the history of the United States and Australia after 1945. The reflection that flows here is a synopsis of that conversation, reshaped as an argument on our current political position.
Marilyn Lake’s book, “Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform” (2019), has recently opened up the subject in the earlier period of the previous century. It is a subject which received much literary attention in the 1960s, expressed as the ideological politics between New Left and Neo-Conservative thinking, and aligned in the modernist conflicts of race, gender, and class. Against the more radical postmodernist propositions of it’s all relative and no conversation or perspective can hold firm to true claims, but while accommodating moderate postmodernist propositions of compatibility and inclusion, the reality is that the modernist conflicts have come back to bite in the year 2020 (and has for some time). The populist nonsense on Covid-19 and the presidency of Donald Trump brought together, on one hand, common sense conservatives, and on the other hand, democratic rights radicals, into a much needed alliance.
Those of the intellectual traditions of empathy and critical thinking need to work together to push back the forces, of right and left, which has twisted what was once good in an anti-elite, anti-establishment, anti-ruling class appeal to the people, as a commitment to some unrefined ideals about individual autonomy and freedom. The populist good, and its once true claims, had erred in its ugly form of populism, and this was well explained, long ago, with Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963). In Australia, in the same era, Manning Clark was the historian who saw the value in the intellectual traditions which shaped the cultural life of the country, and how those traditions were being eroded by the modernist conflicts. Donald Horne, as a cultural critic with both conservative and radical outlooks, also fleshed out the story of how populist and progressivist ideas were challenging the Australian identity. The messaging has not changed since the 1960s, despite the shallow spin of contemporary ‘public relations’ thinking. The true savagery and barbarity of the modernist conflict has only increased, doubly dumbed-down and bedazzling in the new world of social media. It is the reason why Nicholas Buccola’s critique in “The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America” (2019) is so important. The 1965 debate between Baldwin and Buckley explains the radical call for racial justice and challenges the neo-conservatives who have taken a far-too accommodating stance with white supremacy. Buckley’s new conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s was wrong, and it is time for true Burkean conservatives –those who can advocate political revolution for social stability – to admit the terrifying and reactionary nature of today’s Republican Party; and admit it as the anti-intellectual distortion of conservative thought (i.e. it betrays itself, betrays the ideas and values).
This claim is true for Australia as well. The American version of populism, after 1945, was engaged in Australia, and often given a new coating in the Australian national mythology. It was what Donald Horne railed against as American commercialism, since mass production become to be populously valued (a new wealth for the masses). Against Horne and Clark was the popular view that we could take our White Australia Policy (white supremacy) and modernise it with an affluent white society, and token gestures to modern cosmopolitanism and compassion for Aboriginal Australia. What Horne and Clark had argued for were bold ideas and policies which meet the human needs of the day, and they shared in R. H. Tawney’s critique of “The Acquisitive Society” (1920). In each of the analysis, of such public intellectuals, there were imperfections, and they each had their own blind-spots. Richard Hofstadter denied the Catholic intellectual tradition as sufficient in American culture, a claim which can be well contested today, and Hofstadter’s claim reflected the faults in the liberal Protestant worldview. However, the broad, mid-century, American Protestant ‘intellectual’ school of thought was self-correcting, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics” (1932) had provided the required political realism. Irrespective of the faults, all of these public intellectuals upheld educative values, and education today is being undermined in the cognitive overreach of both the Right and Left in making ethical claims on what is wrong in our education systems (the ethicist Bernard Williams calls this popular move, ‘one thought too many’). The systems have failed, but the education has not, and the populist’s anti-intellectualism has made a virtue of attacking an educative outlook. Indeed, a contrast ought to be made in the lessons between Donald Horne’s “The Education of Young Donald” (1967) and Mary L. Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” (2020). Think back to Menzies’ claims for family values of the ‘forgotten people’.
