Back around 1970, the Labor Party was unelectable because its biggest branches, in NSW and Victoria, were controlled by factional machines of the right and left respectively, who were still refighting the battles of the 1950s Split. The eventual response was Federal intervention to restructure both branches. The intervention was more successful in Victoria than in NSW, but overall the results were good enough to produce a revitalised Labor party. The election of the Whitlam government was one result, as was the strength of the early Hawke ministries, almost any member of which would outperform the great majority of both frontbenches today.
I doubt that an intervention would produce a similar result in NSW today, but the situation is now so dire that it could scarcely make matters worse. It’s hard to imagine a political party with less justification for its continued existence than NSW Labor. It sold out its stated principles with repeated attempts to privatise the electricity industry, then made a botch of the job anyway> It has made itself look stupid with repeated changes of leaders (the only one who tried any resistance to the machine was Nathan Rees, and he was promptly squashed). Its members are enmeshed in every kind of corruption, financial, ethical and sexual, above and beyond the routine corruption of political processes that turned the word “rort” from Sussex Street slang into an Australian byword for sharp practice. Electorally, it’s a disaster area, having gone down to the worst defeat in its modern history, under the sock-puppet leadership of Kristina Keneally. Even though the NSW Libs are, as they always have been, appallingly bad, the O’Farrell government is riding high.
And now, these geniuses have decided that it’s smart politics to make war on the party that’s keeping Federal Labor in office, and with which they will need to deal for the indefinite future if they ever want to pass legislation through the Parliament. Looking at this appalling crew, I can only quote Oliver Cromwell “You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”
Update My friends at the Oz take a keen interest in all my thoughts, so I wasn’t too surprised to see this post linked in their “Cut and Paste” section. However, the headline All the Climate Change Authority member would like now is to get rid of the NSW Right seemed both unwieldy and obtuse, in a fish-meets-bicycle kind of way. Why should my (widely shared and longstanding) views on the NSW Labor Right machine be of any more interest by virtue of my membership of the Climate Change Authority? And why should my enthusiasm about the election of the Rudd government (also linked by Cut and Paste) be relevant to either?
The answer, I would imagine, is this post by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy who (in a quite strange misreading) took the imprecation “In the name of God, go” to be directed, not at the Sussex Street machine repeatedly criticised in the post, but at the Federal Labor government. Terje Peterson tried to set him straight in comments (thanks, Terje), but I had to spell the point out before he added a correction on Sunday evening, which made the entire post rather pointless. By that time, I imagine, the cutter and paster had already set the story up and gone home, leaving the unfortunate sub-editor to do a salvage job with the headline (not the first time!).
John Quiggin 
With all this “flakey” talk I smell fear of, rather than concern for, the the future electoral prospects of the Greens.
The Greens still have my vote because their policies are far better than the Coles/Woolworths we have on offer as our ONLY choices in Australian politics. When they join Coleworths, they lose my vote.
When they shed the flakes maybe they will get others votes too.
The most telling, and damning, aspect of recent Labor denunciations of the Greens is that nobody in the Labor Party has criticised the Greens’ decision to rescind their policy supporting an inheritance tax on the very wealthy. This would be a perfectly sensible and principled reason for a social democrat worth Ben Chifley’s bootlace to criticise another party, yet nobody in the ALP has uttered a squeak about it.
Hmm, well spotted BBBAC. All is not well in the Greens. The unrepresentative structure of Greens policy making fora reveals a disproportionate influence of members from small states and by extension those who are willing to compromise in order to achieve short term popularity.
Bob Brown’s peremptory dumping of inheritance tax was justified in the name of popularity and achieved by support of a conference stacked with representatives from small states. Greens political careerists threaten to trash the Greens brand.
The Greens should recognise that they have to choose either permanent opposition and uncompromising radicalism, or extinction as a party. There is no alternative.
Here is a sensible voice of dissent in the Greens:
http://watermelontharris.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/greens-and-their-better-selves.html?m=1
An inheritance tax on unearned wealth would be one of the most progressive initiatives imaginable, so naturally it is opposed violently by the parties of entrenched privilege (i.e. Labor, Liberal and National). Who after all could want to overturn the legacy of that great Australian Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen?
