So, how did we get here?

This is not my beautiful world

Shit got real just now, but it took a long time and a lot of inattention and complacency, basically since the 1950s. It began with the unholy alliance of manufacturing and the military during the Cold War and the technowashing of German military engineers like Wernher von Braun. Allowed to be unpunished and even fêted, villains were a normalised part of US’s and its allies’ institutions.

But, as an ex-hippy in the late 60s and early 70s (I got better), the defining event for me was Nixon being pardoned for clearly criminal actions by his successor, Gerald Ford. Nixon resigned all right, but he got away with a “dirty tricks” unit that itself became (or always was) a normal part of politics in democracies. Shortly after this, our Prime Minister in Australia was effectively fired (by the Governor General) due to a failure by our equivalent of Huey Long, Jo Bjelke-Petersen, premier of Queensland to honour the conventions when a state Senator resigns and appoint someone from the same party as that senator; instead appointing a hard conservative, allowing the conservative coalition to block Supply (the Bill that approves spending by the government.

This failure to follow conventions made it clear to me then that democracy is not held in place by checks and balances (Bjelke-Petersen didn’t even know about this when interviewed), but by the willingness of politicians and institutions to follow conventions in good faith. Australia lacks the kind of constitution had by other nations (like the US, Russia, China, etc.), but so long as conventions were followed and enforced, we did (and still largely do) pretty well.

One thing that we hippies and “New Left’ types did to make this all seem normal, too, was to call every conservative a fascist, even when supposedly progressive parties behaved in much the same fashion. The term “fascist” lost all meaning, even though, as I came to realise decades later, those who started the countercultural movement were exactly right in their specific uses of the term.

As I was taught, fascism is a nationalist authoritarian government in close concert with big business interests (including the aristocracy sometimes) that treat the nation as more important than individual rights. Democracies have always had people who flirted with fascism or something very like it, but after the second world war, it was considered morally repugnant. However, there was one class of people who really, really, wanted an authoritarian government: profiteers. In short, Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex”, which is fascism by a less offensive label. Add to that the change in the 1970s and 1980s from “profits are only one goal of business” to “it’s all about the profit margins” (which is why “It’s the economy, stupid” had such resonance. We started to focus under Reagan at economic issues to the exclusion of the well being of populaces (because the individual is less important than the nation).

Speaking of Reagan, even after it became obvious that he committed treason in order to win the presidency, the GOP never accepted culpability, and why should they have? Unlike the remnants of ethical and moral values at the time Nixon was accused, or the end of the HUAC witchhunts (“At long last, have you no decency?”), Reagan was never going to be criticised by the right, and the left seemed to have no spine, at least in Congress. Once it was clear that the left/progressive parties want to “move to the middle” – in the process becoming largely what had been conservatives a decade or so earlier – and so were afraid to hold the right to account, decency, morality, and convention was seen by them as mere tools to apply to acquire power, and profit.

And this happened in the 1980s. Forty years ago.

In Australia, a great opportunity was missed by the then Treasurer, and later Prime Minister Paul Keating. Keating was a “pragmatic” left wing politician, but he, like his mentor in New South Wales, from pre-war union politics Jack Lang, was interested solely in getting power, and for all his rhetoric, he caved to conservative and business interests, failing to hold the then rising Murdoch empire to account as a media monopoly. There are a list of other bad decisions he took such as denationalising communications, selling government assets in a “privatisation” movement, most of which then became extensively profiteering, and permitting fees for education that had been, under the last Labor government, free for all. He, in other words, was a conservative (still is).

Keating’s government (Immigration minister Gerry Hand) also introduced the idea, previously considered a breach of international treaties, that refugees should be held in detention and vetted. This opened the gate for the subsequent conservative PM John Howard to declare, in perfect dog-whistle, “we decide who comes here!” “We” of course meant white anglo men. The Australian detention system for refugees became increasingly cruel and performative, and has inspired many right wing policies in the west. It also was a profiteering exercise, benefiting those contractors and their investors (the same people as the government, maybe? I am too cynical) who were hired to run, very inhumanely, the detention centres.

Now, I recount this not because Keating and his cronies killed western democracy. At best they killed Australian political norms. They are, though, an instance of what is happening across the post European landscape. And it led to, if not actually was, the revival of fascism.

I have said for a long time that the period from 1946 to around 1975 was an exceptional period in history. Take that term literally. It was the exception, not the rule, in our past. And it set some very bad expectations: what we might call bourgeois apathy. Leave liberty, or freedom, or morality, or decency to the institutions. We are done fighting. My generation (boomer) and the one that followed mine (Gen X? Such annoying terms. Basically marketing demographics; but it will suffice for now) forgot that to be free and decent you need to constantly strive, fight and stand up for others. We got here because we got lazy, and because we bought into the profiteering mindset of rent seekers and military providers.

What happens next is up to us, and our kids, and grandkids, and just anyone who is a decent human being. Oppose profit motives and treat human beings as worth well-being.