Furthermore, progressive valuing is also being undermined, and this is going badly for conservatives, as well as radicals. The history after 1945 was a time of great hope. For 50 years, there have been softer versions of progressivism and anti-commercialism ideologies which have worked through the social institutions, so as to make a political come-back in the early 1990s and into the 21st century today. This can be characterised as Labor Progressivism in Australia, following Ben Chifley’s “The light on the hill” speech, delivered as his Prime Ministerial speech at a 1949 Labor conference speech at the Sydney Trades Hall. The ideals can be so summarized:
1) that only cooperation, not competition, produces success;
2) that one should work together to achieve a fair economy for all;
3) that the core value of those in the Labor movement is an inclusive and democratic process;
4) that it’s hard work existentially that actualizes goals;
5) that progressives aim toward ‘the light on the hill’, toward structural change to society/government and the world, toward welfarism (for the well-being of all, not as mere charity or government handouts);
6) that the machinery of government/state has stewardship over the individuals and has to value them, take care of them; and
7) that to be humanistic is to orient one’s life toward others.
Although it was held off in Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ long reign of the “Forgotten People” (the opposing landmark address delivered on 22 May 1942, as a call to defend the family home as “the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole”), that softer Labor Progressivism did work its way through, and gained power in Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s New Left style government (1972-1975). There was also a softer Liberal Progressivism in the declining governments of Harold Holt (1966-1967), John Gorton (1968-1971), and William McMahon (1971-1972). Electorally progressivist policies ebbed and flowed in the contest with the rise of neo-liberal politics in the governments of Malcolm Fraser (1975-1983) and John Howard (1996-2007). Fraser is interesting in this regard because after his career in politics, and as a humanitarian statesman (very much like the Jimmy Carter in his post-president years), the latter Fraser advocated a liberal Progressivism, not much different (if at all) from the Labor version. As Prime Minister, Frazer famously stated that “Life wasn’t meant to be easy”, only to reject this inference to neo-classical economic individualism. As Hegel stated, “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”.
The opposite of Labor and Liberal Progressivism in Australia, in terms of the more popular right, is not progressivism, but the same ideology as Trump’s politics – xenophobic if not outright racism, fear-based reactionary politics in the midst of sweeping cultural change. In terms of a more intellectually stable opposite, a conservative progressivism (perhaps a type of Burkean conservatism in an elite political revolution for social stability) is also possible to locate in the United States and Australia, and elsewhere. It is probably now in the conservative voices of the so-called ‘religious left of centre’, the normally apolitical churches, mosques, synagogues, and (‘secular’) civic centres, which now are finally understanding that ‘Black Lives Matter’ is the last progressive move (hopefully) to put to end the legacy of slavery.
Trump and his supports are populists and are opposed by both the leftist progressives and the establishment (Burkean) conservatives. The libertarian populists fear that the community, with its restrictive civic rules or civil religion, is seeking to take charge of them; they want to be able to say “Merry Christmas!” without fearing a cultural event being cancelled or worrying about offending someone. The irony in this nonsense stance is that the populist is defending the right to express a cultural meme when other socially-oriented individuals (as the community) are well prepared to criticise owned symbolic usages in the cultural-centric thinking. There are many devout Christians who are pissed off with the populist for culturally-defensive nonsense about “Christmas” because it undercuts the very spiritual or religious nature of the message.
With all its faults, Richard Hofstadter still stands well with “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” (1963). One reason is that it offers an American ‘Christian’ perspective that engages with American ‘secularised’ classicism. I say ‘Christian’ and ‘secularised’ cautiously because the lines are entangled in different traditions. The populist arguments are entangled because those who are uneducated cannot see the lines between the intellectual traditions, as well as being blind to uncertain boundaries between ‘Church and State’ and ‘Religion and Politics’. The radical postmodernists have got the whole analysis wrong. The world is not fragmented; it is entangled in confused thinking. We need to return to the broader and inclusive education, and work together towards compatible ends.
