Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people…
Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol #covid19aus /1 https://t.co/POUqotdJ7j
It’s in our institutions that expertise and accumulated wisdom resides. Institutions are the emergent organisation of multi-generational experience. You don’t just create them out of choice. Language is an institution. Science is an institution. Institutions aren’t just…/2
…government departments. (Though they’re institutions as well.) They’re like society’s DNA, that helps to continuously re-create it for every generation. Libertarians generally attack institutions, it’s their defining belief, that institutions restrict individual freedom. /3
This is the place to understand the success and tragedy of Trump and Johnson-style libertarianism, also well underway under the LNP in Australia. They win elections by destroying institutions. Their strategy for many decades has been to paint institutions as ‘bureaucracy’, as…/4
…’red tape’, restricting your individual freedom. To paint themselves as the clean broom, sweeping away these ‘elites’ of experts and bureaucrats. (That these same libertarians live at the top of the pyramid of elite social life doesn’t stop their appeal.) /5
The problem with our ideas about democracy is that people *want* hierarchy, they want to be led by other people. Not just in politics, you can’t find a profession or part of life that doesn’t have a hierarchy in that way. It reflects the value hierarchy we maintain for ALL…/6
…things. We always value things, whether it’s work or ideas or shoes etc., along a hierarchy of bad to good, to best. And we ‘elect’ people along each part of this hierarchy of value too. The worst and best shoe makers, etc. This is where our insistence that democracy…/7
…is some value-less plurality of beliefs, ‘each to their own’, is actually destroying it. People will always re-create hierarchies, if they’re not available. That idea of benevolent pluralism is the seedbed the libertarians use to grow their own hierarchies in. Their…/8
…political opponents are so busy promoting the diversity of belief, that they forget to offer any hierarchy of value at all. Or the hierarchy they offer is purely negative and reactionary: to libertarian ‘aspirational’ politics they offer ‘anti-libertarian’ ideas as the only…/9
…alternative. Just about pulling down the libertarians, not about offering a positive alternative hierarchy of belief. Or the positivity is just that same pluralism of belief, which inspires nobody because it defies the basic logic of existence, that some things are better…/10
…than other things. The real danger we now face is about institutions. Because they emerge over generations, destroying them may be a terminal act. As Bruno Latour says here, about religion. Anti-libertarians relish the destruction of religion, with gleeful iconoclasm. /11 https://t.co/duhXEa13lL
Our societies may actually not survive the libertarian success, because it by definition eats the actual basis of our societies. Societies of adolescents, we learn our social ideas in high schools, where each generation competes rather than forms that famous ‘circle of life’. /12
Edmund Burke wrote brilliantly about why custom and tradition are the lifeblood of any society. Conservatives like Burke used to make that the foundation of their politics. Libertarians are not conservatives, that’s just the vehicle they’re using. They’re the vanguard of the…/13
…eternal youth culture, the culture of adolescence, that our societies have become. The boomers began it. But look at the deepest resistance to basic public health in this pandemic - it’s been in the young. The libertarians are winning. /14
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These libertarians are our culture. It would be easy if it was a clearly identifiable group of evil bastards oppressing us. It isn’t. Back to Tweet one of this thread. People vote for this libertarian nonsense. This IS our culture now. We may not survive it. /15
Our societies really are high schools now. Look at the fascination for adolescent life, in all age groups. People well into retirement age find going to gigs and drinking a pinnacle of social life. The intense comparison of adolescent life, of status and positioning…/16
…yourself in a social group. The epidemic of cosmetic surgery and photo filters to retain our adolescent looks. Politics as adolescent gotcha debates, with no ‘programmatic specificity’, to quote a former (mocked) PM. The manic avoidance of disagreement, in favour of…/17
…’identification’ with any of a range of personal passions. The translation of all political issues into impacts on our personal feelings. The substitution of organised (union) political action into personal protest. Etc. This is our world. A high school. /18
High school is short, 6 years. It ends. That may be the epitaph of our societies too. The second the boomers straightened the circle of life into an eternal lifestyle-based youth, it was game over. /end https://t.co/O96I7pKfkT
