I’ve had a few brushes recently with people who’ve shifted, politically, from positions well to my left to positions well to my right. There’s some useful discussion (and some not so useful) of this and related phenomena in this Crooked Timber comments thread following up a post by Chris Bertram about Nick Cohen, a recent exemplar of the left-right shift. I’m taking points from various commenters with whom I agreed, without acknowledging them: read the thread and you can see who has said what.
A couple of things have struck me about this process. One is that, even though the shift from radical left to neoconservativism or neoliberalism is rarely instantaneous, and appears in some ways to be a smooth transition, there doesn’t usually seem to be any intermediate stage at which people in this process hold a position similar to my own (social democratic in domestic policy, internationalist in foreign policy and reluctant to support war except as a last resort). Rather, what seems to happen is that leftist modes of critique are used, increasingly, to defend rightwing policy positions.
An obvious example is the way in which ex-Marxists seize on largely incoherent notions of ‘the new class’ and ‘elites’ (typically defined in cultural terms rather than with any analysis of economic or political power) as a way of attacking their former allies. Eventually, this kind of thing is often abandoned in favour of traditional conservative or free-market rhetoric, but by this time, the shift in political position is usually complete.
The other is that, although people change their opinions, they generally don’t change the confidence with which they express them or their attitudes to those who disagree. If they were thoughtful and sceptical as leftists, they generally remain so. If they regarded all who disagreed with their leftwing shibboleths as fools or knaves, they will take exactly the same view of those who disagree with them when they begin spouting rightwing shibboleths instead.
This is disappointing in two respects. First, having been (on your own assessment) badly wrong once, ought to inculcate some sense that it is possible you might be wrong again. I don’t think this ought to reduce you to agnostic inertia, but it’s surely a good reason for humility[1].
This ought to be true collectively rather than individually. I’m always stunned when people (particularly those old enough to remember the postwar boom) advance free-market economic arguments with the air of someone stating matters of scientifically proven fact. The same arguments were regarded as hopelessly exploded fallacies in the heyday of Keynesianism, refuted not only in theoretical terms but by the brute fact of the Great Depression. Experience since the 1970s suggested that Keynesians were premature in their triumph, but this ought to have produced humility about the limits of economic knowledge rather than new round of triumphalism from the neoliberal side.
Second, while the left may not have the winning argument on every issue, there are plenty of left arguments that are strong enough that the right typically ignores them rather than confronting them head-on. For example, anyone who’s looked hard at a left analysis of the way the media stereotype groups like the unemployed ought to be immune to simple-minded claims about leftwing media bias (Keith Windschuttle’s book Unemployment was very good on this point). Yet lots of ex-leftists seem to forget things they once knew, and espouse arguments they could formerly refute. (The same is true, in reverse, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen so many examples of the process).
fn1. I know I don’t always practice what I preach in this respect, and some modes of argument like opinion columns don’t allow for equivocation, but I do try to acknowledge that there are people who’ve thought carefully and well about the issue and come to the opposite conclusion.
UpdateJason Soon has more and points to an earlier piece by Paul Norton
John Quiggin 
I’d also add that there are some personality types who can’t handle the gooey, uncertain state of being somewhere vaguely in the middle where you actually seek out empirical evidence to find out what’s going on. It’s psychologically simpler to latch onto ideas that you resonate with emotionally.
Emotional resonance has a lot going for it, but it’s prone to mood swings, and, screwing up big time.
Paul, as regards Cohen, I’m not classing him as a convert on the basis of his support for the Iraq war, but on passages like the one I quoted above (5th comment in the thread), and on this archetypal old-fogey rant about how cocaine use is socially acceptable while smokers are persecuted.
“Is there any reason why it couldn’t have been handled by a mercenary force?”
so, if i understand you correctly, for those injustices that cannot be cured by the state, the alternative is mercenaries? jeebus. apart from anything else [such as, say, reality] your solution does not address, as a practical matter, the question of who will be paying and directing the mercenaries. a government, perhaps? surely an invasion and occupation, undertaken at government direction, will always be “state intervention”, regardless of whether the government contracts with a private army, or supplies its own army, for the actual fighting.
if you think about it, your “mercenaries” argument justifies any number of interventionist government policies. all you are proposing is privatising the implementer. on this argument, for example, the dole would be just dandy, so long as the government did not administer it, but instead paid the benefits to a company, which was in turn responsible for giving the money to the unemployed. surely you don’t believe this.
In the left-right conversions I’m most familiar with – McGuinness, Catley, Hitchens have all been mentioned – I’ve always thought the allegiances to either side were forever mercenary. Better parties and more s*x with the left when young and more money, travel and access to free lunches with the right in middle age. As J K Galbraith (I think) once remarked, there’s always a lucrative market for analysis that shows the rich deserve what they have and more. Converts I’m aware of have been opportunists with an eye to the main chance at all times, characterised by positions most guaranteed to attract attention.
Logic and fervency tend to be substitutes rather then complements when it comes to political opinions. We all know people who, when they can’t sustain an argument, resort to emotional oubursts, dismissing the opposing viewpoint as ‘rightwing bullshit’ or whatever. It’s no surprise that when someone’s public intellectual position is based on groupthink and emotional loyalty rather than hard analysis, they have a high probability of shifting to a new position when it all becomes too hard, and the social glue reinforcing their dogmas dissolves. I’ve noticed that a lot of flip-floppers seem to be far more interested in scoring points off ex-comrades than in analysing an issue academically; in many cases I suspect the driving force is personal animosity – towards a despised colleague or ex-partner.
