Tag Archives: democracy

The Destruction of the USA

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One can write of the decline of the USA, and that has already been noted many times.  One can write of the collapse of the USA, and that arguably is in process.  But neither characterisation would capture what is now happening to the USA.

The USA is being destroyed before our eyes.  The nation with the greatest military defences in history, by far, is being taken over and sacked.  Like Singapore in World War II, it’s guns are pointing in the wrong direction.  This time the destructive horde is not Japanese soldiers rattling overland on bicycle rims, it is people who claim to be patriotic Americans.

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PC in the US: Comrades Ike, Abe and Dubya

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[In my previous post I noted how radical is our far-right compared with a few decades ago, and how savagely they enforce political correctness.  Here is Richard Eskow at Campaign for America’s Future explaining the US equivalent.  Of course it’s more virulent in the US, and of course we follow where they go.]

 

A well funded network of right-wing extremists wants to make it socially and politically impossible to express the ideals that made this country great. One of those extremists appeared on their billionaire-funded network this week to attack Elizabeth Warren, and anyone else who isn’t on the far right, as a Communist.

How retro, you may be saying to yourself. They haven’t pulled that trick since the Eisenhower era.  That’s the strangest part of all this: They seem to think “Eisenhower era” is a euphemism for “Bolshevik control.”

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The political correctness of the radical Right

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[Just published on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed.  It is distilled from The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right.]

What currently passes for political commentary includes excited discussions about whether the Leftist Labor dog is being wagged by a“toxic” Greens tail; why right-wing Labor is in dire straits; whether centrist Labor is resurgent; and whether the extremist Greens are doomed.

Balance, in political commentary, is supposed to lie somewhere between Labor and Tony Abbott, who often seems to be regarded as just a somewhat aggro conservative.

Such commentary reflects remarkably limited perspectives that fail to take into account two major developments over the past five decades. The first is the rise of the radical Right. The second is the manifest failure of radical Right policies.

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The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right

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[For some time I have been frustrated by the very limited perspective of mainstream political commentary in Australia, and by the difficulty of establishing a longer perspective in the standard 800-word commentary piece.  So I decided just to write until the case was made.  Hence this 6000-word essay.  It refers to the Australian context, but there are parallel stories in other countries.]

The political spectrum is traditionally characterised in terms of Left and Right, but the way these terms are used has changed so much they have become quite misleading.  Today they are more about tribal identification, and their use is more of an epithet than a description.

The main reason for these changes is that the Right has shifted to quite extreme positions, compared with a generation or two ago.  The modern Right not only espouses free-market fundamentalism, it promotes an extreme individualism that overlooks or dismisses the importance of social relationships and even denies the existence of society.  There seems to be no standard of factual basis, sense or consistency required for its claims, so any opinion, however uninformed or misinformed, apparently is to be accorded as much validity in the public domain as any other.

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Precious Media

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Bob Brown has named it, the media are being precious.  First, they whine, people complained about Gina Rinehart buying a few media shares, then Treasurer Wayne Swan got stuck into the gang of three miners for using media as their personal megaphones, then the Finkelstein media review recommended some actual, semi-government enforcement of abuse rectification.  Oh, the outraged howls of injured innocence!

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Media Ownership: by Us, The People, Directly

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[Published 7 Feb on ABC’s The Drum Opinion.]

Gina Rinehart’s evident intention to own large chunks of our media is focussing many minds on the question of media ownership.  However most of the discussion does not properly recognise the special role of the media in our society, and canvasses only variations on concentrated ownership by very rich people, usually with an implication that ownership by government is the only alternative.

The media are the means of social conversation in large societies.  They deserve to be accorded special status, like the courts.  Ownership could be widely distributed among those served by each outlet.

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The Real Howling Mob

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[A condensed and modified version published at Eureka Street, 7 Feb.]

The Australia Day “riot” at the Lobby restaurant in Canberra was the subject of hysterical misreporting – I know, I watched it.  We would be wise not to dismiss this episode as just another example of media sensationalism.  Rather, it is symptomatic of a growing nexus in Australia of fear, hysteria, racism and ignorant ranting.

These phenomena are rapidly degrading our capacity for decency, our democracy, and even our perception of reality.  We are moving rapidly away from the decent, laconic Aussies of our stereotyping, and into being a fearful, intolerant, nasty and brittle society.

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Labor and the Media: Obstacles to a Decent Society

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Two major Australian institutions are in the spotlight at the moment, the Labor Party at its annual national conference, and the media in an enquiry prompted by the Murdoch press’s excesses in Britain.  However the deepest problems with them are rarely acknowledged.  The Labor Party has become an obstacle to good governance and to a tolerable future for Australia.  The media have become more superficial, divisive, and regressive, and they are eroding our open and democratic society.

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Lost Labor – from 2003

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I have been well ahead of the pack on a number of important issues, political leadership among them.

Here is the opening sentence from a comment by Don Watson on political leadership, from the current issue of The Monthly.

“It is now all but universally agreed that the Australian Labor party is a near-ruin, ruled body and soul by factional bosses and opinion pollsters.”

Below is a post from my old website www.geoffdavies.com, dated 7 June 1993.  You can also find more recent comments of mine here in the category “Political commentary”.

After two months abroad I find little has changed on the Australian political scene.  John Howard has finally confirmed he will stay on, the obsessively one-eyed Government is still attacking the ABC for alleged bias, and the Labor Party is still clueless.

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