Conservatism and fear of change have become so deeply embedded in our culture that any serious attempt at reforming anything will be condemned as dangerous radicalism. People who ask the Greens to ‘stop being flakey’ are just asking them to join the establishment and stop being ‘different’. That’s fine if you complacently admire Australia’s relentless march to individualistic materialism. Other people, who remain appalled that our country has become so amoral we cheerfully join in wars of aggression just to impress a cretinous US president, believe reform of values and beliefs is exactly what we need.
As perverse as it may seem, I’m not that fussed over the inheritance tax issue, despite being from NSW.
Whil I regard it as perfectly defensible in equity terms, I’m not convinced that one couldn’t address unearned wealth more effectively than with “estate taxes”. The point is surely to prevent large aggregations of unearned wealth rather than to claw it back after it has fallen into the wrong hands.
Taxes need to meet certain critieria, IMO, to be useful:
a) They need to settle burdens onto those most ethically fit to bear them (there’s your equity question)
b) they need to be low cost per dollar of collection
c) they must be easy to comply with and administer
d) those to whom they apply must have little reason not to know their obligations
e) they must be hard to evade/prtovide little incentive to evade
I’m unconvinced that estate taxes meet standards c) & d) very well and in addition, they provide enormous scope for rightwing populist trolling. Personally, I see taxing residential property, wealth from shares and CEO incomes, superannuation benefits for the upper middle class and better wealth testing access to benefits, as better ways to narrow the gaps.
Equally, suitable due diligence on residential property loans — putting a floor of 20% under the required equity for loans, capping maximum repayments allowable per month at 30% of adjusted household income, expenditure on increasing the available quality public housing stock plus rezoning for urban consolidation etc again would limit some of this problem.
FB, your taxonomy of appropriate taxation is eminently sensible.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Greens have slurped deeply from the poisoned chalice of federalism, imbibing substances that are toxic to the heartlands of progressivism. The future of the Greens is with the youth of the inner suburbs. They are the vanguard of cultural change, not the populist trollatariat. The rise of the Greens is a twenty-year project. The party must look beyond victory in the next by-election. If the careerists don’t like it, then let them join another party.
@Katz
It’s hard to disagree with your outline Katz.
On the Federalist question though, you raise a point worth teasing out. I’m teaching inter alia Year 9 History at the moment and Federation was the first thing we did. After we’d discussed at some lenth the various conceptions of democracy, the students naturally asked just how democratic federal structures were, given that they didn’t distribute power equally amongst all the people they were intended to serve. On the face of it, you might wonder how anyone who thought democracy was about giving everyone an equal say could ever sign on to federalism or even a unitary system in which the seats were not all even — as is the case with our federal parliament.
Running across democracy is the idea of localism having a value that was equal to or perhaps superior in some senses to democracy. The states antedated the commonwealth — which was entirely a product of a consensus amongst the states that they should all keep most of the authority in their bailiwicks ceding only what they could not usefully do to the feds. Given the remoteness of tjhe commonwealth, the transport and comms difficulties, there were functionally reasonable arguments for this.
Similarly, the Federal Greens were an artefact of local Greens groups seeking a Federal presence. We had a strong presence in Tasmania of course (many of whom were much closer to the older-style narrowly focused environmentalists, and in NSW too, coming out of the Green bans movement (where we had a more distinctively left-of-centre perspective), but if we were to attract like-minded persons outside these places they needed to be reassured that they wouldn’t simply be subsumed within the larger and better established political alignments. Part of avoiding having a NSW-dominated Green movement, which might simply have stayed in NSW, or one limited to a few major centres entailed surrendering to a federal structure — so that those who joined in QLD, SA, WA, and elsewhere could be confident that they wouldn’t be lost in the wash. Federalism and the consensus voting system necessarily makes us a more conservative party than we’d be if local branches sent delegates according to their numbers to a national conference where matters were decided on a majority basis.
On the other hand, if we’d had that structure, there might have been no Australian Greens at all, or it might have been something of a sham as almost all of us would have been within a narrow strip from the Tweed down the east coast plus Tasmania. The ability to present ourselves to modest communities as capable of representing concerns over development for example would have been much diminished. Another advantage is that the structure tends to militate against branch stacking, which has been a serious problem for the ALP and Libs. You’d have to rort the system seriously in virtually every state to get any tangible advantage.
The irony though is that our party is pressing for PR in Federal elections, precisely because the current system makes it damned near impossible for the nearly 12% who give us their PV to get anything like that in Canberra. We are keeping a malapportioned structure for our party branches while opposing it at Federal level for the parliament of the country. That there may be defensible reasons for these apparently differing positions is beside the point. It still looks odd.
