Asymmetric polarisation, down under
You might be wondering whether the Coalition is just having a particularly bad moment, or if something has fundamentally changed on the right of Australian politics. There’s nothing new about lies or spin, but have we seen this level of flagrant cheating — think sports-and-other rorts, destroyed evidence, fake election signage, and Angus Taylor, generally — and perhaps more worryingly, a government this unbothered by notions of shame and accountability, even when caught red-handed? Has there been another issue on which one side has completely untethered itself from reality to the extent that the right has on climate change? And what to make of Malcolm Turnbull’s descent from leader to misfit to exile in the space of a few short years? If Turnbull’s journey has been a product of the party drifting while he stood still, what’s that drift all about?
A Turnbull-loving, economically conservative mate of mine has been struck by these questions. He told me recently he feels politically homeless after giving up on the Liberals, mostly due to climate change and social issues. Without a Kerryn Phelps or Zali Steggall in his electorate, he holds his nose and votes Labor. ‘Fair and balanced’ journalists must also be feeling lost, torn between reporting the facts of the Coalition’s behaviour (fair) and the urge to criticise both sides equally (balanced).
It turns out the Americans have an explanation for all this. In their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, veteran political scientists Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein describe asymmetric polarisation, observing that while both parties have diverged ideologically, the Republican party has changed in problematic ways the Democrats have not. They also accept that it’s something of a taboo to say so, because political operatives don’t want to make it even harder to work across the aisle, and pundits fear being labelled as biased. Vox’s useful primer on the concept acknowledges this challenge with admirable self-awareness; you obviously can’t say one party is fundamentally worse than the other without sounding like a partisan hack.
Mann and Ornstein described the Republican party as having become:
- ideologically extreme
- contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime
- scornful of compromise
- unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science
- dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition
Put simply, everything takes a backseat to winning: decency, democracy, logic and law. Winning does not only mean electoral success; it’s about turning every process and every optic into a zero-sum contest. For example, the authors cite Republicans voting against bipartisan bills they co-authored just to deny the Democrats a perceived win, and blocking the confirmation of Obama appointments who they had no real opposition to, even when leaving key roles unfilled harmed the country. The will or wellbeing of the people become secondary to the forever war.
But hold up, are these centrist scholars just concocting some grand theory to explain the anomaly of Donald Trump? Well, no, they wrote their book in 2012, making their diagnosis an especially prescient one. And if Trump is just the result of undercurrents which were already there, this dynamic can theoretically replicate in places where its root causes are common. So while many journalists have called out Scott Morrison’s Trumpian tendencies, there’s a bigger story here about the conservative movement, and we need new language to tell it.
Time and again I see analysis which either doesn’t recognise or doesn’t want to accept the fact that there’s an inequity occurring. Take Mark Kenny’s full-throated critique of politicians, which drew parallels between the government’s shenanigans and Trumpism, but still felt obliged to take a token swipe at the Greens for using “blunt” rhetoric and daring to have a peaceful and orderly leadership transition in the same week as the Nationals’ latest round of infighting. Former Liberal leader John Hewson was left staggered by the government’s bad-faith defence of sports-rorter-in-chief Bridget McKenzie, recalling that Labor’s Ros Kelly fell on her sword over a similar but lesser offence in 1994. It’s a good example of the sometimes-subtle differences which account for the asymmetry. Corrupt acts are not unique to the right, to be sure, but revelations which would previously have caused heads to roll (and still would on the left) are now brushed off with smug contempt.
It’s not just the federal government. Remember last year when Pauline Hanson dismissed what should have been career-ending scandals, blaming a media “blinded by bias and hate” for reporting events caught on tape? Remember the year before, when two Victorian Liberals claimed they did not want to work on Good Friday due to religious reasons, then snuck into parliament to win a crucial vote after Labor had granted them pairs?
Hewson suggested on a recent podcast that he thought Morrison would surely pivot on climate change after the summer bushfires, again missing the point through will or ignorance. Climate is the purest manifestation of Mann and Ornstein’s claim of the right becoming “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science”. There just aren’t left-leaning equivalents of the Coalition’s denialist rump. When new information emerges which challenge the left’s assumptions, they generally adjust those assumptions. When the right’s beliefs are challenged, they double down.
