A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  But if we understand what the media demand for authenticity is in response to, if we know what authenticity is not—it’s not the bland careerist who has only ever worked in frontbenchers’ offices since she left university—it’s harder to know what it is. Authenticity can be faked—or, more correctly, its characteristics can be faked. A politician’s language and lexicon can convey authenticity, but can easily be faked as well—at least sometimes.*

  If language can be faked, so too can inarticulacy, which in the US and Australia is linked to political authenticity every bit as much as a capacity for great rhetoric—so much so that many politicians have emphasised or cultivated their inarticulacy as a key tool of their image-making, contrasting themselves with their glibber, more polished rivals. George W. Bush, following Ronald Reagan, tapped into America’s long political tradition of anti-elitism and cleverly used a propensity for malapropism as part of his folksy charm (Dubya, the third generation of his family to pursue politics, has a BA in history from Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School). One of Australia’s most effective political communicators was 1970s and 1980s Queensland premier and crook Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who pioneered a number of innovations in media management in Australia, as well as cultivating an aura of plain-spoken inarticulacy to the point of rambling self-parody.* Australia’s least articulate and most authentic political figure of recent decades was Pauline Hanson, advocate of xenophobia, protectionism and a clutch of bizarre economic policies sourced from the remainders bin of right-wing bookshops. Hanson routinely insisted she was ‘not a politician’, an important part of her authenticity for the regional blue-collar people attracted to her politics; this non-politician went on to become a serial election candidate garnering extensive public funding each time she stood, even though she was never elected.

  If not inarticulacy, what about ideological consistency? Doesn’t authenticity include a willingness to stick up for certain principles regardless of their popularity? But rare is the successful politician of any stripe who hasn’t adjusted his or her position on significant issues or whose actions have never been at odds with their rhetoric. Those that don’t in time look like relics, not politically savvy and authentic. And politicians with a reputation for authenticity are just as susceptible to such flexibility. Ronald Reagan (an actor before entering politics, and a better one than commonly given credit for) preached small government but presided over an increase in the size of the US federal government and a massive increase in US government debt. There was also a significant gap between the rhetoric of neoliberal icon Margaret Thatcher and her actions: the lady who was ‘not for turning’ presided over an expansion in the British welfare state, and the level of taxation as a proportion of GDP under the Iron Lady only fell from 40 per cent to 39 per cent.

  More recently, John McCain, celebrated ‘maverick’ and passenger on, if not driver of, the ‘Straight Talk Express’, was wildly inconsistent in his position on major issues such as tax cuts, and seemed to veer between conservatism and moderate positions depending on whether or not he was running for the US presidency. Former Australian prime minister John Howard also liked to sell himself to voters as a straight shooter, declaring ‘you may disagree with me but you know where I stand’. But he was also notorious for carefully parsing his own words to explain inconsistencies, and as a professed small-government free marketeer oversaw a dramatic rise in taxation, government spending and middle-class welfare while prime minister. So, one might conclude that ideological consistency is only properly ‘authentic’ when a politician can, regardless of what they actually do, create an image of stubborn adherence to principle, because the reality is unlikely to be there.

  Worship at the altar of manual labour

  The more closely we examine it, the more authenticity appears an entirely subjective judgement: one voter’s authentic politician is another’s inarticulate bully. Our own beliefs inform what we judge to be authentic, not merely in politicians but in others generally. Conservative voters will thus invariably find conservative politicians more authentic, while progressive voters will see a fake, and vice versa. Authenticity is a construct, another simulacra, generated not merely by a politician but by voters themselves, with all the epistemological rigour of ‘I know it when I see it’.

  This explains the risibly Stupid outbreak of Shopfloor Chic among Australia’s major party politicians in recent years, in which they don high-visibility vests, hard hats, eye protection and other accoutrements of the factory floor at staged media events.* This elevation of labouring occupations as a key signifier of political credibility was borne out by an unusual speech by then Labor prime minister Julia Gillard in 2011, at that point trying to define her prime ministership as one focused on fairness and reward for hard work—preferably of the manual variety. Gillard, similar to her predecessor Kevin Rudd, liked to name-check ‘tradies’ as a favoured occupation in her government’s eyes, and one type of tradesperson had a prominent role in her speech. ‘[W]e have always acknowledged that access to opportunity comes with obligations to seize that opportunity,’ Gillard said. ‘To work hard, to set your alarm clocks early,* to ensure your children are in school. We are the party of work not welfare, that’s why we respect the efforts of the brickie and look with a jaundiced eye at the lifestyle of the socialite.’

