Tony Abbott is not our man

I was listening to a discussion between Reuben Slife and Marc Barnes, and they ventured into the topic of how the idea of nation changed during modernity.

Marc Barnes: You have the loss and sometimes the very deliberate loss of the concept of the people...that there are peoples who operate together, who have a charity, who have a love for each other, and who have a sense of their own being, as having a history. That's precisely what gets swept away as ignorant, as the enlightened modernity turns to the elevation of the individual and the contractual relationship, so that "peoples" become this sort of thing that you may or may not enter into, but it always doesn't really penetrate to the depths of a person.

Reuben Slife: The people is a basic concept of politics...yet the concept does take on a different meaning in the Enlightenment where it becomes a, what would you call it?, an agglomeration of a bunch of individuals into a whole, it becomes a numerical thing, and like you add it up into the people, and so when you say "we the people" you mean something like "all of us, the free individuals, who made our rational choices, banded together and said this is the rational thing". It's related to social contract theory and all of that. But as you said there's the difference between that and this really ancient sense of me being a part of a unity that pre-exists me and that has a history that defines me and within which I operate and that starts getting lost in Enlightenment modernity, even as it starts to substitute a different concept for the people.

This may seem like an academic discussion of sorts but, unfortunately, it is still highly relevant to the way that politics is playing out today.

Reuben Slife (left) and Marc Barnes

I'm going to use my own country, Australia, as the example, although conditions are similar elsewhere. For decades, both of our major parties, Liberal and Labor, have been committed to extraordinarily high levels of immigration. This makes sense if you have two underlying political assumptions.

The first is the modern concept of nation as being, as Reuben Slife puts it above, "an agglomeration of a bunch of individuals....it becomes a numerical thing." The second is a belief that the primary role of government is to increase the GDP - not to have better living standards, but just to have a larger economy.

If you adopt both of these principles, then adding more people means you are both "building the nation" rather than replacing it, and "building the economy" even if GDP per capita is stagnant, so that there is no real improvement in the standard of living. 

Therefore, if we wish for our political class to act differently, we need to challenge both assumptions. This will require some effort. I was reminded of the difficulties involved when having a polite debate on the issue with a left-leaning work colleague. He readily conceded that real GDP was stagnant, but was nonetheless adamant that immigration was a good thing because it meant the GDP numbers would go up. The idea has been around so long it is just something that is not critically examined, not by either side of politics.

The other highly relevant aspect of the Slife/Barnes discussion is the changing notion of the word "nation". Modernity did not abandon the older lexicon - it keep the same philosophical terms but radically changed their meaning. This includes words like freedom, justice and rights. This makes a political "theory of mind" much more difficult. We hear moderns using certain words and assume that we have a common point of reference. But we don't.

I have a very specific example of this to use: the Australian politician and former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. In response to the rise of the populist One Nation Party, Abbott is trying to win back conservative voters by highlighting his commitment to patriotism. He created a social media video with Senator Michaelia Cash, in which she says, "Tony, I love our flag, I love our country, and I love our values":

It would be easy for an ordinary socially conservative Australian to think that these two were patriotic in the same sense that they themselves are. But the truth is different. These two have the Enlightenment model of nation, the one in which countries are just agglomerations of individuals who choose to live in a certain place.

And so Tony Abbott made another video explaining that anybody could be an Australian as long as they held to certain liberal political values, including supporting "a healthy pluralism, an equality of rights, freedom of expression, of conscience, of religion". 

What is the effect of holding such a view? Well, it means that you lose any specific identity to your nation. It means that a nation is no longer made up of a particular, distinct people, with its own history, culture and tradition. Abbott has been consistent in promoting such a view. Here are some quotes from his speeches over the years:

a. More than any other, the English-speaking culture is prepared to take people from anywhere on their own terms. No one who can speak English is really a foreigner in any of the English speaking countries. (source)

b. The essential principle animating the Federation Fathers...was citizens’ greater freedom to pursue their individual destinies. (source)

c. My instinct is to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia. A larger population will bring that about provided that it’s also a more productive one. (source)

d. I want to say how brave every single migrant to this country is, because every single one of you has done something that those who are native born have never done. You have been gutsy enough to take your future in your hands and to go to a country which is not yours and make it your own...[migrants] make the very best Australian citizens eventually. They are the most worthy, the most welcome parts of the Australian family. (source)

e. The immigrant who feels like a stranger in our midst is really at the heart of the Australian story. To the extent that it is a celebration of our nation, Australia Day is necessarily a salute to an immigrant culture. (source)

f. A very significant part of Howard's achievement has been to massage away the pessimistic and narrow-minded aspects of Australian conservatism. Fear of Asia, mistrust of difference, obsessive concern with whether people are getting more than their share are much less part of our national make-up than they were. (source)

I would hope that these quotes demonstrate just how distant Abbott is from any principled defence of the existing Australian national identity, let alone a defence of the founding people of Australia. It cannot happen with him, it will not happen with him, because the political principles which animate him do not allow for it to happen. 

Our task is to make sure that we do not keep voting for those who remain trapped in the Enlightenment paradigm. We should not mistake his nation for ours. We do not have the same understanding of what the word means. 

In the short term we can vote for populist candidates, even if they do not perfectly represent us. In the longer term, we need to deliberately raise a generation to hold a different set of principles, one that does allow for a defence of who we are.