The protesters shacked up in Canberra, along with other, more aggressive and more extreme protest movements elsewhere — in New Zealand, in Canada, in the UK, and their far-right enablers and promoters in the US — remain characterised by a variety of motivations.
They range from anti-vaxxers to white supremacists, sovereign citizen types, anti-lockdown/mandate protesters, anti-Semites, self-identified Indigenous land rights advocates, QAnon dead-enders, Putin supporters and the chancers and grifters feeding off them all.
Don’t discount the potential for violence from some — not merely from fascists lurking within their ranks but individuals becoming obsessed with the constant rhetoric of hatred directed at the political and media classes in general and high-profile politicians in particular. Some politicians, like Craig Kelly and Gerard Rennick, will continue to encourage and promote them, regardless of the potential for violence.
But however disparate, the protesters do share ideas about, and consequences of, community.
Amber Schultz’s excellent piece for Crikey yesterday on the stories of some of the protesters shed a lot of light on the experience of community among them. Protesters who had travelled long distances to forge bonds with like-minded people, some after becoming alienated from their families or losing their job because they refused to be vaccinated.
It’s a story many of us have heard: families no longer on speaking terms because of arguments over COVID; Christmases spent apart because unvaccinated family members weren’t welcome. Anti-vax grandparents cut off from their grandkids. Nurses and teachers who’ve lost their jobs because they wouldn’t get a vaccine (but insist they’re not anti-vax).
These people have severed themselves from their kith and kin, from their communities and livelihoods, motivated by irrational beliefs, conspiracy theories or childlike assertions of privilege against being compelled to do something for the broader community. But notice what they do next: seek out other, replacement communities where they feel more at home.
Those communities might be fascists, or anti-vaxxers, or QAnon, or simply people swapping experiences of being alienated from their families, but that need for community is what they all have in common.
The need for community has been one of the great disruptors of modern politics, in a way that has not yet been properly appreciated, certainly not by political journalists focused on the here and now. Much of the economic and political history of the past 40 years is one of communities and how we identify with them.
One of the consequences of neoliberalism — and no, this is not yet another “neoliberalism is to blame for everything” argument — was to act as a solvent of community.
Fundamentally it replaced a more communitarian economic philosophy that emphasised economic security with an individualist economic philosophy that offered greater freedom. Zygmunt Bauman called it the transition from solid modernity to liquid modernity, with individuals losing economic security in exchange for the potential for greater wealth, consumerism and personal choice. We were told we were on our own, we could no longer rely on our communities to keep us secure — that was now in our own hands, along with the opportunity to prosper.
But however appealing greater individualism and the material benefits of neoliberalism were, they couldn’t nullify the need for community and the certainty and security it can provide. Most of us, it turns out, aren’t up for rugged individualism; even libertarians prefer to hang out with other libertarians. Indeed, in a society that embedded in us the idea that our only value as individuals was an economic value, the need for community became even greater given that, at any one time, half the population will have below average economic outcomes and only the top couple of per cent would demonstrably prosper. Abandoning security for freedom, transitioning from solid to liquid, ignores that people want the certainties and security of community.
The tribalism, reaction against globalisation and nativism that drove much of Western politics after 2015 was fuelled by this reaction against the core message of neoliberalism, as people — especially white, middle-class people — looked to familiar communities for security from economic competition. The relentless growth of identity politics on the left, and the obsession with constructing elaborate matrices of privilege, and the co-option of much of that by reactionaries, is part of that as well.
Some of this wasn’t new. We’d seen populism and nativism in Australia in the 1990s, in reaction to 15 years of liberal economic reform, as those who perceived themselves as losers from neoliberalism looked to those who offered the comforting certainties of racial and cultural nostalgia. Unsurprisingly, one of the avatars of that early iteration of anti-neoliberal reaction, Pauline Hanson, reemerged to exploit it in the 2010s.
The pandemic, in addition to shattering the neoliberal economic consensus, has only fuelled that process, even if those alienated and in search of communities remain a small minority.
Like many communities, especially those created under pressure, these communities will soon fracture and divide internally. QAnon, always at least implicitly and often explicitly anti-Semitic, is now fragmenting as extreme anti-Semites attempt to co-opt adherents.
Like religious sects, such groups can often violently split over subtle points of doctrine. And some members will invest more and more of themselves in such communities, losing perspective, losing contact with the real world (indeed, convinced they live in the real world while the rest of us as deluded) and becoming cut-off from their families. It happened with Trump supporters and QAnon adherents, and now it’s happened with vaccines.
As Parliament debates which particular minority should be excluded from the community protections that most of us take for granted, as it decides whether Christian communities can exclude trans kids but not gay kids, we should recall that who we welcome and who we reject can have serious ramifications beyond the individual lives we’re harming.