Despite this, observers tie themselves in knots trying to treat the climate wars as some typical policy dispute, for example by gladly parroting Morrison’s disingenuous attacks on Labor’s emissions targets. They do this not because they are stupid, but because the alternative is so uncomfortable: telling their audience (including an election-winning majority of voters) that one side is completely cooked.
In an asymmetrically polarised world, ‘sensible centrists’ find themselves with a new dilemma: the ‘middle’ and the ‘truth’ are nowhere near the same thing. My aforementioned friend loaned me a book, Blackout by Matthew Warren, which claimed to calmly cut through debate between “two equally preposterous narratives: coal-fired climate change indifference versus an impossibly utopian renewable energy crusade”. Warren chose the ‘middle’, ridiculously equating 100% renewables (a technical challenge) with outright denialism (civilisational suicide). Turnbull has chosen ‘truth’, hammering his old party and calling for a Green New Deal in Time magazine. That proposal is very reasonable if you listen to the science, but way bolder than what even Labor feels safe to propose because of how far to the right the Coalition has dragged the centre. It’s all very discombobulating for the average punter.
Why don’t voters punish them?
Our conservatives have learned from their American counterparts that the consequences for such brazen flouting of rules and norms are not as costly as they should be, or even net-positive. This occurs for two broad reasons.
The first is that the majority of voters do not pay close attention to politics, so the mud sticks not only to the guilty party but to the whole system, which benefits the right. Mann and Ornstein again:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly and proudly what the method was to all this disruption and obstruction. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’ generic favourability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
Here too, trust in government is at record lows. Morrison is expert at pandering to low information voters — his ‘quiet Australians’ — who don’t keep track of each party’s demerits. He stokes their frustration at the dysfunction in the ‘Canberra bubble’ even though his side has an outsized role in making it dysfunctional. Then, when Labor promises a bold, sophisticated agenda brimming with popular policies, some voters are sceptical that the bloody government can actually deliver it. Labor can’t win: the more they call out the Coalition’s poor form, the further they undermine the institutional credibility their electoral pitch depends on.
In an ideal world, sports rorts would be to the Coalition what sandpaper-gate was to Australian cricket: an undeniable disgrace, the catalyst for root-and-branch reform. Instead, Morrison suspects that if he can ride out the storm, all that will be remembered by the next election is a vague feeling that you can’t trust politicians. Voters will reject the party of bigger government for the bloke in the baseball cap or say stuff the lot of ’em: I’ll give Pauline or Clive a go (and let preferences do the rest).
This strategy is aided and abetted by the media’s insecurities, which Trump plays like a fiddle. Tuned out voters want to feel vindicated in ignoring the hard work of political engagement, so they welcome the news that both sides do dodgy stuff (“they’re all as bad as each other!”). Journalists who actually try to help people keep score can be dismissed as biased by both partisan actors and quiet Australians who don’t want to be lectured to. The legitimate moral high ground afforded to the left by the asymmetry becomes yet another ironic disadvantage when it is spun as sanctimony — a crime worse than any corruption.
The second reason the new approach has become viable is because the conservative base is increasingly here for it. While people still like democracy, it seems some love winning that much more.
One of the reasons offered for this is that the further the parties drift from the centre, the higher the electoral stakes. Even if you don’t love all your side’s policies, you probably have a visceral fear of your opponent’s agenda. In this climate, the incentive to cheat increases. Sure, it would be bad to undertake a program of voter suppression/mislead Chinese voters, but if they are going to come for our guns/utes, who is in the wrong, really?
But in theory, this effect should apply to both sides. It doesn’t. In 2016, a majority of Republicans (57%) said they would support a leader who “is willing to break some rules” to “set things right”. A minority of Democrats (41%) said so. While some pundits have cast Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as two sides of the same populist coin, this authoritarian attitude was found to be strongest in Trump acolytes (65%), and even weaker among supporters of Sanders (40%) than Hillary Clinton (46%). Today, at Trump rallies, the crowd swoons while he toys with the idea of staying in the White House indefinitely. There’s no equivalent in the Democratic primaries, despite their unprecedented desperation to win.