Thanks to, and acknowledgement of, Tom Osg for helping to refine the thinking. The opinions are those of the author.
Buccola, Nicholas (2019). The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America, Princeton University Press.
Clark, Manning (1963; fourth revised 2006). A Short History of Australia, Penguin-Random House.
Hofstadter, Richard (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Horne, Donald (1964). The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.
Horne, Donald (1967). The Education of Young Donald, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.
Horne, Donald (1976). Death of The Lucky Country, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.
Lake, Marilyn (2019). Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press.
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1932). Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Tawney, R. H. (1920). The Acquisitive Society, London: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Trump, Mary L. (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wolf, Susan. ‘One Thought Too Many’: Love, Morality, and the Ordering of Commitment’ in Ulrike Heuer and Gerald Lang (ed. 2012), Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes From the Ethics of Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press.
Donald Trump’s “Radicalism” and Scott Morrison’s “Liberalism”
The American Revivalist Tradition Mark II Since 1995
9 June 2024
“The successful outcome of complaints in relation to Citipointe’s January 2022 enrolment contract also sends a strong message to the NSW Government that it is time to remove out-dated privileges that allow religious schools to discriminate against LGBTQ people,” he said. [Alastair Lawrie, Public Interest Advocacy Centre, SMH, Jun 10, 2024, updated]
Since 1995 I had forewarned where the American Revivalist Tradition (ART) was taking the Christian institutions in Australia, from my doctorate awarded by The University of Queensland. I had, though, never really understood the spiral of history, and could not imagine how the impact of ART would contribute to our current Trumpian and Putinian state of affairs. At the time, the “American empire” was, again, on the ascent, and the “Russian Empire” had collapse. With the rise of the economically-driven American secular nationalism, came the reinvigorated Christian nationalism of the 1990s, as the Institutional Church is the handmaiden to the State. The new Evangelical outlook built on the nationalism of the 1950s in the paradigms of anti-communism and American Modernism (or “Americanism”) to which Robert Wuthnow describes as “American Religion”; also Harold Bloom in The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992; second edition 2006).
From the roots of American modernist nationalism, developed the 1960s of William F. Buckley’s neo-conservativism, the 1970s Moral Majority, the 1980s New Christian Right, and, of late, the 1990s, with succession into the early 21st century, of the Evangelical Religious-Rightist Alliance. It is important to understand that this is not the global evangelical world. American evangelicals are very divided, almost to the point of a civil war. Certainly, denominations and individual churches have split in the contemporary culture-history war. Lets be clear, Christian nationalists are not beyond turning to violence. And if Christian nationalists were to take power, again, under a presidency of Donald Trump, global evangelicals would, again, be against American culture in its degeneration. There are already Australian evangelical voices speaking up (e.g., Tim Costello, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity, in the SMH, June 9, 2024 — 5.00am).
Let’s be clear. The legacy of the ART has again become revolutionary and hypo-radical. American revivalism was born in the ethos of revolution, both before and after the American revolutionary war. The motifs of warfare are the motifs of ART. It is true that Donald Trump is an opportunist and his Christian convictions are little apparent, and, indeed, much evidence to the contrary. However, a Trump administration knows where its electoral base is, and it is in the Evangelical Religious-Rightist Alliance. There are also signs of a broader, secular, reshaping of the United States, if such alliance was successful, again. Russ Vought, the former president’s budget director, is laying the groundwork for a broad expansion of presidential powers (The Washington Post, June 8, 2024, at 6:00 a.m. EDT). Vought has led the Center for Renewing America, part of a network of conservative advocacy groups staffed by former and potentially future Trump administration officials. His ideological position is called, “radical constitutionalism.” Vought, argument in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the Left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions, and that the solution is 1) a recognition of our “post-Constitutional time,” with the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy, and to 2) give the American President more direct powers, overriding the current US constitution, and 3) allow such a President to carry out “retribution.”