The dole should be a private matter, covered by insurance (or savings). Like most government spending, it’s entirely discretionary, and not a direct responsibility of government.
My reading of Cohen’s rant is not that smoking should be acceptable, but that cocaine should not. If he was a genuine right winger, he’d say that the case against passive smoking is unproven, anti-smoking zealots violate cherished individual rights, and sing all the other hymns from the right wing prayer book.
But he doesn’t say that at all and the line about smoking is really incidental to his main point, which is about the consequences of coacaine use, to which the London dinner party set are oblivious.
And he makes his point pretty well, with his tale of ehat happened in Honduras, financed indirectly by the habitues of these dinner parties.
The bigger point he makes is that fashionable London dinner parties are populated by superficial poseurs. Is this a right wing thing to say? It could just as easily be said by an old-school Marxist.
————
Two days before Christmas, a drugs gang armed with AK-47s, paid for by the proceeds of deals in faraway bars, fired on a bus “just for kicks” and killed 28 men, women and children.
“So, thank you for your drugs money, self-appointed first world,” the writer concluded. “Another thoughtful donation to our ailing country, along with military hardware and paedophile tourists. We are told here that at some of your London dinner parties, an after-dinner toot has . . . taken the place of your traditional English pudding among the chattering classes – the very same people who claim to care so deeply about the poor third world. Rather than chopping out their lines on the latest world-music CD, perhaps these enlightened individuals should chop them out instead on a photo of a Honduran bus with the slogan “Dios es amor”, but pockmarked with bullet holes and with the blood-stained dead in the road alongside. Jesus Dominguez, aged 45; Maria Anita Portillo, aged 14; Alexander Gutierrez, aged seven; Javier Barahona, aged two. After all who paid for the bullets?”
Gordon:
AlanDownunder says: “The richer you get, the ‘righter’ you get.�, but Abb1 thinks this doesn’t explain the adoption of specific positions on eg. “bombing the bastards� in Iraq. It does, actually, through the well-known “dinner party effect�.
Yes+ Gordon. Also, a psychologically strident ‘lefty’, suitably enriched and socially migrated, becomes a psychologically strident ‘righty’. Also, shifting political sands make for shifting iconoclasms.
John wrote (in the main post):
“[E]ven though the shift from radical left to neoconservativism or neoliberalism is rarely instantaneous, and appears in some ways to be a smooth transition, there doesn’t usually seem to be any intermediate stage at which people in this process hold a position similar to my own�.
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/08/08/converts/
If the changing of one’s politics/world-view is viewed as largely a matter of fashion
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/08/04/critical-literacy-to-be-scrapped-in-queensland-schools/#comment-30624 ,
then the “intermediate stage� theory makes some sense. Fashion without a continuity of change is called revolution.
However, no one seems to be claiming (or admitting) that there *has* been a political revolution within the last 30 years – or more specifically, in the late-1970s to mid-1980s (to set-down a date range that seems consistent with the implied date of a typical left-right conversion). For me, this is a strange and quite generation-specific blind-spot – an aporia which hides some strange bedfellows, as well as casts a retrospective cloak over the unlikely phenomenon** of the fully-formed-at-18, middle-of-the-road Leftie, which is to say, John Quiggin c. 1975.
An example of some strange bedfellows from this period is of the coincidence of John’s and Jack Strocchi’s professed youthful reactions to Bob Catley’s “From Tweedledum to Tweedledee� (1974).
John recently wrote:
“I thought Tweedledum to Tweedledee was silly thirty-odd years ago, and I haven’t thought much more of anything I’ve seen in his recent writing.�
http://badanalysis.com/catallaxy/?p=1076#comment-22542
while Jack Strocchi remembers:
“c. 1980 being set Catley and McFarlanes “Tweedledum and Tweedledee� [sic] by a radical (not bearded) tutor as a text in my first year politics course. Even as an ignorant teenage undergraduate I found its thesis – that there was little ideological difference between the Whitlamite ALP and the Fraserizing L/CP since both political parties were technocratic service providers for transnational capitalism – somewhat implausible. It was one of many intellectual experiences that gave me a life-long aversion to New Left politico-economic theory.�
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/08/04/critical-literacy-to-be-scrapped-in-queensland-schools/#comment-30633
This coincidence matters because if Catley et al were actually RIGHT (= correct) in the mid-70s – and IMO the “technocratic service provider for transnational capitalism� thesis seems uncannily prophetic in describing all Australian (federal) governments since 1983* – then where was Catley expected to *go*, in political and career terms, from that time?
Viz, shunned by the moderate lefties of the world, such as the youthful John Quiggin, wasn’t it always inevitable that Catley would actually step into the technocracy he had previously, albeit critically described?
Admittedly, such a move – from leftie observer to knee-deep participant – would have been no small step. But it is still much easier, surely, for a leftie to adopt a “Join’em� strategy than for him to re-fashion his political world-view from the ground up, that is, away from something that the middle-of-the-road Left of the time refused to countenance as even existing? (and *still* doesn’t admit to, BTW)
Being a little ahead of one’s time intellectually will often lead to messy situations, and it may be that Catley “jumped ship� prematurely – that is, if he hadn’t, he could have looked forward to reaping the rewards of academic vindication (at the very least) by now. A Google search suggests, however, that Catley’s “From Tweedledum to Tweedledee� is all but forgotten – most especially, therefore, deliberately so by the ageing boomers who dominate campus academic payrolls.
