1. What do Australian progressives want, and why?
1. What do Australian progressives want, and why?
Part one of three in a series on Australia’s loudest and proudest political denomination: the ‘left-wing’ progressive.
This is part one of a three-part series on the past, present, and future of Australian progressive ethics. For part two, click here. For part three, hit subscribe. And while I’ve got your attention, please hit the like button while you’re here, it makes a huge difference.
There is a Western society-wide assumption that we are pulled from left to right across the political spectrum as we age. The words often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, “If you’re not a progressive when you’re 25, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain”, sum it up nicely.
Depending on who you hear this ‘quote’ from, or in what context it is offered, the word ‘progressive’ is traded with ‘liberal’, ‘left-wing’, or ‘socialist’. The word conservative remains the only operative constant.
The interchangeability of these four very different words, and their use as a less mature counterpoint to conservatism, is worth looking at.
It is reasonable to assume that the point of this adage, in all its various incarnations, is to suggest that the difference between any political outlook and conservatism is but a matter of maturity. The patronising assumption suggests that ageing and maturing delivers the young radical from naivety and into the warm embrace of traditional values and a newfound, generalised opposition to ‘change or innovation.’
For today’s purposes, see point 1 in the below definition of conservatism.
A few things have happened since I first began hearing the adults around me parrot these sentiments.
My generation ended up with less than our parents. We watch the oldies retire with enough super to live comfortably and plan the odd holiday from homes they own outright that they bought in 1985 for four dollars, while we rent other people’s parents’ investment properties at extortionate rates. At the same time, we’re being told that everything’s all fine, as long as we’re in a position to raid our super and trade it in for a small deposit on some black-mould-ridden hovel.
On top of having inherited a planet devastated by conservative environmental policy, we’re tasked with rooting out centuries worth of social injustice overseen by our forebears while holding ourselves responsible for both their lingering causes and institutionalised effects.
That’s not to say the work hadn’t already commenced. It’s just that my generation—those shmucks who pay the mortgages on your investment properties for you in rent—are living in an age that demands perfection in anything that might be considered a social justice issue. Where our parents were able to pat themselves on the back for attending an anti-apartheid or anti-Vietnam war rally, our generation’s expectations of each other are inverted, whereby it is ‘the action of inaction’ that might condemn one to scrutiny.
Friends chastise other friends for using SodaStream during a boycott of Israeli products, and mis-gendering someone can be considered violent. I could list ‘woke-isms’ ad nauseam, but perhaps this brief example from my time at RMIT might sum it up.
In 2019 I was publicly berated while opening a door for someone at university. Apparently by opening the door for this stranger, allowing her to pass through it before myself, I was committing ‘patriarchal micro-aggression’.
While desire to desert dated cultural norms and dynamics—like men patronisingly treating women as girls who need doors opened for them, or people insisting on a choice of two pronouns only—is admittedly sometimes met with a kind of whiplash, its prevalence is telling of a culture desperately reacting against any whiff of social conservatism. And given the work that lies ahead, who could blame us?
These expectations we have of ourselves are self-imposed and are a manifestation of our desire to fix the world. There is a deep desire to do and to be good.
The Jews have a phrase, ‘tikkun olam’, which translates to ‘world repair’. In the west, we pursue the task of tikkun olam with fervour, and this fervour has seen conservative social and cultural prescriptions slammed and upended. Progressivism is slated as a path forward, and conservatism as part of the problem.
This is reflected in social policy, and our citizenry’s reactions to attacks on progressivism. When conservative politicians and lawmakers in both America and Australia attempt to chip away at women’s reproductive rights, and while conservative pundits retreat into religious zealotry and theocratic yearning, they are met with widespread ridicule and scorn.
Whether it’s pride-flag-painted ‘GayTMs’, affirmative recruitment action for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, or governments priding themselves on their ability to platform female politicians, we young westerners are proudly part of a culture that seeks to make a point of challenging social conservatism. We pride ourselves for our progressivism so much so that we occasionally risk putting performance before practicality or coherence.
Despite my generation’s challenges, world repair is baked into the zeitgeist. Conservatism, especially social conservatism, is broadly reviled.
The first half of that fake Churchill quote contains a set of very different political counterpoints to conservatism. These counterpoints seem to have coalesced, in popular parlance, into more of a general reaction to the status quo than any list of separate political or philosophical outlooks.
Liberalism, socialism, ‘left-wing-ism’, and progressivism are all of course very different things. What they lack in any unifying telos, they do however make up for in ethos—a unifying dissatisfaction with the status-quo. Four completely different responses to ‘business as usual’ conservatism being presented as interchangeable counterpoints.
Whether one’s responses to conservatism are liberal or leftist, socialist or progressive, conservatives too often respond to any ethos shared by their conceptual interlocutors with a dismissive wave of the hand.
To the young, conservatism is giving: ‘I know you’re all angry, but that’s because you’re too young to understand what I understand about the world. Your opportunism is a manifestation of your immaturity, and it will likely produce only more suffering should you and your ilk wield any real power. There are tried and tested ways of running a society and maintaining order. Stop screwing with them.’
These sentiments are well evidenced in conservative responses to successive civil rights movements, which for over a century have not only been inadequate but have stood deliberately in the way of social progress or attempts to foster equality and cohesion.
This is something I would hope for American and Australian Jews to remember right now. With both America’s Republican party and the Australian Liberal-National coalition parties in opposition, and with elections on both fronts looming, we must be careful not to mistake conservative pandering to Jewish constituents as authentic or guaranteed representation.
The chances of young Australians ‘maturing’ into conservatism at the rate assumed by whoever first penned this fake quote seem unlikely given the circumstances. I for one am going to need considerably better access to affordable housing, considerably more evidence that anyone in power is actually doing anything about closing the gap, and considerably more hope that our elected representatives are mandating a transition into sustainable energy sources before I might feel safe enough to start focusing more on what we’ve got than what we could be.