The preservation of Australian democracy and the rise of autocratic governments across the globe are concerns of mine. This past fortnight, these concerns intersected with the Liberal Party’s once-in-a-century loss in the Aston byelection and its decision to campaign against the Voice in ways that beg for a big-picture analysis.
What’s happening to the Liberal Party is not unique to it, nor to Australia. Instead, according to Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and co-author of Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, it is happening to right-of-centre parties across the Western world. It is a slow-moving generational change in social attitudes about what is required to live a good life, and therefore what people want from their political leaders and parties.
How does generational change happen? Norris argues the values we acquire during our formative years shape our values for life. For wartime and post-war generations, the importance of social and economic stability and pragmatism were keys to a good life, so small-l liberal parties focused on freedom and opportunity, and the centrality of economic growth emerged in democracies in the Americas, the UK and Australia to meet that generational demand.
But millennials are slowly replacing the silent generation and boomers in electorates across the Western world, and their formative years — and values — are different. Raised in a world that led them to take peace and economic opportunity for granted, their focus moved up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to focus on issues of inclusion and esteem.
The rising wave of “woke” values overtaking politics is thus like a “rat in a python”, as Norris puts it — a gradual but deep attitudinal change that cannot and will not be reversed in any electoral cycle foreseeable to politicians and political parties today. For such figures, the Overton Window has shifted inexorably to the left, and they and their partiers either need to adapt or be marginalised. Otherwise, they must destroy democracy so that, despite being the minority, they can continue to rule.
American Republicans took the latter path, which has led to the formal downgrading of their democracy to “fragile”, and some experts — myself included — predict secession or civil war. This same choice is what’s facing the Liberal Party of Australia now.
Will it take the only course available to democratic leaders with integrity, and realign its values and priorities to those of a changed electorate? Or will it succumb to demagogic electoral losers like Tony Abbott and the whisperings of an astonishingly un-cowed Murdoch press — while Fox News is currently being sued for US$1.6 billion for claims that it broadcast false statements about voter fraud after the 2020 election?
Finding one’s core values repudiated and one’s party in permanent minority hurts. It’s an ego wound that, if not tended to properly, can fuel the grievance-style politics that those on the right are turning to instead of the hard and humbling work of personal, social and institutional change.
We’re seeing this kind of politics in the Liberal Party’s continuing refusal to support meaningful action on the climate crisis, and its cruel betrayal of Indigenous peoples by campaigning against the Voice.
Which is where you come in, dear reader, especially if you have a past, current or desired link with the Liberals or other right-of-centre parties. Every Australian should be invested in avoiding one-party rule, but those most likely to be heard by the Liberal Party in this hour of confusion are their own voters. Don’t sit on the sidelines and assume reason will prevail and the party will do the right thing: many right-of-centre parties faced with this dilemma haven’t over the past decade — and it may not now.
Instead, email one of 14 Liberal moderates trying to push the federal party in the direction of reason, right and evidence — folks like Bridget Archer, Simon Birmingham, Dan Tehan, Russell Broadbent, Marise Payne and Paul Fletcher — to ask how you can help moderate the party.
And don’t forget to remind them of the words of Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, which reminds us that in a democracy, leadership can be followership in key ways: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
What shifts in policy, principle and attitude must the Liberals make to meet the future? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