In perhaps the sweetest irony of all, Catley has likewise forgotten *himself*, so that he can essentially recycle, quite deadpan, the sort of stuff he wrote (I’m assuming) in 1974 for the present day:
“In the main, from 1990 – effectively the first cohort of post-Dawkins graduates – to 2004, entrants to this career path moved from rent-seeking activities to efficient management of factors of production as their major wealth-creating criterion.�
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/08/04/critical-literacy-to-be-scrapped-in-queensland-schools/#comment-30600
What *has* changed, of course, in the mean time, is the world – and I reckon that the apparently politically-immutable (and inscrutable in origin**) John Q would be better employed dwelling on these changes than on the comparatively small step of Catley’s jump from technocratic outsider/prophet to insider/profiteer. That is, to address the right-wing revolution of 25 years ago, and its winners and losers. “Fashion�, in contrast, is just so-o-o Bob Catley: forever in limbo between 1975 and 2005.
Indeed, here I may even be erring on the side of generosity: the “technocratic� aspect is certainly what all such governments have aspired to (“knowledge workers�, etc) – but in reality, the even more atavistic “farm-and-mine� economic model has tended to win the day.
An above linked-to comment by Jack Strocchi finishes by John Q being asked “to enlighten us on the subject of his [own] political education� – an invitation which John has so far not taken up.
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/08/04/critical-literacy-to-be-scrapped-in-queensland-schools/#comment-30633
Dave, the line about smoking may be incidental, but the fact that it’s included at all is indicative of the desire to attack what he calls the “vaguely leftish upper middle class”. I haven’t seen any evidence that cocaine users have any particular political alignment, and I bet that Cohen hasn’t either.
The whole piece is a morass of contradictions typical of the pre-conversion phase. He alludes to the obvious point that legalisation is the only real solution to the problem, but brushes this aside in a wave of waffle.
“Troll” an antishortmanic term.
Open season on short people.
“people in his stature are in…short supply”.
There are those that think little of us.
Maggie: Hey Lindsay, you want some chips?, Lindsay: Umm…oo…, Betsy: Maggie! NO! she might fall in the bowl!!
He’s so short…he would drown by the time he realised it was raining.
He’s so short…he doesn’t know if he has a headache or footache.
He’s so short…if he pulled his socks up he’d be blind
John, I don’t doubt at all that Cohen is gunning for the vaguely leftish upper middle class. But it’s possible to do that from a number of vantage points. You can be Paddy McGuinness/Piers Ackerman, and obsessively sneer about PC chattering classes (spoken with the authority of ex members of that same class, but now super glued to the Establishment Right), or you can do it from an old left perspective. At this stage, I am prepared to give Cohen the benefit of the doubt.
Let me give you another example. Laurie Ferguson, son of Labor left icon Jack, brother of Martin, occasionally takes shots at the middle class left. Most recently the subject has been refugees, but there have been other times as well. Laurie Ferguson is old-fashioned working class left. That doesn’t make him right=correct, but it doesn’t make him right wing either.
Instead of using labels, why don’t people try this exercise. Look at what a person actually does, and then ask yourself – in whose long term interests would it be, if the world conformed to what the person says about the way the world should be? Now I know this can be circular, because people always argue ‘if so and so were done, then this and that would happen’ but the trick is to then look at what they actually do, and how they go about trying to build support for their vision.
This tells me a lot. If a person prattles about freedom for example, but then acts in ways or supports proposals that limit the freedom of actually existing persons, on matters which are important to the safety and enjoyment of actual human beings, then I am pretty sure what I think about theh person. As to the label – well who cares. It’s the deeds that count, and the words are only ever clever ways of conceaning, or revealing the better to decieve.
i think the “in it for the money” conversion theory has some merit. a striking example of this [when you consider how much money he makes] is, in my opinion, david horowitz.
Most of us who defect from the left don’t do so because of age, or money, or personal animosity, but because we’ve had our noses rubbed in reality a few times too often. Windschuttle, for example, abandoned Marxism because the Khmer Rouge murdered one of his friends. Lessons don’t get much more compelling that that. After a while the excuses just don’t work any more. Many on this thread seem to think that you can’t move rightwards out of principle, honesty, or seering experience. Well, yes you can. And more and more people are doing just that. This confuses the left, because it generally equates principle only with itself.
It does, actually, through the well-known “dinner party effect�.
Gordon, I don’t have any information about Cohen/Hitchens’ social circle at the time of their conversion, but I assume it had to be an overwhelmingly orthodox leftist circle. Hitchens’ boss (or the thing closest to it) was editor of The Nation. In fact, they probably were outright expelled from their dinner parties, not just embarrassed.
.
Of course they now have a new group of friends.
.
I think, at least in the case of Hitchens, it could be exactly the opposite – displaying his contrarian streak. Only as a part of the reason, of course.
Rob, I haven’t seen this explanation of Windschuttle’s change of views before. Do you have any more information on this? It seems surprising to me, given that the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, and Windschuttle was still writing from a Marxist perspective through the 1980s. But I don’t have any reason to dispute it.
