Four More Years Of Hard Work

What a month it's been, with elections in both Australia and America - and Indonesia and Afghanistan and Ukraine, even if the last was badly flawed. And the right people won, at least four out of five; certainly in Australia and America, the two that matter the most to me. For Afghanistan, just the fact of a calm and fair election is enough.

But in Australia, John Howard only won by a 5.5% margin, 52.75% compared to 47.25% for Mark Latham. And in America, although George Bush won by more than three million votes over John Kerry, the percentage margin was even smaller, 51% for Bush against 48% for Kerry.

Why were both contests so close? Why did so many millions of people vote in favour of being governed by men I, quite frankly, loathe?

Well, it's complex. Sure, some people are just batshit crazy, like the trollish denizens of MoveOn.org, Democratic Underground, Daily Kos and so on, the historical revisionists and self-confessed Marxists. But even when you count San Francisco and Berkeley, and Byron Bay and Nimbin (and, frankly, whoever lives in that house on Kurraba Road...) they can only account four ten percent of the population.

Fifteen, tops.

Which leaves thirty-odd percent of the apparently normal populace voting for the wrong guy. I'm not going to mess about here: Latham was not fit to be Prime Minister, nor was Kerry fit to be President. Both countries would have survived; America has of course been through worse; Australia would have just shrugged its shoulders and muddled through.

But still...

Part of the reason is the nature of the political systems in the two countries. For all the differences in the details - Australia's preferential voting and America's popularly elected* President - the similarities are more important. Whenever rule of law is so well established that ignoring the result of an election is unthinkable, and politics is ruled as much by pragmatism as by ideology, this is what you'll find:

Two parties, opposed on a wide variety of issues, but each drawn inexorably towards the centre. Because the centre is defined by the people, and there are fifty percent of the population on either side. If you judge it just right, you will cross the line by just enough to pick up that crucial winning margin, be it 3% or 5.5% or even -0.5% if the districts are stacked the right way. If you cross the line by too much, you piss off your base, and they in turn piss off and vote for the Greens or the Libertarians or some other spoiler party - and you lose. Misjudge the line and drift too far from the centre and you make your base happy but you can't pick up enough of the ordinary Joes and Janes to make it.

And as long as pragmatism doesn't get forced into the back seat, one of the key jobs of the political machines is to judge public opinion and to work out exactly where and by how much and on what issues you need to shift to win the next election. It's an incredibly complicated job, because it's not a simple continuum but a space in a hundred or more dimensions, and it's not just the distributions but the dimensions themselves that are constantly changing. And at the same time the opposition is trying to do the same thing, and doing their level best to throw spanners into your works.

Which is why the parties screw it up exactly half the time.

Now, the flip side to this in recent years has been the actions of the mainstream media. For some reason - I have no idea why this is so, because I can see no benefit in it for them - they have decided to throw in their lot on the side of the liberal/left. Entirely, to the point of utterly destroying their own credibility, which is their stock in trade.**

What they have been trying to do, and they have been willing to not just misreport and distort the news but to fabricate and flat-out lie to do it, is to shift puplic opinion to the left.*** That would mean that either the right-of-centre party would have to shift to the left (pragmatism) or stay where they are and lose power (ideology).

The problem with this plan is that the mainstream media do not have a monopoly on the distribution of information. We can thank Rush Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts, Rupert Murdoch, small-town newspapers, and the internet for acting as a spoiler. Because what happened instead was that the opinion of roughly half the public shifted to the left.

And that's no good at all; in fact, it's counter-productive. The first step in the electoral process in both countries is the selection of a leader for the party, and that selection is undertaken by the base, that same base that has now shifted to the left and opened up a public-opinion gap between itself and the other half of the population. So it was that respectable figures like Joe Lieberman and Kim Beazley, either of whom would have made an acceptable leader even to much of the other half, and might indeed have picked up some votes there; so it was that these electable men were shunted aside for someone who would appeal to the base but could never bridge the gap to pick up the votes needed to win.

Which, I think, is why both races were so acrimonious. If you can't bridge the gap, if you can't count on picking up some of the moderates on the other side, all you can hope for is to energise your own side. And if you're not a remarkable man, a gifted orator (and let's face it, none of the candidates in these two elections were that), then the best way to do that is to demonise your opponent - widening the gap still further. There's always some of that in any such contest, but this time it was the primary tool of the left because they simply didn't have much else to use.

In Australia, voting is compulsory, so there's not a lot of leeway there. In America, both parties did all they could to encourage voters to, well, vote, and indeed were extremely successful. And perhaps equally successful, which is not that surprising given the dynamics of public opinion and party platforms. Of course, the "youth vote" never materialised in America, but that should surprise no-one who can still remember their own youth.

And so, what we have is this: Michael Moore won the election. As did Dan Rather, and Martin Sheen, and Philip Adams, and Maureen Dowd, and Margo Kingston, and the editors of The Guardian, and a host of other lefty celebrities and intellectuals. Of course, they won the elections for John Howard and George Bush, which is hardly what they intended.

The problem with all this is that when pragmatism fails on the left side of the centre it is weakened on the right. If your opposition is weak, you don't need to pay so much attention to them, and you can indulge your ideology. Which is fine up to a point: George Bush is now free to finish the war, and the Iraqis know that their American liberators aren't suddenly going to depart and leave them at the mercies of the insurgency. And John Howard, with control of the Senate for the first time, can pass much-needed reforms that have been stymied until now by obstructionist minor parties.

But in the long run, this shift away from pragmatism is harmful, potentially deeply harmful. Four years isn't going to hurt America, but four decades likely would. Either the Democrats and the Labor Party need to abandon their ideologues and move to the centre again, or they are going to lose, and keep on losing, and hurt their respective countries in the process. Rhetoric from both camps so far shows no sign of any such process, but it's early days yet and the left has years in the wilderness in which to achieve this change of heart. As many years as it takes.

* More or less.
** With the exception of those parts owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is nobody's fool.
*** No, I haven't forgotten what I just said about hundred-dimensional polispace. This is shorthand here. You know what I mean.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:28 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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