Even as there has been significant resistance to Americanization in Australia, recent militant protests during the short era of the global pandemic shows a sizable section of the Australian population captive to American national rightist narratives. The role of the 30th prime minister of Australia (2018-2022), Scott Morrison, was central to this warped, and populist, American-influenced, Australian nationalism, even as the Prime Minister was himself a target of nationalist attacks on the government’s pandemic health restrictions. Grace Tame, the 2021 Australian of the Year, and director of The Grace Tame Foundation, published a damning critique of Scott Morrison in The Monthly (June 2024). Tame’s critique is based on Morrison’s Plans for Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness, a 272-page desperate battle cry to American right-wing Christian nationalists. Tame writes:
“Plans for Your Good flows with all the plausible, coherent, rhythmic religiosity of a psalm recited by the Swedish Chef. At best, it is unoriginal, inconsequential, cyclical, paternalistic evangelism. At worst, it is a dubious attempt at indoctrination. But neither Christian values nor the practise of faith more broadly are the problem. It’s Morrison’s willingness to use them as tools of manipulation, distraction and evasion. In the Gospel According to Scott, he is always the hero, never the villain. His superpower is amnesia.”
Australian popular culture is exposed to Morrison’s Americanisation. The 2022 Australian Lamb promotional video illustrated the point. Morrison before politics was director of the New Zealand Office of Tourism and Sport (1998- 2000) and was managing director of Tourism Australia (2004- 2006). The lamb video (“lamb-to-the-slaughter”) was à la Morrison’s Where the Bloody Hell Are You? It was Morrison tourism schema that overrode the nationalistic-centralism and the care for mental health issues, by “Just laugh it off’; as Morrison did as Prime Minster, on refugees, Aboriginal communities in isolation, and ‘policies’ whatever that is. The public cultural perception became “Yes, let’s have a laugh. Oh, yes, the French arriving in subs, I wonder what that is about.” The culture thinking was one of a bubble-encased country rather than the capacity to explore a world on its own terms.
More seriously, with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Hillsong Church in the news, in the local Australian media, it seems that the spiral of history has returned, at the point that Neo-Pentecostalism again dominates politics; the fall of Australia’s first and (I cautiously predict) onlyPentecostal Prime Minister, and its continuing legacy. It goes back to the days of Aimee Semple McPherson and her Megachurched Foursquare Church, in California. This was explained in the Politics, ScoMo’s Pentecostalism, and Indigenous Philosophy (or ScoMo Native Pentecostalism), Sea of Faith Brisbane CBD Group, 17 October 2021.
The ART influences among Australian evangelical believers made a mess of their thinking on Indigenous Australia. First, is the “what” of the history of Australian Pentecost missions among the indigenous inhabitants. The Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements reveal the patterns which had similarities to other white mission stations: Isabella Hetherington at the Daintree Mission (1928), the Enticknap brothers working among Islander and Aboriginal people around Townsville (1923), as examples. The general observation has to be made is that missions are entangled in the politics, particular for Queensland history, and this includes the history around Pacific Islanders in central Queensland. Rosalind Kidd’s The Way We Civilise (1997) is still the best work on this topic.
The argument from the Pentecostal historiographer Mark Hutchinson is that “charismatic faith is now ‘normative’ in the Uniting Church’s Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, a synthetic and often conservative indigenous voice in an otherwise quite liberal and white tradition.” It is a fair statement, but it is very troubling that the voice of the “quite liberal and white tradition” is now ‘normative’ for Aboriginal Christians, and no less for the Pentecostals among the tribal groupings. The statement is true as historical fact. The great failure, though, is to understand multiple indigenous voices within a Pentecostal world. Facts are Facts, but the Pentecost leadership has been extraordinary naive in the education of political history and sociology. If you read the Pentecostal literature that Scott Morrison reads, you will see that the facts of the deeper Aboriginal experience are downplayed by the Pentecostal leadership.