As Jason Soon points out in his post (linked above) if one’s version of leftism included support for the Khmer Rouge (or for any version of communism), an extreme subsequent reaction is not that surprising.
>Many on this thread seem to think that you can’t move rightwards out of principle, honesty, or seering experience. Well, yes you can. And more and more people are doing just that.
Any empirical evidence for that?
John, it was in a letter to the Australian on 16 Sept, 2003. Read in part: ‘Cadzow wrote, accurately, that Pol Pot’s murder of my friend Malcom Caldwell was a catalyst that led me to abandon not Pol Pot but Marxism’. I’ve not seen the original interview to which KW was referring. Note that he said ‘catalyst’. It need not follow that he immediately abandoned Marxism. As I said on Jason’s post, it was a long slow road for many of us.
…or for any version of communism…
You’re overstating a bit, I think. What about support for this version of communism, for example? Should it be a subject to an extreme subsequent reaction to Khmer Rouge?
It’s not the communist idea, but the idea of using violence to achieve dogmatic socio-political goals that’s been (once again) discredited by the Khmer Rouge. And if that’s the lesson, then the Khmer Rouge episode should’ve turned you against the Iraq war (as justified by Cohen&Co), not for it.
Many on this thread seem to think that you can’t move rightwards out of principle, honesty, or seering experience. Well, yes you can. And more and more people are doing just that.
I had been drifting that way, dissolusioned by working for the commonwealth, observing the waste, inefficiency, featherbedding and patronage endemic in public employ, and the lack of incentive and reward for innovation and endevour. Being almost banrupted by the world’s greatest treasurer was the final straw.
Perhaps if Peter Walsh had been treasurer i’d still be a pinko.
Everyone here seems to assume that the shift is pretty much always from left to right, with those who go in the other direction either exceptions, or optical illusions (as in the case of Manne who really hasn’t moved at all, but has seen things move around him).
It’s a reasonable conclusion because for most of history it has been true, and certainly correct for those of the generation stretching from McGuinness to Bolt.
Back when I was a left activist at uni we assumed that some of us would end up defecting. Those of the hard left saw me (as a relative moderate) as dangerously likely to adopt gradually more right-wing views, while I tended to suspect that it was the most zealous revolutionaries who would end up spouting for Murdoch.
But the weird thing is that so far neither has happened. I have yet to come across a single confirmed sighting of a former “comrade” of vaguely my age who now votes Liberal. They may be out there, but I have yet to meet one.
On the other hand I have met four former Liberal opponents, and three from the Labor right, who have moved a fair way left.
I wrote something for Crikey on this, becuase I am very keen to find out whether my observations are symptomatic of my generation (I’m 35 – the people I am talking about range from about 26-40) or just an unrepresentative sample. They didn’t run it, but I’d be interested in seeing what people here have observed.
Let me be clear here. A lot of the leftists I knew have had their politics change. Many former revolutionaries are now moderate reformists, but all the ones I have heard of are still well to the left of Australian politics. Since most of them now have politics much closer to mine than they did in the days when we were in uneasy coalition this hardly bothers me.
Some of the former more moderate members of the left coalitions, particularly the ALP leftists have moved towards positions more in keeping with the ALP right (although none have formally changed factions as far as I know).
Beyond this all I am aware of is one very annoying revolutionary who in the space of a month jumped to the ALP right, and one former Australian Democrat. I’ve lost touch with him, but our gracious host once quoted someone of the same name endorsing Lomborg. I haven’t been able to confirm if it is the same person, but the name’s not common.
On the other hand I have run into the aforementioned four Liberal student pollies who now are broadly on the left (although in one case very hestitantly so). I have also run into one former Young Liberal who I didn’t know at the time (although we knew people in common) who is now an organiser for the Greens. Quite a few others report still voting Liberal, but being deeply disillusioned and seeking a party left on social and environmental issues, and rightwing economically. In their earlier years these people held somewhat similar views, but regarded the economic as so much more important they were happy to identify as right, some even calling themselves “hard right”.
I have some theories about why those born between after 1965 are likely to have moved in a direction opposite to the general historical course. However, I thought I would ask if anyone knows of supporting or contradictory examples first. I’d look pretty silly analysing if it turns out I’m looking at a totally unrepresentative sample.
Rafe Says:
Let me get this straight. Before you will accept that the Mao and Stalin apologists’ arguments are (or rather, were) bulls**t, you require me to explain why they were not, in fact, bulls**t.
It’s a novel argument, I guess. Not novel enough to rise above the “pathetic” level, but novel.
I note that John has already addressed the rest of your complaint.
Exactly, Paul. I would love to have been able to continue to believe that the government could be some kind of Robin Hood, that it could ‘right wrongs’ and ameliorate social equality by executive fiat. Well, it can’t. It’s tried and tried, and it usually just makes things worse. The Nugget Coombes solution to aboriginal disadvantage (you see the results here on the streets of Alice Springs every day, and it’s not pretty), the Cain-Kirner ‘equality of outcomes’ education model, the VEDC interventions in the market, the Dawkins reforms of the universities,the migration of nurses’ training from the hospitals to the universities. All well meant, well-intended, and all complete disasters. Everyone sensible who works for government knows how inefficient it really is, how utterly and inherently unable it is to undertake these kinds of projects and pull them off. It just can’t do big, bold, breath-taking things. And it’s not supposed to (pace John Stuart Mill). In liberal democracies, the people are supposed to have power, not the government. Of course that’s a moveable feast, and the relationship between the people and the government is never constant or static. But the left’s expectations of government were always too high, and its expectations of the community too low.