The Greens are a voluntary organisation. Nobody has to be bound by its rulings on policy unless they want to stay and be an MP (and even here, outside NSW, there is a notional loophole), and in many parts of the country we are very thin on the ground — which is why we struggle to elect people. The commonwealth includes every citizen, whether they like it or not. The latter therefore should be more faithful to one vote one value than us, as we are seeking to recruit new people who think they can make a difference.
Now if we had 25,000 members distributed more or less evenly across the country, the arguments for a federal structure would be far weaker.
Is this a hc guest post?!
What are the institutional reasons we have arrived here? How can it be that a party could engineer itself so that the incentives facing an individual (aspirational) member are so opposed to the interests of the party as a whole?
I am not at all qualified to comment on the tax discussion. That being said I think that Fran Barlow has it right in the criteria listed at #6.
As an aside, I got home from work last night early enough to watch Q and A, a pretty good panel I thought, one question/discussion jumped out at me; in regards to that shocking death of the young man at Kings Cross. When asked what could be done to prevent this kind of shocking crime, the answers ran the gamut of more police, shorter club opening hours, better drug and alcohol controls, more rigorous application of the RSA laws, etc. etc. Only one panel member suggested that we look at the base level causal effects, the motivation of the perpetrator, their socio-economc background, their education, the reasons why they committed the crime in the first place. Sarah Hanson-Young.
Freelander, who is the the “they” that should “shed their flakes”? The troglodyte ALP right?
I sadly refer to the the latest Quiggin thread concerning relevancy and complacency”, however.
The Greens have been persuaded to abandon their initial mission in favour of souffle issues and have allowed themselves to be wedged apart from this mission, manoeuvered into becoming a virtual single-issue party wearing its heart on its sleeve re asylum seekers in a way that almost contradicts their initial critique and purpose.
The asylum-seeker issue can’t be sorted without relating it to the wider suite of issues re enviro and reasoned economics. The public wont support an open ended, indeterminate influx of offshore people unless a) adequate infrastructure, planning and design codes are in place and b) it finds that the refugee trail is ended at source, by having imperialist powers get out of third word countries. Neither event will happen, partly because of the stinking ALP Right’s sabotaging of the Labor government’ stated task of defence of civil society..
Hence, I beleive Fran Barlow is wrong to call for exceptionalism for middle class and upper income taxation at a time when the majority here and offshore are expected to pay for Wall st style neoliberal criminality. another example of dislocated fundamentals.
They, the greens. Have to support the proposition that flakes and flakey policies ought to be jettisoned from all parties. At the moment there are a lot to jettison.
I am not completely sure that adding the abolition of Federalism to the Green agenda would necessarily be either seen as an example of the necessary escape from flakiness or central to their mission. Several new democracies, including South Africa, are federations. Their upper house, the national council of provinces, does not have the same powers as our senate, but it does have equal provincial delegations.
Abolishing the federation and moving to unicameralism in Australia has been a historical preoccupation of the left, but that doesn’t necessarily make it an aprioristically great idea.
Political parties need more than nice policy positions. To be elected government voters need to believe that a party can do. You don’t give executive power to a party of flakes who have good intentions but haven’t a clue about how to carry them out. The greens are not yet a credible alternative.
You are better off in a car driven by someone who knows how to drive,even if they are going somewhere you don’t want to go, than in a car driven by someone who wants to go where you want to,but who doesn’t know how to drive, is unsafe in their attempts,and doesn’t know the way.
Which is why some are reluctant to embrace the Greenspam.
Sorry … the greens.
You would have hoped there was more adult supervision over autistic programmers … and someone would explain that humans don’t like their decisions made for them… These text changers constantly making unrequested changes! On the autistic behavior and lack of adult supervision Google is really going offvthe rails with manipulative trickery that only those missing a theory of mind would indulge in.
This is the first blog I have heard the Greens called ‘flakey’. We are generally called extremist, radical, looney left, authoritarian, communists and watermelons. Of all the labels, radical would be the closest to the truth and I’m talking about the real definition.
Perhaps Freelander should look up the term flakey and properly answer the previously put question as to which policies and which people he defines as flakey.
Already, given an example of a policy. Not that I had to. Can’t name one wholey non-fkakey green politician. Have pointed out that the ability to do which the greens don’t seem to have is necessary before they can be a credible alternative.