In Australian Pentecostal histories and historiography, generally, the outlook is blind-sighted to the politics. This is not only true of Australian megachurch neo-Pentecostalism but across the ART spectrum of “big belief and doubt”. Recently, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church has been in a consternation, with Gareth Hales, the son of the church’s global leader Bruce D. Hales, and his purchase of the two-hectare estate (SMH, June 9, 2024 — 5.00am). The Church’s leadership is used to espouse a doctrine of a simple and humble life, rather than a portfolio of statement homes and trophy estates, and it has become very troubling in the least. In the end it is political naivety which got the Church into this unwelcomed situation. Let’s be clear. It is the politics of corporate capitalism.
I have brought the analysis of Australian Pentecostal histories and historiography, comprehensively as a summary, into a review essay published in Journal for the Academic Study of Religion (34.2,2021, 234–237). Pentecostal traditions have had a strong self-reading of marginality in the histories. Critics have stated or inferred that Pentecostal grouping has taken marginality into a martyr complex or ‘Us and Them’ politics (Maddox 2005: 163–65, 222–23). There is a Neo-Pentecost outlook that is the legacy of the British folk tradition and its influence on ‘proto-Protestantism’ in Australia, and continually misunderstands “big belief and doubt.” There is the disconnect between the work of Australian intellectual historians and sociologists, who are considering the wider society for the local ethos, and Pentecostal historians and historiographers who have either portrayed their stories as being a-politically irrelevant (itself a politically-charged message), or speaking in the militant politics which is portrayed as a secular government out to destroy the religion of the devout.
Australian Pentecostal histories and historiography are still caught-up in American Pentecostal Whig outlooks. Often the choice of political argument depends upon the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement’s institutional advantage at each historical moment.
ART is not Australian culture, and while truly liberal Australia understands, the Australian Evangelical Religious-Rightist Alliance has taken the country into ‘strange waters.’ The success of the Australian Alliance has been mixed. Unhappy for the alliance, the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017, passed the Parliament of Australia on 7 December 2017. Happily, for the alliance, 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was defeated. It is difficult to predict an ART trajectory in Australia. The fall of Scott Morrison makes ART dominance less likely. Nevertheless, the country is still very receptive to the influences of cultural Americanisation.
SOURCES
Buch, Neville (1995). American Influence on Protestantism in Queensland since 1945. PhD diss., The University of Queensland.
Chant, Barry (2011). The Spirit of Pentecost: The Origins and Development of the Pentecostal Movement in Australia, 1870–1939. Emeth Press, Lexington, KY.
Deverell, Garry Worete (2018). Theology: A Trawloolway Man Reflects on Christian Faith. Morning Star Publishing, Reservoir, Vic.
Haack, Susan (1993). Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology. Wiley-Blackwell, London.
Hutchinson, Mark, and John Wolfe (2012). A Short History of Global Evangelicalism. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Maddox, Marion (2001). For God and Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics. Parliament of Australia, Canberra.
Maddox, Marion (2005). God under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Yong, Amos (2005). The Spirit of Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology. Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, MI.
Sarah Longwell and George Conway debrief the presidential debate, applaud Alberto Gonzales’s Harris endorsement, and talk trial timelines in DC and New York.
The splinter of the most confused will stick with Trump, but among the one-fourth estimated national population who generally supported the Republican nominee, I cannot see how large sways of republicans will continue the support.
The Focus Group Podcast on The Bulwark with Sarah Longwell: Kamala Harris crushed Donald Trump in this week’s debate…and swing voters noticed. CNN’s Dana Bash joins Sarah to discuss her new book, this week’s debate, her experience as the co-moderator of the June 27 debate, and the role of moderator fact-checking in both debates.
The Bulwark Podcast with Jeffrey Goldberg: The former president doesn’t think our country is exceptional, and the political press won’t hold him to any standard because it has zero expectations of him. Plus, Lindsey Graham is an empty shell, John Kelly was nearly driven mad working for Trump, and JD Vance can’t stop spinning conspiracies.