Pretty much accords with my experience. I’m pre 1965, was “hard right” economically and environmentally, but all over the place on other issues. I know plenty of people who were to my left to start with, and who’ve remained there, and plenty of others who’ve moved leftward as I have done.
Howard did it for me. I dunno about the motivations of the others.
If you’ve got something which attempts to explain some post-1965 phenomenon, go right ahead. I’m keen to hear, at least.
Rob, if you once thought government could institute social eqaulity ‘by executive fiat’, it’s no wonder you were disillusioned. Radical changes, based on some ideologue’s grand blueprint and imposed without consulation, usually fail. But the left don’t have a monopoly on hare-brained schemes: it works in both directions. Add rail privatisation in Britain and financial deregulation in South East Asia to your list of complete disasters. That having been said, to what particular recommendation of Nugget Coombes do you attribute the plight of Aborigines in the Northern Territory? The idea of self-determination for Aborigines sounds pretty consistent with your power-to-the-people slogan. I think if you try hard enough you can interpret any social problem as the fault of someone you’ve chosen to identify as your idelogical opponent. What about the policy of assimilation of aborigines through adoption? Was it right wing paternalism, or was it the kind of left wing social engineering you despise?
True about privitisation in the UK, James. Radicals of both sides are to be avoided, and their policies eschewed – because they are grand blueprints. I could have added the de-institutionalisation of the mentally ill to the list, both here and in the US.
On Coombes: he held to the hopelesly idealistic view that education and employment were inimical to the traditional culture of Aboriginals and therefore were of no value to them, and not worthy of inculcation. His policy, adopted by governments of both parties, was born of a Rousseauian concept of self-sufficient ‘native villages’ making a living from the maufacture of tourist artefacts, and happily sunning themselves for the benefit of the passers-by. In reality it meant endless amounts of ‘sit-down’ money and no jobs, no hope, and an endless self-perpetuating cycle of violence and self-destruction. That’s what you see on the streets of Alice, and in its hospitals.
Of couse it’s not Coombes’ fault, at least not directly, nor even of the governments that followed his advice. It’s just the way it fell out, the way it wasn’t intended. But my feeling is, if they’d just left things alone, left it the way it was, to grow in its own way – mission stations, paternalistic policies, inequities and all – and allowed the community, European and Indigenous, to work things out for itself, we would not see the things we see today over on Todd Mall, and down in the bed of the old dry river.
That’s what I mean by ‘power to the people’. Let the communities work it out, since they’re in the best position to know. It takes time, but it works. Keep the governments out of it. It’s not a matter of finding an ideological opponent. It’s a matter of trusting the people to find the right, or at least the least wrong, answer, and not the government.
James, apart from Coombs the great disaster for the Aborigines in the Northern Territory was the “equal pay” decision that made them unemployable as stockmen. Equal pay for equal work would have been ok but they were not doing equal work and when the distant tribunal made its decision, the stockmen were relegated from proud contributors in the industry to the position of mendicants.
Good point, Rafe. And an agonising one. You can’t possibly argue, morally, that Aboriginals should not get the same pay as whites for ‘doing the same job’. Yet when equal pay was mandated, the Aboriginals lost their jobs, because they were not worth the same to the employers. You can say that was racist, it shouldn’t have happened, etc. Doesn’t matter. It happened, and was probably entirely predictable. A deus ex machina decision intended to reduce Aboriginal disadvantage actually exacerbated it a hundred fold. However imperfect, and however ‘bad’ it looked, the community and the market between them had come up with something that worked. Then the government (well, one of its instrumentalities) stepped in and ruined it – because it looked ‘bad’.
A couple of points on the equal pay issue. I agree that the outcomes of this were bad, and that something better could and should have done. But the status quo wasn’t sustainable either for two main reasons
First, it’s not true that equal pay was simply imposed by external fiat. The trigger for much of the change was the lengthy strike at Wave Hill. More generally, the whole system depended not only on low wages but on the whole system of restrictions associated with Protectors of Aborigines and so on.
Second, technological change and the cattle crunch of the 1970s would have wiped out most of the system regardless of wages. If the problem had been simply one of relative wages, the Aboriginal workers would have been replaced by whites. In fact, employment of white stockmen declined drastically in this period (no figures on this, but the majority of cattle properties these days have no full-time employees, relying entirely on family labour or manager + contractors.
Rob, in relation to Windschuttle’s invocation of the murder of Malcolm Caldwell by the Khmer Rouge as the catalyst for his long march across the political spectrum, I can see how being aggrieved by the actions of a Stalinist regime could catalyse a long-term intellectual retreat from all forms of socialist or social-democratic leftism on economics and the role of the state, although this is far from an inevitable or necessary progression.
However, this story does not plausibly account for certain other shifts in his thinking. Two of these are his shift from endorsing feminism and environmentalism in his 1980 book on unemployment to his statements of c.2003 that feminism was “a terrible failure” and that global warming was “a demonstrable myth”. The most dramatic, of course, has been his shift from strongly endorsing the work of Charles Rowley and Henry Reynolds on the destruction of Aboriginal civilisation by European settlement (a view which he expressed as recently as 1994 in The Killing Of History), to seeking to discredit such work in his own recent writings on the subject.