Might not be nice for greens to hear but until they absorb the message they are not going far.
@Freelander
Was Ivan Milat a competent driver? Did he know his way arounf Belanglo State forest? Would a hitchhiker have been safer in his car than that of a well intended learner?
I’m guessing not. At least in the latter case, one can perhaps make suggestions, get lucky with the hazards.
Personally, I’d pass on both …
Freelander, if you read the papers you will find articles from Guy Rundle and Nicholas Stuart identifying the true source of the”flaky”. Now, Freelander’s assignment is to read these two articles, then go bed, taking Teddy with him/her.
First site I visit after leaving here a couple of minutes ago, “NewMatilda”.
First article off the rank, Henry Pill, with a piece entitled, ” The Labor Right’s American Playbook”.
This commences,
“What do Mitt Romney and Paul Howes have in common? They both offend the right people to consolidate their own power. The ALPs NSW Right is attacking the Greens to alienate progressives” .
Sorry to add this to your already extensive reading list, Freelander, but it might help “unblock”, when all else has failed.
@Alan
As I think I implied, there can be credible arguments for a federated structure. Democracy is a fairly loose concept based around the idea of individual sovereignty raised to the level of governance, aggregated and then after some parsing, enacted as “the consensus”. Not all governance is best located at the centre — and much of it is better done locally anyway.
OTOH, my own view (as distinct from that of The Greens) is that in 21st century Australia, the states have no useful role to play and that we’d be better served with a strong central government coordinating regional governments which would in turn have subcommittees to look after council functions.
It’s hard to see any Federal government in the near term pushing that one however.
Amusing to see green logic in action. And this is the sweet talking they do when they try to win support from someone who agrees with the direction they would like to see things go in, to some extent. But unskilled and undisciplined they won’t get far. Fiesty and flakey they will stay in the entertainment section.
Freelander, you’ve shifted the goalposts a few times, but never mind. I note you still haven’t come up with a single actual flaky Greens policy, instead claiming we have no other kind, even though I gave you the death duties. (Not that I actually disapproved, I just believed from a pragmatic point of view that it was unwise.)
So: put up or shut up. Just name 10!
The state borders are more than faintly silly. I live in a fairly remote town and we have a lot more in common with people living on the other side of state borders than we do with the state capital hundreds of kilometres away.
Canada has precisely your structure and it would be interesting to do some research on service delivery in Canadian provinces versus Australian states. South Africa moved from 4 colonial provinces to 9 new provinces but there are 14 continuing boundary disputes that have generated considerable problems and quite a lot of enclaves. But, as you say, no government is going to move in this direction in the foreseeable future.
It seems to me that Greens have a Green agenda and its not really our job to enact an agenda for the historic left.
Gee! I’ve shifted the goal posts! No. Mine have stayed still. The problem with a lot of the fellows here is that they argue against the argument they would like to argue against not the argument they happen to be facing.
If homework is being handed out, maybe some careful reading of what was not. But then my hope never springs eternal.
By the way …
A new internet law – You know they have run out of arguments when they resort to dragging in Ivan Milat or the Belanglo State forest or better still,both.
A uniquely Australian law?!
@Freelander
someone adduces a silly analogy as argument.
Speak of the devil …
Reductio ad Milatum or reductio ad Belangloum, a nice Aussie contribution in lieu of silence when having nothing left to say. I like it!
The people who would like the greens to stop being flakey of course don’t want them to evolve into the incumbents. They simply hope they will evolve into competent adults. The incumbents are hardly what we want but despite their many flaws, they have to be preferred to the greens and their dangerous deficiencies.
Just an observation here; I find that the more comments there are by Freelander, the less I enjoy the discussion. I wouldn’t want to assert direction of causality, but the phenomenon is certainly real.
What a pathetic contribution Sam. What a pity the world is neither designed nor revolves simply for your enjoyment.
Ah, and here’s another data point, right on time.
Ah, ad hom all you can contribute Sam and rather nonsensical ad hom at that. So you don’t like me, apparently. How sad for you. But if you have nothing to say,try to avoid being pathetic.
Freelander, what is up?
This stuff isn’t “you”.
You are true blue Labor and can’t believe the mess recent history has left Labor in, particularly since the promise of 2007-10?
Neither can anyone else at this thread, I’d bet.
It is not dislike of Labor or Laborites, it’s just dismay at what the ALP is becoming and what sort of opportunity has been wasted, as well as a sense of sabotage from the Right, within and without.