  Not content with directing a sinister yellow gaze at the glitterati, Gillard also attacked the party nibbling away at Labor’s left flank, the Australian Greens, who would, she declared, ‘never embrace Labor’s delight at sharing the values of everyday Australians, in our cities, suburbs, towns and bush, who day after day do the right thing, leading purposeful and dignified lives, driven by love of family and nation’.†

  This apotheosis of manual labour, delivered, appropriately, at Sydney’s Luna Park, had as much reality as the live cross to nowhere. The economies of Australia, the US, the UK and Canada have all seen big falls in manufacturing employment since the 1970s, as have other Western economies and Japan. Meanwhile, service industries have grown rapidly as employers of large numbers of workers. In Australia, manufacturing is a relatively small employer compared to a generation ago: it is now only Australia’s fourth-biggest employer and on the verge of being overtaken by both education and professional services. Construction remains a key sector of the Australia economy in terms of generating growth, but it is still smaller than retailing and Australia’s (and the United States’) biggest employer, health care. Gillard holding aloft the calloused hand of the brickie as the champion of honest toil was about as authentic as a beer ad.

  The politician in the high-vis vest sneering at the social set is thus an even more surreal simulacra than the mainstream media’s news rituals; a person trying to portray themselves not merely as something they demonstrably are not, and most likely never have been, but aping an outdated representation of the real experience of ordinary voters, invoking a past that, to the extent it ever existed, has long since been replaced by an altogether different economic world.

  Where this hyperreality becomes particularly ironic—hyper-hyperreality, perhaps—is when it is understood as a reaction not merely to historical changes like the arrival of the internet or the professionalisation of politics, but to the central message of Anglophone economic policy since the 1980s. The economic changes that have rendered politicians in the garb of manual labour about as meaningful as a carnival cut-out are the ones wrought by politicians themselves. All English-speaking countries have embraced liberal capitalism, to varying degrees, over the last thirty years, deregulating their economies, reducing taxation, privatising publicly owned infrastructure and service delivery and reducing industrial protectionism, accelerating the historic decline in Western manufacturing.

  This abandonment of regulated economies that distributed the burden of supporting traditional public sector and blue-collar jobs across the whole community in favour of market-oriented economic individualism lifted living standards in deregulated economies for all income groups, alth
ough the main beneficiaries were high-income earners. But it also adversely affected some sections of the community, such as manufacturing workers—primarily blue-collar males, but female-dominated industries like textiles were also severely affected—who struggled in the transition to the service industries that increasingly dominate Western economies.

  The message from political leaders who pushed these changes, and from the media that encouraged them, to those groups left behind by economic reform and to the whole community—never stated bluntly but built into the entire reform program—was that they were, henceforth, on their own. The days of a communitarian approach to economic policy, in which governments would support industries or continue to own assets in the name of maintaining traditional jobs, were over, unless your industry was particularly influential and could successfully demand continuing support, like the heavily unionised, male-dominated car industry. The days of maintaining some sort of handbrake on dramatic wealth inequalities were also finished: if you could make millions, good luck to you—the tax system was about enabling wealth creation, not redistribution. Economic assistance was now an entitlement that corporations and unions bid for, rather than the whole basis for a nation’s economic policy. The individual was elevated over the communal.

  This economic atomisation complemented that already achieved by the unified media environment of the twentieth century. The mass media created from newspapers, radio and television had worked to dissolve lateral bonds between individuals and replace them with a bond between individuals and the media, albeit a one-way bond in which the individual had two simple roles: to consume, and to choose what to consume, courtesy of the advertising delivered via the media.

  The atomisation inherent in the liberal economic reform program, however, focused on the individual’s role as a worker or producer rather than consumer, removing or reducing the community’s support for uncompetitive industries or government-owned services, allowing areas like manufacturing or traditionally public-owned services like rail transport to fend for themselves in a global marketplace while service industries thrived.

  Through the looking glass in pursuit of authenticity

  The abandonment of communal economic values and their replacement with individualism—admirably summed up in Margaret Thatcher’s declaration ‘there is no such thing as society’*—also created a kind of values vacuum that different groups have sought to fill and/or exploit, creating a search for authentic social values and principles beyond those of the market, which have been deemed as socially insufficient by most non-libertarians. Individualism and consumer choice, it turned out, were insufficient as social glue, the philosophical equivalent of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  Some on both the left and the right thus yearn for a return to a closed, protected economy and a traditional social order. In Australia, the most vocal parliamentary advocates for greater protectionism are found in the Greens and the rural conservative Nationals and ex-Nationals, and regional Australia has produced successive waves of right-wing protectionism coupled with conservative social policies and xenophobia over the last two decades. More mainstream social conservatives, lamenting the rise of an entirely materialist and individualist society, tried to hold the line in privileging heterosexual, religious men and their dependents, advocating social regulation wholly at odds with their economic philosophy. As we explored in previous chapters, many progressives embraced paternalism as a replacement for large-scale economic engineering.

  Conservative political parties also embraced nationalism and militarism, and did so much more successfully than progressive parties. The left, whether traditional or cultural, remains uncomfortable with nationalism, which is notionally antithetical to traditional Marxist analysis, but deemed useful during the twentieth century if it contributed to the class struggle. Accordingly, nationalism for the traditional left is good if it involves minority groups in other countries whose separatism may be contrary to the interests of Western countries or Western-aligned leaders (thus, Basque separatism good, Kosovan separatism bad). Domestic nationalism in Western countries, however, is seen as unpleasant populism and kitschy jingoism, at best an instinct with all the class of a flag bikini, at worst something subtly or not-so-subtly racist.