There is no logical link whatsoever between, on the one hand, rejecting collectivism for liberalism on economics, and on the other, rejecting liberalism for pre-Enlightenment conservatism on the question of gender equality, or deciding that the great majority of the scientists working in a field in which one has no expertise of one’s own are wrong.
Abb1, I went and read the N.Cohen column in the Guardian. I may be wrong, but it seems that if Cohen’s conversion to the Right (which actually seemed somewhat qualified in the article he wrote) arises from the World Trade Centre attack and the Afghan/Iraq invasions, he is a rather simple case of opinion being trumped by nationalism. I’m not sure that such a case is relevant to Prof. Quiggin’s post, except in the sense that it is a common cause of apparent “conversions” – but not a cause that rests on argument or opinion. Even if it is admitted as relevant, I have often heard people use the WTC/Afghan/Iraq events as a sort of conversational “coup de main” that is used to cut of all further discussion. Sadly, it often works.
Obviously, the view of Snuh and others in this thread, that patronage has moved to the Right and those who make their living by commentary are therefore pressured to follow it, has a great deal to recommend it. But it is such an obvious point that I followed a by-way which, though interesting, is minor. The art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is full of Madonnas, Crucifixions and Martyrdoms, but not because artists as a group were exceptionally religious!
Fair point, Paul. I don’t know what impelled Windschuttle to go down the various roads that he did. However, I believe he is on record – several times – as saying what converted him away from the Rowley-Reynolds reading of Aboriginal history, to which, as you say, he once fully subscribed, was his discovery that the materials in the Tasmanian archives did not suppport it – rather, the primary sources contradicted it. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History may have serious methodological and evidentiary flaws, but I don’t see any reason to doubt he was quite honest in his approach and about the reasons he gave for writing it.
jquiggin,
I am not defending the ‘protector’ system, I just want to ask an economic question.
I accept that “…employment of white stockmen declined drastically in this period…”. Could that also have been the result of increased labour costs and reduced property profitability making it less economic to employ anyone? You argue that “…[i]f the problem had been simply one of relative wages, the Aboriginal workers would have been replaced by whites.” If (say) the employment of 50 Aboriginals at nominal wages made a property of 100,000 acres profitable with 10 white stockmen to oversee them and the 50 then left, the employment of the 10 to do the overseeing would no longer be needed and they could be let go. The property would then be run (at a lower output or with more capital) by a family and a contractor or two, perhaps with some properties amalgamating to improve the capital efficiency.
In addition, this was a period when the stock horse was being phased out and the motor bike, 4WD and ATV were coming in. That alone would have reduced the need for stockmen, white or aboriginal.
Do you stand by your original analysis?
Gordon,
I may be wrong, but it seems that if Cohen’s conversion to the Right (which actually seemed somewhat qualified in the article he wrote) arises from the World Trade Centre attack and the Afghan/Iraq invasions, he is a rather simple case of opinion being trumped by nationalism. I’m not sure that such a case is relevant to Prof. Quiggin’s post, except in the sense that it is a common cause of apparent “conversions� – but not a cause that rests on argument or opinion.
Nationalism – yes; you nailed it, man, absolutely.
And same is true about original, ‘classical’ neocons as well; Norman Podhoretz, one of their founders, said:
They were, perhaps, shaken out of their wits by Soviet anti-Israel actions and rhetoric, and of course the last straw: the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
Still, it doesn’t answer the question of how one becomes a ‘born again’ nationalist.
You think it may be pathological rather than rational?
Hmm, something’s wrong with this software, I didn’t emphasize the phrase above.
test
Stephen L (Luntz, I’m assuming) –
You’re not only not alone, you are far from *original* in positing a generational fault-line! (Hint: google my name and “baby boomers�, or just read this
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/07/24/what-ive-been-reading#comment-30117
for a more succinct essence). Apart from a minor quibble with dates, that is – you say 1965, I say c. 1962 is the cut-off/changeover date for the phenomenon you speak of (which perhaps in turn brings SJ into our warm-yet-angsty demographic embrace).
All I can add is that Jason Soon correctly identifies the peculiar boomer cocktail – which drives left-to-right conversions – of “guilt and its overcompensationâ€?, resentment and embarrassment:
http://badanalysis.com/catallaxy/?p=1076 and https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/08/08/converts/#comment-30753
Pol Pot, Schmol Pot, as far as Windschuttle’s reasons for conversion go – the fact that he owns an Eastern Suburbs (Sydney) house of such a value that even the most successful arts academic of my generation could never dream of owning it, and yet *he*, not I, was the one with the (presumably) misspent youth speaks much louder.
Comment from Paul Watson (trying to get past autoblock)
Onto a more recent sub-topic, of the equal pay issue. Rob‚s suggestion that „[W]hen equal pay was mandated, the Aboriginals lost their jobs, *because* they were not worth the same to the employers‰ (emphasis added) is frankly offensive in its connotations of lazy blacks, etc. If anything, the opposite is probably true – particularly in the full-employment environment of the mid-late 1960s, getting an honest day‚s work out of white-trash drifters (who comprised then (and still do) almost the entireity of the non-urban, non-Indigenous NT population) would have been a harder task.