It was a good pragmatic platform, the 2007 platform. All of the modest targets on everything from asylum seekers to social policy and environment, to industrial relations and justice, were achievable.
If things have come to the current sad state, it is to do with the assault on the government from capitalism and msm, against a backdrop of deteriorating consciousness within “New” Labor. The current problems are NOT the fault of progressives, Green or otherwise.
They are brought about through Labor being fly-blown by manipulable Lyons Forum cranks, neolibs and opportunists, not the people who would dearly have loved to have been its closest allies in keeping democracy healthy.
Do you realise what a concern it may be be for other thinking people, that soon there may be no viable alternative to the Tories?
Can I share some thing with you, Freelander?
I was brought up in a Labor stronghold, believed in Labor; voted for it monotonously.
Can you imagine what it does to me, to see turncoats within wrecking it and turning it into a bosse’s instrument to be wielded against ordinary Australians?
Must admit that once upon a time I thought Labor were for the right things, and once they were. But that was a long time ago, and the labor party is too far gone with opportunists,and careeriests to come back. Lets hope the Greens or some other party steps up and soon.
As for the Tories, you ‘d have to be embarrassed to be a supporter on that side. Malcolm Frasier seems embarrassed!
What has truly sadden me has been the destruction of the union movement, with the divide and conquer of enterprise bargaining being the penultimate step to no unions at all. Free trade was a great battering ram in the long struggle to bust the unions and undo one hundred years of gains.
Yes, the gaping hole left in the political fabric has been the disappearance of the “left”, to do with globalisation and neoliberalism, off shoring of the industrial base and the hammering down of the unions.
The “workers”, of course are now Asians slaving away in the sweatshops of SE Asia- out of sight, out of mind.
Where once was a country, now only suburbia exists. There is no longer a sense that we are planning and working together toward some thing better, that could be a model for the world, just a load of scrapping amongst Australians for the blingy and ephemeral material symbols that are the outward form that once denoted a creative, healthy civil society.
Somebody thinks that the Greens have been taking Freelander’s advice, and isn’t happy about it. I personally think the author’s argument is flawed by her essentialist view of “the market”, but as an informed insider accound that actually attempts to present a political argument rather than NUS-style slagging off, it’s a healthy counterweight to the crap we’ve heard and read over the past eleven days.
http://overland.org.au/blogs/left-flank/2012/07/neoliberals-on-bikes/
There is another important fact of Australian electoral and parliamentary history to be borne in mind when discussing the Labor-Greens relationship. Labor has not had a Senate majority in its own right since 1953, and is not going to have such a majority in any forseeable scenario over at least the next decade (to be charitable). In other words, the current situation where there is a Federal Labor government which needs to negotiate legislation with another left of centre and pro-union party in the Senate is the best place Labor has been in since 1953, and is as good as it’s going to be for quite some time to come. Those Labor figures who have been sounding off about the Greens need to tell us what alternative situation they think is (a) feasible and (b) more desirable from a Labor perspective.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth Humphrys, quoting from the Overland link above, is absolutely correct:
There is no middle ground between maximising return on capital and a sustainable economy. One must plump for one or the other.
@Katz
quoting Humphrys:
The trouble here is twofold. “At all costs” is a non-specific condition. Almost anyone could oppose economic growth at any cost. What scale and quality of cost meets that test is the stuff of mainstream argument, even if one assumes that almost any growth a conservative or neoliberal might approve of would pass the test. That regulatory systems are in force, even in economies run by avowed conservatives or neoliberals tells us that even they accept that growth must pass some sort of cultural test.
Equally though it has been the case for some time that the more conservative of our major parties has declared that budget deficits are something akin to a mortal sin. That’s niot far from the consensus in the US and of course striving for balanced budgets is de rigeur in Europe these days. Clearly, they don’t think growth at any cost is a good policy.
So I’m seeing this qualification as something of a truism. FTR there’s nothing at the Greens website that resembles this declaration, and much that seems to affirm that growth can be a good thing, including an explicit recognition of the positive role of markets.
It’s true that not a few in the Greens are sympathetic to what is called “steady state economics” — a zero-growth perspective that dovetails with the idea of stabilising and reducing population. That’s not the party’s official position though.