The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich:
It was quite a debate and quite a week. Today, Heather and I look back on both, and do our best to peer into the future. What effect will the debate have on undecided voters? What does Kamala Harris need to do in the remaining weeks? What will Trump do? Why is Trump refusing a second debate with Harris?
We also examine the consequences of Taylor Swift’s endorsement (and Elon Musk’s grade-school bully boy response). And we take a look at yesterday’s 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.
In the event of Donald Trump’s “Music Town Hall” meeting in Philadelphia suburbs, we can see how Entertainment Has Been Used to Keep Uneducated Persons Ignorant.
Buch’s Pyramid Of Social Personal Development
Two attendees separately had medical issues at Donald Trump’s town hall with supporters in the Philadelphia suburbs on Tuesday, the former president stopped the question-and-answer session and asked that music be played for the remainder of the event. Both Trump and Noem commented on the warm temperature inside in the room.
Trump paused the Q&A with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem while a medic in the room attended to the first person. During the pause, attendees in the room began to sing “God Bless America.” Later, the GOP presidential nominee asked that “Ave Maria” be played and an instrumental version of the song played over the sound system. After resuming the discussion, a second person had a medical issue. Trump and Noem again paused the Q&A after attendees stood and pointed out that someone needed medical attention.
“Let’s make it into music…who wants to hear questions!”
Jimmy Kimmel said,
“Here on another crazy day in the United States, you know…we get a lot of people watching this show on YouTube from around the world, and for those who watching from another country right now, please come help us.”
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s intervention on the Labor Government’s decision on the AUKUS agreement for increasing Australia’s defence capability in the Asia-Pacific region, is as helpful as it (also) muddies the waters of local-regional-national interactional discussions.
ANU’s Mark Kenny is reported in The New York Times as he explained the essential problem:
…Professor Kenny said that Australia should have a cleareyed debate about what kind of threat China realistically posed to the nation.
“The China question needs to be thought through much more clearly, and I don’t see a lot of evidence of that in the way the debate is being mediated at the moment,” he said.
The highly politicized nature of national security debates tends to polarize opinions and leave little room for nuance and equivocation, which could be perceived as appeasement, he added.
“The trouble with that kind of dynamic in a debate is that it clouds the opportunity for proper strategic thinking and clear strategic imagining and scenarios,” he said.
This short blog article makes the point that there is an underlying problem to Professor Kenny’s legitimate concern: how to untangle, and thus destroy, the 1990s culture-history war and its legacy, to be able to have the civil debate in the first place.
The critical issue of education (from K to postdoc) in these debates, and how it has shaped personal outlooks from decision makers, gets too much of a back seat in these debates. Keating may understand the geo-political history, but his own policy-framing (not necessarily specific policy statements in the federal-state education portfolio) in the 1990s set a disinformation on how Australians understood their intellectual history and the intellectual history of other countries. Parochialism was the correct target of Keating at the time, but his arguments entangled and hid the genuine overlap in ideas in the local-regional-national-interaction across arguments. As scholars in the marketplace, we have to act to stop the idiocy of the culture-history wars, and, perhaps, calling persons dumb does not achieve that end. It is a lesson for myself.
The difficulty in the climate of the culture-history war is the ignorance of intellectual-cultural histories, and the framing of policy in certain –and very questionable — historiography. The outrage comes from seeing the intellectual marks of personal judgement within a poor educational bubble. We have been short-changed in this country for the education in the humanities and the social science. Governments have made IT-futurism a despot in educational policies, and full-comprehensive education has become the foul victim of that policy stance. IT-futurism separates the work responsibility of knowing to the task of machine learning, not persons listening and learning from other persons directly and unfiltered by machine-like logic (the machine not having the capacity for ‘charity’ in the human formulation of critical thinking). The result is the dumbing down of the Australian population and the capacity to understand the geo-political debates.
