Fw: ::fibreculture:: Re: Sad news overnight

hey thanks. this is a great article.


>—–Forwarded Message—–
>From: Brett Neilson <[email protected]>
>Sent: Oct 11, 2004 5:55 AM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: ::fibreculture:: Re: Sad news overnight
>
>The following piece, written late on election night, was published in the
>Italian newspaper _Il Manifesto_ on 10 October.
>
>Available in Italian at:
>http://www.ilmanifesto.it/oggi/art27.html
>
>Or after tomorrow at:
>http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/10-Ottobre-2004/art27.html
>
>
>Australia
>The illusory drift of Labor to the centre
>
>BRETT NEILSON
>
>Even for us disbelievers, who have witnessed the crumbling of
>representative democracy under the media complex of image and spin, it is
>difficult to pass an election day without entertaining some small fantasy.
>Perhaps this is what elections are all about, anyway. Forget policy. Forget
>truth. The field of contestation is now one of emotion and sensitivity. And
>the messages are served up in sound-bytes, pre-recorded phone messages, and
>personalized letters where the candidate reveals how much information they
>have about you on their databases. These are not weapons of mass deception,
>because deception is no longer the name of the game. We all expect
>deception. Perhaps we even want it, particularly when it protects us from
>uncomfortable knowledge that threatens our sense of probity. Why do
>politicians go on talk shows, do cooking spots, and kick footballs for
>television cameras? They are serving the needs of the imagination, the
>domain where elections are now won and lost.
>
>But John Howard, the conservative Prime Minister who only tonight has won a
>fourth term in Australia, is no Arnold Schwarzenegger. How can a man so
>dull, so ungiven to the skills of celebrity, function so effectively in the
>intense media environment of the contemporary election campaign? Putting
>aside the depression and outrage, we must confront this question. And it is
>a question that has implications that extend far beyond Australia and the
>continuing decimation of health, education, and public broadcasting that
>this election will inevitably bring. Not only because Howard is Bush's
>loyal ally and is likely to follow him into whatever theatre of war opens
>next (assuming the U.S. election unfolds as this one has done). But because
>it is not only in Australia that the art of emotional modulation, the
>interpretation of audience reactions and feedback loops, has been perfected
>far better by conservative political forces than by their agonists in both
>the institutionalized and noninstitutionalized left.
>
>'Keeping interest rates low.' That was the slogan that appeared underneath
>Howard's lectern for the six weeks of the election campaign. The vote, he
>insisted was a referendum on who could be trusted to manage the economy
>better and secure Australia in a time of war. Time and again, interest
>rates and security, and money thrown at the marginal seats where the
>election would be won and lost. And little talk of Iraq, or refugees, or
>the complex and tragic issues that surround Australia's Indigenous
>population. These were the questions that were silenced in the campaign,
>both by Howard and his 43 year-old Labor Party competitor Latham, who was
>wary of alienating swing voters. Sure these are all polarizing issues in
>Australia and Labor's decision to downplay them was one reason why many
>voters deserted them for the Greens. But these polarizations were already
>factored into the vote and were judged largely irrelevant to the conquest
>of the 'aspirational' seats that Labor needed to win back from Howard if
>they were to form a government.
>
>That Labor failed to win these seats points to an entrenched dilemma that
>signals a crisis in the very notion of a centre left party. Since while
>ever they try to match the conservative rhetoric about opportunity and
>social mobility that appeals to the voters in these 'aspirational' seats,
>they bleed on their left side. For Labor, the drift to the centre is
>suicide, yet there is no alternative in the zero-sum game of representative
>democracy. And it is this game that they so timidly play, afraid to upset
>the middle ground with strong talk about war, undocumented migrants, or
>Aboriginals. Yet they lose anyway, and the loss is worse every time. The
>stupefying result of this election is that Howard will increase his majority.
>
>But why did these issues become taboo, especially when the war in Iraq,
>where Howard is highly complicit, is such a disaster? The sorry fact is
>that the voters who count in the representative system (that is, the ones
>who change their minds) don't want to know about these difficult and
>confronting issues. It's all too easy to displace responsibility for them
>(and the violent solutions that governments pursue toward them) on to a
>public figure who is easy to disavow: 'Those politicians, they were the
>ones that made the war. It wasn't me. I hate politicians. I don't trust
>them. They're all the same. And the only reason I vote for one above the
>other is because they promise to make things a little easier for me, to
>keep interest rates low. That's got nothing to do with war. So don't
>lecture me about that. Don't be so condescending.'
>
>These are the attitudes to which Howard was able to appeal, even in the
>darkest days of the Iraq insurgency. But there is a lesson to be drawn from
>this election result, even for those who don't have to endure the painful
>dullness of three more years of conservative government in Australia. What
>is at stake is nothing less than the death of the centre left. For the
>voter who cynically eyes all politicians as equally dirty disengages from
>the system of representative democracy as such. Forced back into the
>system, s/he becomes prey to all sorts of political opportunism and
>masquerading, the entire apparatus of emotional modulation. But it is
>her/his very disaffection with the system that must become the point of
>opening and dialogue with the agents of political change, subjects and
>movements equally dissatisfied with the representative machine. The voters
>who the centre left cannot win back can only be diverted from the
>conservative course if approached as something other than voters. But this
>requires a politics that refuses the logic of the permanent campaign, a
>postrepresentative politics that does not have to wait until the next
>election to begin its struggle, a politics of the present that makes this
>election result, as devastating and predictable as it has been, less
>injurious.
>
>
>Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle … and Other Tales of Counterglobalization
>http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/neilson_free.html
>
>
>
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