Being political now
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark Bahnisch
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Mark Bahnisch's biography and other articles by this writer
In the beginning was the '60s. Or so we're told – the culture wars can be traced back to the second wave of feminism, the pill, traditions fractured, authority called into question. A lot of symbolic weight for a decade to bear, and its images are burned into our collective imagination. At the Museum of Brisbane, they jump off the walls – photos of long-haired protesters in bellbottoms confronting Special Branch detectives in brown suits and unruly sideburns; posters, badges, banners, summonses. The Taking to the Streets exhibition (on display until September 24, 2006) revives memories of the causes and experience that symbolise a generation.
I recall another exhibition held at the Queensland Art Gallery a decade ago, which recreated a typical student lounge room from the '80s, the symbols of radicalism and a political lifestyle evoked by material things. The "greed is good" decade was another decade of radicalism in Queensland. But understanding the nameless decade – the millennium, the noughties, the period that radio announcers can only describe as now ("playing the best hits from the '80s, '90s and now") – is more challenging.
Yet there are contradictions. Another snapshot of '60s life can be found in old copies of the University of Queensland student magazine Semper Floreat: masses of male students eating in the old main "refec" in 1967 wearing ties. It is easy to forget that the '60s also marked the beginning of the radical right and religious movements which dominate politics now.
Not long ago, a lazy editor could always fill space with an article comparing numbers at student protests with the remembered experience of the Vietnam War generation. These images have been turned into commodities, sweeping generalisations targeted at a Baby Boomer audience. Now we are more likely to read about the new conservatism of youth. Gen Y, we are told, believes in "traditional values". The "new conservatism" sits uneasily either with the truth that the "old conservatism" originated in the '60s or the other oft-repeated stereotypes of today's youth: celebrity-obsessed and scatter-brained. Whichever way youth is represented, it's a problem. The emotional appeal in the picture of the "Howard youth" reaches beyond the conservative commentators. Phillip Adams fans can comfort themselves with another stereotype – they, the original radicals, knew how to do youth better than the young. And politics can proceed without taking into account how the world has changed, and how it's still changing.
SIXTIES CULTURE SHARED TWO THINGS NEW TO MODERNIST POLITICS. The first – most powerfully asserted by the feminist movement – was that the personal was political. The public space of politics, the space dominated by grey-suited and homburg-hatted patriarchs, was forced to recognise that much of what was relegated to the private sphere produced inequality. The second change – and one that also deserves the appellation of revolutionary – was a demand that politics be opened up. Participation was the objective. That applied as much to protestors on the streets of Paris, Washington or Brisbane as to Reagan's and Thatcher's legions of young conservative activists.
Expanding the scope of the political and demanding participation (really, demands for democratisation) did not just highlight particular issues, but also sought to alter the political process. It's intriguing to read in Joan Didion's wonderful book Political Fictions (Knopf, 2001), how "process" was talked about in 1988 when the first George Bush was elected. Didion, a wry and perceptive observer of the margins and strangeness of American life, was invited for the first time to cover a political campaign. The process, it seemed, in the jargon of the political players, was quite distinct from "issues". Actually doing something was less fashionable than mobilising grievances through symbolism. Ironically, the attack on "elites" which drove this symbolism was itself orchestrated by an elite of political consultants and strategists.
The story of democratic politics over the last few decades is one of contrasts. While Samuel Huntington writes admiringly of "waves of democratisation" in what was once called the Third World, indices of political participation fall in all Western nations. In Australia, laments about the Australian Labor Party often point to the backgrounds of new MPs – political staffers, union officials, ministerial advisers. But this ignores the broader professionalisation of politics – the Greens now have media advisers moving into seats, and there's a well-recognised career path for aspiring Liberals from university onwards.
Max Weber, in his famous essay of 1918, Politics as a Vocation, contrasted those who "live for politics" with those who "live off politics". Weber was writing about the beginnings of mass political parties early last century, but the justly famous social scientist was prescient. Big P politics is now about closure, about exclusion. It's about managing media messages – about anything but participation. The same politicians who occasionally, in a burst of high-minded rhetoric, bemoan the decline of civic participation in politics often work to keep people out of political parties. Smaller numbers, stacked branches, factional networks all lend themselves to control and management – even manipulation. Participation is more unpredictable. Even left-ofcentre social theorist German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in his dense tome Between Facts and Norms (Polity Press, 1996) accepts that the eruption of citizens into decision-making is a most exceptional event in today's stage-managed theatre of politics.
We still live in an age where politics is a spectacle – perhaps occasionally entertaining, but never enticing. It's no wonder that "apathy" is the usual response, although Didion notes research which shows that the putatively apathetic share social attitudes with those who participate in the ritual act of voting. It may not be apathy, but rather the "do not enter" signs erected around the political field, which are to blame.
While political observers often decry youth for disengagement with politics, they miss an important fact. In this disengagement, youth are not the exception. As political scientist Ariadne Vroman has observed, their disengagement mirrors the attitude of the community generally, and is a response to the closed political games played elsewhere.