Let me repeat several paragraphs of what I wrote on July 16, 2020.
Those of the intellectual traditions of empathy and critical thinking need to work together to push back the forces, of right and left, which has twisted what was once good in an anti-elite, anti-establishment, anti-ruling class appeal to the people, as a commitment to some unrefined ideals about individual autonomy and freedom. The populist good, and its once true claims, had erred in its ugly form of populism, and this was well explained, long ago, with Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963). In Australia, in the same era, Manning Clark was the historian who saw the value in the intellectual traditions which shaped the cultural life of the country, and how those traditions were being eroded by the modernist conflicts. Donald Horne, as a cultural critic with both conservative and radical outlooks, also fleshed out the story of how populist and progressivist ideas were challenging the Australian identity. The messaging has not changed since the 1960s, despite the shallow spin of contemporary ‘public relations’ thinking. The true savagery and barbarity of the modernist conflict has only increased, doubly dumbed-down and bedazzling in the new world of social media. It is the reason why Nicholas Buccola’s critique in “The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America” (2019) is so important. The 1965 debate between Baldwin and Buckley explains the radical call for racial justice and challenges the neo-conservatives who have taken a far-too accommodating stance with white supremacy. Buckley’s new conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s was wrong, and it is time for true Burkean conservatives –those who can advocate political revolution for social stability – to admit the terrifying and reactionary nature of today’s Republican Party; and admit it as the anti-intellectual distortion of conservative thought (i.e. it betrays itself, betrays the ideas and values).
This claim is true for Australia as well. The American version of populism, after 1945, was engaged in Australia, and often given a new coating in the Australian national mythology. It was what Donald Horne railed against as American commercialism, since mass production become to be populously valued (a new wealth for the masses). Against Horne and Clark was the popular view that we could take our White Australia Policy (white supremacy) and modernise it with an affluent white society, and token gestures to modern cosmopolitanism and compassion for Aboriginal Australia. What Horne and Clark had argued for were bold ideas and policies which meet the human needs of the day, and they shared in R. H. Tawney’s critique of “The Acquisitive Society” (1920). In each of the analysis, of such public intellectuals, there were imperfections, and they each had their own blind-spots. Richard Hofstadter denied the Catholic intellectual tradition as sufficient in American culture, a claim which can be well contested today, and Hofstadter’s claim reflected the faults in the liberal Protestant worldview. However, the broad, mid-century, American Protestant ‘intellectual’ school of thought was self-correcting, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics” (1932) had provided the required political realism. Irrespective of the faults, all of these public intellectuals upheld educative values, and education today is being undermined in the cognitive overreach of both the Right and Left in making ethical claims on what is wrong in our education systems (the ethicist Bernard Williams calls this popular move, ‘one thought too many’). The systems have failed, but the education has not, and the populist’s anti-intellectualism has made a virtue of attacking an educative outlook. Indeed, a contrast ought to be made in the lessons between Donald Horne’s “The Education of Young Donald” (1967) and Mary L. Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” (2020). Think back to Menzies’ claims for family values of the ‘forgotten people’.
Furthermore, progressive valuing is also being undermined, and this is going badly for conservatives, as well as radicals. The history after 1945 was a time of great hope. For 50 years, there have been softer versions of progressivism and anti-commercialism ideologies which have worked through the social institutions, so as to make a political come-back in the early 1990s and into the 21st century today. This can be characterised as Labor Progressivism in Australia, following Ben Chifley’s “The light on the hill” speech, delivered as his Prime Ministerial speech at a 1949 Labor conference speech at the Sydney Trades Hall. The ideals can be so summarized:
1) that only cooperation, not competition, produces success;
2) that one should work together to achieve a fair economy for all;
3) that the core value of those in the Labor movement is an inclusive and democratic process;
4) that it’s hard work existentially that actualizes goals;
5) that progressives aim toward ‘the light on the hill’, toward structural change to society/government and the world, toward welfarism (for the well-being of all, not as mere charity or government handouts);
6) that the machinery of government/state has stewardship over the individuals and has to value them, take care of them; and
7) that to be humanistic is to orient one’s life toward others.