One can argue that our “at any cost” test is a lot sterner than that of the mainstream parties. We place a much higher value on preservation of ecosystems, at the expense, if it comes to that, of consumption — though we would argue that we aren’t close to that yet. We’re not growth fetishists but don’t deny that sustainable growth is possible. The idea of “maximising” the return on captial is also misleading. The ROI is maximised, subject to whatever constraints apply. If one of them is a price on effluent from the oxidation of fossil hydrocarbons, and another is preservation of biodiversity, or a ban on extractive industry in a given ecosystem, then that is something that those seeking ROI must factor in. While economic growth would very probably be lower over time if the whole world were operated in this way, one could still seek to maximise ROI.
So Humphry’s attack is a strawman, IMO.
The “at all costs” equivocation is subsidiary to the central contradiction between profit maximisation and sustainability.
In relation to the subsidiary issue, angels and pinheads come to mind.
Neoliberals (libertarians) have always used their long-term strategy of infiltrating all sides of politics that have a chance of success. Even though Neoliberals are in essence a right-wing political force they have pursued the both-all sides strategy because with it they get the Neoliberal agenda enforced regardless of who voters choose.
Not surprised they have made efforts to subvert the German Greens.
@Katz
“There is no middle ground between maximising return on capital and a sustainable economy. One must plump for one or the other”
This is quite wrong. You could do half of each.
@Katz
I don’t agree. Like other Greens, I’m no growth fetishist, but I do regard growth as a necessary condition (though not a sufficient one) for raising people maintainably out of poverty. I’m not giving away secrets when I note that much of what counts as economic activity has little to do with raising people our of poverty, and sometimes its effect is negative. Military spending, for example, is a response to the failure of humans to devise ways to collaborate equitably over the exploitation of ecosystem services. Not only does it divert human labour into something that is at best worthless, but often actually destructive of the products of human labour and of course humans themselves. In a world in which there were no armies and no military technology, and all that human labour was diverted into meeting human need we might well have less “growth” but humans as a whole would be richer per unit of labour surrendered.
Doubtless one could look elsewhere with ease for examples of activity that contributes nothing of tangible benefit to humanity — and certainly nothing of commensurate benefit to humans of the labour and ecosystem services consumed.
Now personally, I strongly prefer a system of community planning over production, but at the light industrial and retail end of the chain, and in services, it seems to me that what we call markets are probably no less efficient at allocating labour than a planning system would be. So once we get below “the commanding heights” where in effect, we have cartels in operation, I’m not persuaded that the marginal utility of planning systems warrants it. These days, co-ops and even small trader operations create no great inequities and will probably deliver goods and services more cheaply in labour time than any other system could.
I don’t agree that this makes me any kind of neoliberal.
One last observation on the silly analogy above about whether one would prefer a competent driver regardless of the destination to an incompetent driver committed to taking you where you want to go …
The basic claim is that it doesn’t matter where one is going. Plainly, if one is standing at a bus stop one will ignore buses going radically in the wrong direction much as one might decline to get onto a bus that nearly kills you by mounting the footpath driven by someone apparently unfit, regardless of its advertised destination.
For those loosely described as “on the left” the idea of “progress” is a basic condition for supporting policy or those advocating it. The idea of progress assumes the idea of humans (and especially those who are relatively or absolutely marginalised) coming to have better life chances and more power over the direction of their lives and the quality and quantity of their life chances. To the extent that this entails choices in a zero sum game, progressives prefer the poorer to benefit at the expense of the relatively privileged.
It’s not a universal view of course. Some think that however unseemly social arrangements may appear, “the poor will always be with us” and this is about as good as it gets, and therefore that inequality and even misery is therefore morally defensible. They assert that any serious attempt to disturb this will not only fail, but risk causing more harm than it abates. Such people are called conservatives, because they seek to preserve existing privileges and usages. Many of them are very competent at prceversing their privileges. A brief look about the world shows this is so. In almost every corner of the world, there is squalor and brutality bound up with the conservation of privilege.
The idea that progressives would prefer to be governed by a competent conservative at preventing progress, or worse, reversing it, merely because the advocates of progressive policies were somewhat incoherent in approaching the resolution of the problem of progress is simply bizarre.
We can fix incoherence, when it gets in the way. We may need to do a lot of that before progress is possible — dragging the unfit busdriver out of the seat and replacing him/her with someone better equipped to drive. The direction of policy however, is the starting point for politics. To date, nobody has shown that Greens are in any way unfit to drive the bus. Here and there, one may disagree on our chosen route — I certainly do — but that’s an entirely different matter.