The Anger of the Elites

Supporters of the Voice struggle to come to terms with democracy

I've written this post after the news this morning that Julian Leeser has resigned from the Liberals' frontbench to campaign for a Yes vote at the Voice referendum.  I know Julian and I provided him a reference when he won Liberal Party preselection for the federal seat of Berowra in Sydney in 2016.  As he said announcing his resignation, 'people of goodwill can disagree' on the Voice and he's done the honorable thing by resigning from shadow cabinet.

At his press conference today Julian said 'no great nation has ever been built by dividing it' - which he believes a successful No vote will do. Many others, including me, would argue a Yes vote will do precisely what he hopes to avoid.

He also said:

There's always been a place in this country, in our heart and soul, for civil debate, for discussion that helps us find common ground and in this debate, that means not calling those who disagree with you racist or inferring they come to the table in bad faith.

And it means not inferring that those who disagree with you want special privileges.

I can see what Julian is trying to say - that there's fault on both sides - but I don't think he succeeds in proving his point.

Calling someone a 'racist' because they believe in the political equality of all Australians is very different to describing the legal consequences of the opportunity to vote for the Voice - an opportunity some Australians will have and some won't.  Yet somehow the world has changed such and the meaning of words so manipulated that suggesting we should all be treated equally is now controversial.  As Thomas Sowell puts it - 'If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labelled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today.'

There's been precious little 'civil debate' about the Voice.  The reaction of some advocates of Yes to the announcement of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party's opposition to the Voice is revealing. Their reaction says more about them than it does about the targets of their criticism.

Noel Pearson described the decision as a 'Judas betrayal of Australia', Marcia Langton accused Peter Dutton of being 'deceitful' and 'lying', Labor senator Pat Dodson claimed '[the Liberal Party] has absolutely not regard for the Aboriginal people', Victorian premier Dan Andrews called the Liberals 'a mean, nasty outfit', while former Labor minister Craig Emerson suggested the Liberals were engaged in 'bloody-minded opposition for opposition's sake', while even the normally thoughtful Troy Bramston said the Liberals  were playing 'an ugly political game in a race to the bottom'.

All of this was summed up neatly by Alexander Downer yesterday:

Yet those same people talk of the need to bring the country together and to unite Australians.  Well, does calling the leader of the opposition a heartless Judas have anything to do with bringing the country together?  It seems the exact opposite - a deliberate attempt to denigrate and humiliate all those opposed to the Voice proposal.

Let's hope those who have descended to such language will reflect on the consequences of using that language and realise that to do so is a mistake not be repeated.

It's noteworthy that few, if any, Yes supporters have attempted to engage with principled arguments for the No case.  Namely, that the Voice will entrench in Australia racial division forever and will overturn the basic tenets of liberal democracy.  Chris Merritt, a long-time legal affairs writer and now vice-president of the Rule of Law Education Centre is right - 'It is wrong in practice and in principle.  It would destroy the doctrine of equality of citizenship by introducing a permanent system of racial preference when it comes to federal lawmaking and administrative decisions.' 

That some Yes supporters are angry is clear.  What’s interesting is to consider why they’re so angry.  The kind of language they’re using goes far beyond the bounds of the normal to-and-fro of policy debate in this country.  (Dare it be said, Pearson, Langton, Dodson, Andrews et al are at risk of 'Americanising' Australian politics.)  Part of the reason for their vitriol is obvious.  Support for the Voice is falling and with every day that passes the success of the referendum is less certain.  For those committed to the Voice its defeat would be a bitter blow.

But there's something bigger at play.  Part of the explanation for the anger we're witnessing can be found in a book published nearly 30 years ago, 'The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy' by the American historian, Christopher Lasch.  It's a collection of essays describing how those he defined as ‘elites' were turning against the traditions of Western Civilisation and the values of democracy, and how 'the original democratic ideal of competence and respect for every man' was replaced by a process of self-selection by the elites.  Much of what Lasch wrote about America in the 1990s applies to Australia today. 

Echoing Sowell, Lasch noted that 'the civil rights movement originated as an attack on the injustice of double standards: now the idea of a single standard was attacked as the crowning example of 'institutional racism.'

To Lasch, the 'elites', those who shape public opinion and 'produce and manipulate information':

are in revolt against 'Middle America,' as the imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy'… It is a question whether they [the elites] think of themselves as Americans at all.  Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues.

The new elites are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort.  Theirs is essentially a tourist's view of the world - not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.