Although it was held off in Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ long reign of the “Forgotten People” (the opposing landmark address delivered on 22 May 1942, as a call to defend the family home as “the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole”), that softer Labor Progressivism did work its way through, and gained power in Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s New Left style government (1972-1975). There was also a softer Liberal Progressivism in the declining governments of Harold Holt (1966-1967), John Gorton (1968-1971), and William McMahon (1971-1972). Electorally progressivist policies ebbed and flowed in the contest with the rise of neo-liberal politics in the governments of Malcolm Fraser (1975-1983) and John Howard (1996-2007). Fraser is interesting in this regard because after his career in politics, and as a humanitarian statesman (very much like the Jimmy Carter in his post-president years), the latter Fraser advocated a liberal Progressivism, not much different (if at all) from the Labor version. As Prime Minister, Frazer famously stated that “Life wasn’t meant to be easy”, only to reject this inference to neo-classical economic individualism. As Hegel stated, “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”.
The opposite of Labor and Liberal Progressivism in Australia, in terms of the more popular right, is not progressivism, but the same ideology as Trump’s politics – xenophobic if not outright racism, fear-based reactionary politics in the midst of sweeping cultural change. In terms of a more intellectually stable opposite, a conservative progressivism (perhaps a type of Burkean conservatism in an elite political revolution for social stability) is also possible to locate in the United States and Australia, and elsewhere. It is probably now in the conservative voices of the so-called ‘religious left of centre’, the normally apolitical churches, mosques, synagogues, and (‘secular’) civic centres, which now are finally understanding that ‘Black Lives Matter’ is the last progressive move (hopefully) to put to end the legacy of slavery.
Trump and his supporters are populists and are opposed by both the leftist progressives and the establishment (Burkean) conservatives. The libertarian populists fear that the community, with its restrictive civic rules or civil religion, is seeking to take charge of them; they want to be able to say “Merry Christmas!” without fearing a cultural event being cancelled or worrying about offending someone. The irony in this nonsense stance is that the populist is defending the right to express a cultural meme when other socially-oriented individuals (as the community) are well prepared to criticise owned symbolic usages in the cultural-centric thinking. There are many devout Christians who are pissed off with the populist for culturally-defensive nonsense about “Christmas” because it undercuts the very spiritual or religious nature of the message.
With all its faults, Richard Hofstadter still stands well with “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” (1963). One reason is that it offers an American ‘Christian’ perspective that engages with American ‘secularised’ classicism. I say ‘Christian’ and ‘secularised’ cautiously because the lines are entangled in different traditions. The populist arguments are entangled because those who are uneducated cannot see the lines between the intellectual traditions, as well as being blind to uncertain boundaries between ‘Church and State’ and ‘Religion and Politics’. The radical postmodernists have got the whole analysis wrong. The world is not fragmented; it is entangled in confused thinking. We need to return to the broader and inclusive education, and work together towards compatible ends.
References
Buccola, Nicholas (2019). The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America, Princeton University Press.
Clark, Manning (1963; fourth revised 2006). A Short History of Australia, Penguin-Random House.
Hofstadter, Richard (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Horne, Donald (1964). The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.
Horne, Donald (1967). The Education of Young Donald, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.
Horne, Donald (1976). Death of The Lucky Country, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.
Lake, Marilyn (2019). Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press.
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1932). Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Tawney, R. H. (1920). The Acquisitive Society, London: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Trump, Mary L. (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wolf, Susan. ‘One Thought Too Many’: Love, Morality, and the Ordering of Commitment’ in Ulrike Heuer and Gerald Lang (ed. 2012), Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes From the Ethics of Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press.
Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