So what did go wrong?
First – many Indigenous pastoral workers were sacked because of fear (or at least long-term economics), rather than for pragmatic reasons of low productivity (= immediate economics).
Onto a more recent sub-topic, of the equal pay issue. Rob‚s suggestion that „[W]hen equal pay was mandated, the Aboriginals lost their jobs, *because* they were not worth the same to the employers‰ (emphasis added) is frankly offensive in its connotations of lazy blacks, etc. If anything, the opposite is probably true – particularly in the full-employment environment of the mid-late 1960s, getting an honest day‚s work out of white-trash drifters (who comprised then (and still do) almost the entireity of the non-urban, non-Indigenous NT population) would have been a harder task.
More from Paul
It has long been my suspicion that, with the ‘smell’of land rights in the air by the late 60s, there was a concerted, or at least semi- so, drive to commit ‘last-minute’ acts dispossession – in particular, so as to thwart the locals‚ later possibility of claiming an ongoing-connection-with-the-land nexus (e.g. the test as recently, and contentiously, implemented in the Yorta Yorta decision).
and more
Here, it important to note that most NT pastoral land was/is held as leasehold only (i.e. the pastoralists were *not* simply being paranoid, in a „They‚re going to put a land rights claim on my [urban, freehold] backyard‰ kind of way). Further, many pastoral leases were/are subject to express reservations allowing ongoing Indigenous access, hunting, etc. While Indigenous unpaid/slave labour lived on-site, these reservations were moot, but one doesn‚t have to be too much of a big-city lawyer to appreciate that a bit of pre-emptive „cleansing‰ in the late 60s would allow the farm gates to be later firmly padlocked against such things (which has turned out to be largely the case, despite the clear letter of the law to the contrary).
Tellingly, when I proposed the of pre-emptive „cleansing‰ theory on the „Troppo‰ blog last year, the only argument in rebuttal was that with real wages came real (Indigenous) p*ss-heads, and so real, lower productivity.
Quite possibly so – but I‚m still not convinced that this was the main reason for the mass-sackings, once the surrounding context is factored in (viz, the „Protector‰ era that John alludes to).
Specifically, the prohibition against serving, selling or giving alcohol to „full-blood‰ Aborigines in the NT (up until then, all state wards from cradle to grave) was abolished, without fanfare or follow-up on 15 September 1964 (Licensing Ordinance NT 1964; Social Welfare Ordinance NT 1964).
While this date doesn‚t exactly coincide with the late-60s mass-sackings of pastoral workers, it certainly corroborates that there is more to the „We sacked Å’em coz they wuz all useless p*ss-heads‰ story than meets the eye. Enter, for the second time, the roving white-trash of the outback – this time making a pretty penny from selling grog to already heavily-intoxicated Aborigines (that is to say, selling it *illegally*, this time under a supposedly non racially-discriminatory law). White-trash on the hustle, also coincidentally doing the pastoralist‚s longer-term bidding ˆ makes sense to me.
SJ invited my theories on the post 1965 shift so here goes – apologies for the length.
First up I think that in historical ordinary times (if there ever is such a thing) there will be three drivers of conversion. On the one hand you will have the factor already pointed to that people generally become wealthier as they age, particularly people successful enough for changes in their politics to be noticed. On the other some, like Ceclia Brown, decide that defying the system is “not as easy/ as I thought t’would be” and give into the pressure to parrot their bosses’ mind. On the third limb most people will at some point run into a failure of their political philosophy in some circumstance or other. In some cases this will cause them to rethink their politics more broadly.
I believe the third factor causes right-wingers to turn into leftists as often as left-wingers become right (on a historical average), but the first two both almost universally operate from left to right, creating the dominant trend. (There are also random effects such as falling in love with someone of opposite politics who then converts you).
On top of this there are occassional periods where radical politics is “in” or “cool”. The late 60s and early 70s is one obvious example, but I imagine the period prior to the French Revolution was another. This causes a group of people who are not left at all to jump on the bandwagon. Cognitive dissonance means that they fairly quickly come to believe what they are spouting, but it is not a fundamental product of their outlook, it’s just a good way to be in. These people will almost all defect when left politics ceases to benefit them, and become the most savage opponents of all things they once advocated.
So far I have not said much new, but I think the thing to note is that while historically the trend is from left to right, this has been much stronger amongst those born in the late 40s and 50s than at other times.
In the late 80s and 90s left politics was anything but cool. This is not to say that being a Young Liberal was cool either – basically apathy was cool. This was enough to ensure the left was not burdened with the same group of ideological carpet baggers that were around 15 years before.
Still, while this explains why there would be less shifting among my generation, it hardly explains any trend in the other dircetion.
I think there are at least four contributing factors here. The first is the one Paul uses a lot, that Generation Xers are doing worse financially than those before them, and this leads to disillusion with the current system. This is certainly a factor, but I don’t place the same emphasis on it Paul does . On average Gen-Xers may be doing worse than Baby-boomers were at the same age, but plenty are doing pretty well. Had it not been for a small matter of a pesky law suit I would have bought a house in the mid 90s and ridden the housing boom to substantial wealth, and I know a lot of people my age who did just that.