We tend to think of the disdain for our history, the rise of 'woke' capitalism', and the disparaging of the 'deplorables' as phenomena of the last few years.  But Lasch was writing about these trends decades ago.  He explains the deep roots of the contempt of the elites for the opinions of 'the masses' has deep-seated roots.  The Progressives of the 1920s:

had little use for public debate.  Most political questions were too complex in their view, to be submitted to popular judgment.  They liked to contrast the scientific expert with the orator, the latter a useless windbag whose rantings only confused the public mind.

To someone like Walter Lippmann:

A complex industrial society required a government carried on by officials who would necessarily be guided - since any form of direct democracy was now impossible - either by public opinion or expert knowledge.  Public opinion was unreliable because it could be united only by an appeal to slogans and 'symbolic pictures.'

At best public debate was a disagreeable necessity - not the very essence of democracy but its 'primary defect'…

The manifestation today of Lippmann are the slogans used by politicians to shut down discussion: 'The science tells us', 'I'm following the evidence', and 'All the experts agree'.

And so we come to the Voice.  As Lasch so accurately remarked, elites usually make no effort 'to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate'.  Which is exactly what's happened with the Voice.  It's as if Yes supporters resent having to explain themselves - because they've never had to.  It seems as though they've have only ever talked to people who agree with them.  Which might explain why those proponents have had so much difficultly explaining why the Voice doesn't overturn the principle of the equal citizenship of all Australians - it's an argument with which they've never had to engage.

The Voice is unusual because it is a transformation to the country that will be voted on.  Usually significant issues in public policy in Australia are kept a long way from 'public judgment'.  The prime minister has committed to establish a Makarrata Commission to in the words of the Uluru Statement to 'supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.'  Such a Commission requires no public sanction.  Some form of referendum or plebiscite on Net Zero, or whether Australia should adopt nuclear energy, or on the size of the the country's immigration program, or even whether Australia Day should be on 26 January would produce interesting results

It's true as Lesser said today that the Voice and its precursors might have been more than decade in the making, but they were the product of a process undertaken by elites and between elites far removed from the glare of public debate.  Certainly there's been consultation with indigenous communities but the Australian public haven't been involved in the development of something they're going to be asked to vote for on a 'take it or leave it' basis.

The ability 'to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate' is not in the skill set of many of those who have sought to impose their cultural and political perspectives on the Australian community.  But a referendum to change the constitution is different - this time, on the Voice, the public gets a say.

And another thing

In this week's edition of The Spectator Australia there is a brilliant article by Dr Peter Ridd, Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.  This is some of Peter's piece:

There is no surer proof that people are losing faith in the scientific establishment than the recent Rasmussen poll of Americans which found 60 per cent of respondents agreeing that, 'Climate change has become a religion that 'actually has nothing to do with the climate' and is 'really about power and control.'  Even 45 per cent of Democrats agreed.

This is a staggering result considering the relentless barrage from almost every major science organisation on earth asserting that climate change is 'real' and dangerous.

Why have so many people reached this conclusion?  It is not because the general population has been reading up on the history of climate science.  I doubt those 60 per cent of Americans know that the climate was hotter when the Egyptians were building the pyramids, that American wildfires burnt a far greater area in the 1930s than in recent decades, or that the Great Barrier Reef has never had more coral.

But they can smell a rat, and they can recognise a high-pressure salesman… [T]he scientific establishment argues that it will be not just hotter, it will also get colder.  Do the institutions honestly expect us not to question the peculiar nature of this argument - however much we would like to believe them because we know we should believe 'The Science'?

Then, as if to prove Peter's argument I was reading this in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

[P]erhaps climate coverage has moved beyond parody.  Now along comes a widely reported study purporting to establish a link between climate change and increased home runs in Major League Baseball.

A study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports: 'Home runs in baseball…have risen since 1980…  We isolate human-caused warming with climate models, finding that [more than] 500 home runs since 2010 are attributable to historical warming.'

The idea that warmer, less dense air enables more hits to clear outfield fences is reasonable enough.  But whenever someone talks about home runs rising since 1980 there is the natural question of whether the study authors have adequately accounted for what is commonly know as the game's steroid era…

As for the period from 2010-2019 that is a major focus of the study, University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr tweets in response that minor leaguers didn't produce the same increase in home runs - 'There is an obvious control group,  AAA baseball (completely ignored in this new paper).  And home runs are down in AAA… Maybe climate change only has effects in the major leagues?'