How Progressive Politics Lost Its Heart
The need for new directions
It’s hard not to be disappointed with the state of politics right now. Despite Labor coming to the 2022 Federal election with a very modest policy platform, watching the self-inflicted collapse of the Liberal party and the meteoric rise of progressive candidates like the Greens and David Pocock sparked a faint glimmer of hope for the future. But after two years those hopes have all but been extinguished. New commitments to fossil fuel and gas projects are being made after the election that was supposed to end the climate wars, the government refuses to consider any serious change to systemically address housing affordability amidst of one of the worst crises in history, and a confused and ineffectual Yes23 campaign resulted in a devastating loss in the Voice to Parliament referendum which is already setting back decades of work in Indigenous policy.
Despite both the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Senate Leader Penny Wong belonging to the supposedly more progressive Labor Left faction and the Greens holding the balance of power in the Senate, it feels as though politics is paralysed, with the government unable or simply unwilling to take any significant steps forward. And what’s even more difficult for me to swallow is the sheer number of people who seem to be ok with this current state of immobility, with many of those I talk to believing it to be at best an unfortunate necessity and at worst the objectively correct and desirable political strategy. To me this is a sad state of affairs. More and more I find myself longing for something better, asking myself if this is really what politics is all about?
Recently I read an essay by the British cultural theorist and founder of the New Left movement Stuart Hall that cut right to the core of my dismay. Hall wrote Political Commitments in 1966 while grappling with the failures of the post-war Labour government and the freshly planted seeds of what would later develop into Thatcherism. However, it feels as though he is speaking directly to our current moment. He describes the disappearance of political consciousness, an absence of political sensibilities of all types across the population. He saw in his time that people were no longer giving their whole self to politics nor shaping their life around a political commitment — least of all politicians. In the background of a rapidly changing socio-cultural landscape, there was a growing sense that something was inherently wrong with committing to theoretical and ideological principles in modern technological society. Under this end-of-ideology framework, politics is seen as a pragmatic and practical art taking place in the realm of the possible and constrained by the realities of the current situation.
Today this perspective remains dominant throughout mainstream politics and seems like a prerequisite approach for politicians who hold any positions of significant power. You can see this when comparing Albo The Backbencher’s fiery condemnations of Israel’s occupation with Albo The Prime Minister’s rhetorical and material support for their genocidal destruction of Gaza. However, rather than holding elected officials accountable for flip-flopping on policy positions, many politically active people also subscribe to this purely pragmatic conception of politics; I have lost count of the number of times people have respond to my criticisms of the ALP with “you have to be more realistic, they can’t do anything more, do you want them to lose the election?”.
“In this atmosphere, politics turns into simply tiptoeing around the status quo and shifting positions to align with the electorate and win re-election.”
The problem with this view is that it leads to the de-politicisation of politics. It defuses hot and pressing issues that hold the potential to enact significant positive change, disconnecting and fragmenting individual problems rather than collecting them together to form a committed platform of political agitation and action. Hall points to the NHS as an example of such a de-politicisation. By drawing on the public experiences of insecurity, rationing, sickness and injury, and two world wars, the 1945 Labour government was able to mobilise longstanding political issues to legislate one of the most radical and important social reforms in history. However, twenty years later the Labour government was unwilling to capitalise on major discontent with how the service was functioning and allowed these confrontations to fracture and dissipate into detached sectional interests, rather than unifying these agitations into a political commitment to push for significant expansion. For me this example mirrors the ALP’s current inaction on both housing and climate change, as they have been unable or unwilling to tap into the widespread discontent surrounding these problems to enact the necessary radical legislative changes.
For Hall, the pinnacle of this trend is the reduction of political issues down to a psephological equation. Although having sophisticated methods to accurately analyse, model, and measure the state of public opinion and the balance of political forces is important, it becomes a problem when these techniques come to totally dominate the way we think about and do politics. Psephology turns the act of politics into simple social inquiry, sampling public opinion under the guise of pseudo-objective scientific analysis so as to merely record pre-existing thoughts and beliefs and echo back to the electorate what they already know. This creates an obsession with attaining the “correct” party image and shifts the selection of political positions and candidates away from concrete policy proposals towards personal aesthetics and generic impressions of “electability”.
You only need to look at the way Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders were constantly undermined and discredited on a personal level, not only by their political opponents and the mainstream press but also their own party members, to see how this pervasive perspective quickly erodes any political commitment to truly progressive change. In Australia it led the ALP to desperately divert attention and discussion away from policy positions and instead run a federal election campaign based around the fact that Anthony Albanese had lost weight and was not the most unpopular party leader at an election since 1987.
In this atmosphere, politics turns into simply tiptoeing around the status quo and shifting positions to align with the electorate and win re-election. Recently in conversation, someone with close ties to the ALP told me a commonly held mindset within the party is that they will secure re-election by becoming the “new conservatives” and continuing to bleed votes from the LNP. This seemed to be corroborated at the party’s latest national conference, during which the focus was on how to unify Labor around continuing their small target strategy to ensure they won’t be ousted in 2025 .
“Now more than ever our leaders need to gather their courage and revive the heart of progressive politics to secure a better future for us all.”
For me this simply raises questions about the point of being in office if the party cannot actually implement change when it is most desperately needed. Labor’s mindset is exactly what Hall described almost sixty years ago, and their platform shows how this lack of political commitment destroys any semblance of what the beating heart of politics, and especially progressive politics, should be: praxis! It omits, as Hall eloquently says:
“the whole dynamic by which latent human needs are expressed in political terms and, by being formulated, become the conscious demands of a section of the society, around whom a political agitation can be built, maintained, and carried”.
Political consciousness does not exist a priori, is never simply given, and is most certainly not stable; it is formed, shaped, and made by political praxis. Creating and cultivating a new social consciousness requires direct political action informed by explicit and engaged commitments that cannot come from simply sampling opinion polls.
If Labor really wants to take serious action on climate change, make housing more affordable, and recover from the disastrous results of the Voice to Parliament referendum then it has to get out into communities and actively engage in building support for the policies that will achieve these goals. They need to tap into the widespread feelings of discontent about the current state of politics and society at large, unify the existing disparate sectional interests around clear commitments, and start to build a progressive social consciousness. No longer can they simply be constrained by the supposed realities of the current political climate. They have to engage in political praxis to change what is considered realistic in the first place!
We see some examples of this progressive political commitment coming from the Greens and other independent senators who are putting political pressure on Labor to change their policies. Examples include securing direct funding for social housing, establishing a climate trigger on fossil fuel projects, and endorsing a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, yet even these limited results are always met with ridicule and disdain from the government, rather than any spirit of collaboration and cooperation between groups united by a common progressive cause. For the last fifty years the ALP has been wary of political commitment, but now more than ever our leaders need to gather their courage and revive the heart of progressive politics to secure a better future for us all.
Parl Kolanyi is a hungry social scientist, and economic historian hoping for a great transformation in the Australian political scene.
Sincere thanks to Luca Bisogni and Eloise Taylor for editing this piece.