Secondly I think there is the increasing evidence of environmental danger. The evidence here just keeps building up. The younger you are, the more you are going to live with the damage, and in at least two of the cases I mentioned it is concern about the environment that prompted a right-left shift. In one case the individual realised that the right-wing simply has no answers to environmental destruction, and concluded that anyone who can’t answer such a fundamental problem probably doesn’t have answers on anything else. The other person remains supportive of the right on some topics, such as IR, but considers these less important than the environment.
A third factor is sexuality. Sections of the right in the 80s and 90s relied heavily on homophobia as a recruitment tool on university campuses. Inevitably they picked up some people who were uncomfortable with their sexuality. Eventually these recruits came to accept their preferences and not only left the right but developed a certain bitterness against those who had once encouraged their self-loathing.
But its the fourth factor that I think is the most interesting, and possibly the most significant. This is that in recent years the right has become increasingly populist. Hardly a novel observation, I know. This has won Howard four elections using among other things demonisation of asylum seekers and economic rubbish about interest rates. Great for winning votes amongst those who are fairly disengaged, but a significant problem for those who think about politics a lot – particularly those engaged in it.
For left-wingers considering turning right the sight of Reith denouncing anyone who dared doubt that asylum seekers throw their children overboard was a bit of a deterant, to give one example amongst many. On the other hand, right-wingers who were starting to have doubts would have those reinforced on hearing him running a campaign on how Labor would raise interest rates, knowing full well that the Reserve Bank and international conditions are the driving factors. And anyone engaged with politics is likely to have qualms about media monopolies in a way that most voters are not.
The cumulative effect is to encourage left-wingers to stay somewhat left, even if their increasing wealth might push them right, while many right-wingers start to have doubts. On the other hand, the general factor of people running into the failures of their beliefs has tended to cause a lot of ex-revolutionaries to adopt a more moderate stance.
If I am right about this then what we may see is an increasingly bizzare situation where the Liberals hold a solid majority of the vote, built on the weak preference of the apathetic, but find it hard to recruit talented young people, leading to a major talent deficit amongs MPs, staffers and party officials. One likely effect of this would be aging and increasingly untalented state MPs, with the problem taking longer to show up federally as, for a while at least there will still be enough to fill the more limited posts there.
Victoria is certainly seeing the aging of opposition MPs, and the decline in talent seems to be national (although obviously more subjective).
Still, unlike the neocons, I am not convinced of my omniscience and all this remains a theory built on relatively shaky foundations, so I am keen to see it challenged or supported.
Thanks for that, Stephen L.
In the interests of civilised discussion, I’ve deleted a sub-thread of comments that created more heat than light.
I’d like to offer another perspective on the generational fault-line:
Most people born in Australia after about 1965 have little or no concept of real poverty.
I grew up on the outskirts of Brisbane in the 1960s, because of a lingering case of malaria he’d picked up in World War II and other service-related injuries my father was unable to hold down a regular job – he worked as everything from a farm-hand to a welder to a xook to a shop-keeper but was never able to keep a job long because of his health problems. My mother worked as a maid. There were six kids in the family.
Poverty is not having to save a couple of week’s allowance in order to afford new Nikes – it’s not owning a pair of shoes until you’re twelve. Poverty isn’t not having a mobile phone – it’s running a mile to the nearest phone to call an ambulance in an emergency.
I’ll point out here that our poverty wasn’t that bad – we ate three meals a day even if I grew to hate choko and Poor Man’s Bean. We certainly had it a lot better than the family up the road who had eight kids and lived in a one room converted pigsty.
If you grow up experiencing real poverty and seeing its effects on others, your attachment to social justice is likely to be a lot firmer than that of someone who picked it up as a dinner-table topic at university.
“And same is true about original, ‘classical’ neocons as well; Norman Podhoretz, one of their founders…”
I liked Woody Allen’s quip about neocons and the amalgamation of the Magazines “Dissent” and Podhoretz’s “Commentary” under the catchy title “Dissentary”.
‘Rob‚s suggestion that „[W]hen equal pay was mandated, the Aboriginals lost their jobs, because they were not worth the same to the employers‰ (emphasis added) is frankly offensive in its connotations of lazy blacks, etc.’
John, you’re reading something into my comment that I certainly never intended. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) connote anything of the kind, just the cold laws of labour economics. I said it was morally impossible to argue they should not have been paid at the same rate as Europeans.
I was baffled by Stephen L.’s comment. As someone who made the shift around the time I turned 40, I thought – acknowledging we are not open books even to ourselves – I was primarily motivated by a realisation that on many things, and for many years, I’d made mistakes of judgement, including some very bad ones, like cheering on the Red Guards – from a safe distance. Nor does abandonment of the left mean you support John Howard. I don’t support his IR policies, his policy on refugees (noting that he inherited it from Labor) or the war in Iraq. Furthermore, my rightward shift was well under way during the closing years of the Hawke-Keating government, so Howard’s populism had nothing to do with it.
And incidentally, I still vote Labor.
The left, I think, needs to recognise that some of us leave because of principle and sincere conviction, even if you disagree with it.
Just to clarify, Rob, the comment you’re responding to was from Paul Watson. I posted it for him because the software was blocking it.
Sorry, John. So: ‘Paul, you’re reading something ……..’
Rob, given the positions you’ve stated above, I don’t think you are a convert in the sense that I was using the term. Apologies for any imputations to the contrary.