  All of these replacement values try to mimic or return to the communitarian characteristics lost with the abandonment of regulated, protected economies, with varying degrees of success. Economic traditionalists can no more restore a closed economy than go back in time to the 1970s. Social conservatives struggle with the problem that their preferred family model, married heterosexual couples with children, doesn’t reflect the reality of most Western households. Paternalism specifically proposes to demonise and alter the traditional behaviours of the community, not celebrate them. Militarism is now profoundly unpopular in the aftermath of two disastrous Western military ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Only nationalism has been successful, at least in countries where it isn’t contested by indigenous groups.

  Even nationalism, however, raises more questions than it answers when it comes to authenticity. What does it mean to be proudly Australian, or British, American, Canadian? The answer gets complicated once you go beyond a reflexive assertion that each is ‘the greatest country in the world’. Nationalism in any meaningful sense must be code for other values and thus another simulacrum of a reality that doesn’t exist for many, and possibly most, citizens. The American way is, stereotypically, about individualism, opportunity and innovation, however much that may contradict more than ever the experience of tens of millions of desperately poor Americans. But Australian nationalism still relies on values like ‘the fair go’ and ‘mateship’ (held, generously, to apply to women as well as men), which in any pragmatic sense derive from equity and communitarianism. In the UK, at least, ‘British values’* come with a longer list and more depth, reflecting institutions, traditions and national characteristics long attributed to or specifically developed by the British. You don’t get to develop political liberalism, parliamentary democracy and global imperialism without having some substance to your list of core values. But this redefines nationalism as institutional and historic pride. Either way, we end up chasing our tails in pursuit of ‘authenticity’ again.

  And undermining this drive to find replacement values is that individualism is being reinforced and yet altered by the internet. After sixty years of atomisation by the mass media and thirty years of individualism driven by economic policy, people are now being offered the opportunity to connect up to whatever relationships, values or communities they can find online. This reverses the atomisation generated by mass media but replaces it with something very different from the community ties undermined by the mass media in the twentieth century. Individuals use online interconnectivity to form their own communities—communities that differ significantly from analogue-era communities. Before the twenty-first century, the communities we formed were dictated almost entirely by geography and kinship: our relationships and our communities were based on where we lived, our families and our workplaces. To choose a new community, you had to move somewhere else or change jobs. Now, individuals can select from a global range of communities those they wish to directly participate in, reflecting their own ideological, personal, spiritual and recreational beliefs and world view. Individuals can, using the internet, choose which community feels most authentic to them, rather than having one imposed on them by virtue of where they’re born, what they do and what media they’re exposed to. Moreover, there are multi-billion-dollar corporations entirely dedicated to monetising this process of community selection: the individual is no longer materialistic—that’s a banally analogue way of thinking. Instead, under digital capitalism, the individual is now the material itself, their very process of personal self-discovery and self-definition an online consumer transaction, if that’s not too grandiose a term for an ad for that one odd trick to lose belly fat.

  Older commentators ill at ease with t
he internet still like to argue that this online engagement is in some, perhaps indefinable, way qualitatively poorer than real-life interaction—real-life relationships and interactions are, they maintain, more authentic than online relationships and interactions. There’s a decided tone of get-off-my-lawn and back-in-my-day to such arguments, and they tend to be made by people without substantial experience of social media, for whom, say, a like on Facebook and fully fledged online activism are the same thing. They’re also ahistorical: that non-face-to-face relationships are less real than face-to-face ones would come as a surprise to, say, nineteenth-century frontier communities in the United States, where long-distance engagements and marriages were very common and held together by letter-writing, or for that matter to anyone who has endured a long-distance romance, particularly now that the internet enables much fuller communication between separated partners than the phones and letters of the analogue era.

  It also overlooks that, particularly for people under forty, there is an increasing unity—not just complementarity—of online and offline worlds: when you’re permanently connected to your community online, no matter where you go, via a mobile device, the online and offline spaces you inhabit become more difficult to separate, and claims that one is more authentic than the other become harder to understand, let alone verify.

  The new era of self-selecting your community conversely reinforces yet another form of fragmentation, in which one’s own personal experience is elevated to the apex of public debate as the narrative that trumps all others, no matter how soundly based they may be. For many social and political issues, this undermines the very capacity to have an intelligent debate: if you haven’t lived (or lived through) something, your arguments are automatically less valid, less authentic than the arguments of those who have. Want to argue that crime is falling? Try wandering the streets of *insert name of major city* at night. Are you a white middle-class heterosexual feminist? Then don’t speak about women of colour/gays/low-income earners—your analysis doesn’t apply. Oppose regulation of junk food? Wait till you’ve lost a family member to diabetes. That is, you may have evidence, you may have logic, but unless you have lived experience, your arguments are automatically, well, inauthentic. And there is, ultimately, no logical response to such arguments: either you have the relevant experience or you do not.