It is harder to measure this effect in Australia, although when Hanson deflected the NRA debacle, she claimed she was only accountable “at the ballot box”. Two months later, 5.4% of Australian voters gave One Nation their first preference in the Senate, up from 4.3% in 2016. Coalition MPs like Taylor, George Christensen and Barnaby Joyce all maintained or increased their votes in 2019 despite the myriad scandals afflicting them. On the other hand, Warringah voters finally punished Tony Abbott for his denialism and wrecking.
What’s behind all this?
Mann and Ornstein are thorough and full-blooded in their diagnosis of the problem, but nowhere do they really explain why one party, and why that party, has gone rogue. No one seems to have answered that question with the empirical rigour with which they have identified the trend.
The best explanation I have heard comes from Vox’s David Roberts, who has been writing about asymmetric polarisation for the better part of a decade. He called it straight and plain on a recent podcast so I’ll quote him at length:
The right has become animated by the interests of a demographic. The right-wing coalition has become extremely homogenous, not only ideologically but ethnically and culturally and even along some personality lines. On an objective historical level, America (has been) a culture where those people are at the centre. Other people are allowed to come in at their discretion, but they run things.
That view is incommensurate with modernity: demographic trends, economic trends, climate change, name it. So if you are going to cling to those tribal interests, by necessity, you’re gonna have to throw overboard a lot of producers of objective knowledge. You’re gonna have to cast people out of your tribe insofar as they still hold those principles dear because you can’t square the circle. Ultimately, if you think you and people like you should rule, that’s not a philosophical or governance argument, it’s just a raw power argument. You can’t keep yourself in charge, especially when you’ve become a demographic minority, through good science and good evidence and fairness and the principles that are written into our founding documents.
They were either going to submit to a more multiethnic, more cosmopolitan, mixed society … or stay in charge. You can’t do both. And so they chose, as I think most groups in power do, to try to stay in power, and the rejection of their previous moral principles, their previous political principles, their previous epistemological principles. All of that is a necessary outcome of holding on to power.
This explanation appeals because while Roberts was talking about the US, it can easily map onto Australia or the UK where similar forces and counterforces are evident. Richard Denniss has skewered the Australian right for its hypocritical abandonment of neoliberal ideology, which this theory fits so neatly. Old allegiances are gone; the Coalition claims to be the party of workers while wealthy suburbs swing to Labor. Economic doctrine has taken a back seat to the new mission: protecting the threatened cultural dominance of mostly older, white, straight, patriarchal, and Christian Australians. This monolith is overrepresented outside the cities, which explains why Abbott can be ousted while his equally poor-performing but rural-based colleagues are rewarded for their service to the culture wars.
Most of these modern political dividing lines have become common wisdom: city v country, young v old, and so on. But you rarely hear analysis couched in language of good faith v bad faith, evidence-based v power-based, democratic v undemocratic. I suspect David Roberts would cause some waves if he delivered that sermon on Q&A. It’s understandable, because as discussed earlier, it would be super divisive and career-limiting for most people to talk in those terms. Journalists would also have to openly accept that the country’s largest and most influential media organisation is not what they wish it to be — a legitimate and necessary right-leaning contributor to the marketplace of ideas — but a propaganda machine with a business model built on enabling grievance.
On the other hand, if this is the truth, it should be told. If the media continues to cling to the belief that both sides of politics are just presenting different ideas about how to solve common problems, it will increasingly find itself trying to explain the inexplicable. The collective national interest is not one side’s goal anymore. Departures from normal procedure are not anomalies, they are expressions of a movement with different, selfish priorities. Simply shining a light on corruption and trapping politicians in car-crash interviews will not have the traditional regulating impact. The Morrisons and Taylors of the world will be immune from accountability from their tribe so long as they are loyal culture warriors. They aren’t there to be nice, or be lawful, or even to govern effectively. They’ve been appointed, first and foremost, to own the left.
The Republicans’ handling of Trump’s impeachment — the most pure, unabashed example of Mann and Ornstein’s five symptoms yet — is a glimpse of where this road leads. For everyone bemoaning the current state of Australian politics, let it be a lesson to you. Normal service will not resume. There is no bottom.
The final word goes to Barnaby:
There is no umpire in the political debate. There’s no rule book. What you get away with wins.
