It’s pretty clear that we are in a time of intense social division caused by a flourishing of corrosive rhetoric, divisive politics and put simply, an utter lack of nuance in discussion perpetuated by an inability (or an absence of desire) to see the humanity in the people around us. At times like this, reminiscent of pre-World War 2 – see Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom – it’s imperative to put on one’s historian hat and have a look at both the cause and effect of such a time. It’s critical to understand that history provides answers and guidance to our biggest problems; there is little room and use of non-evidenced, ‘intuition’ based thinking at times such as ours, labelled as affective realism. However, this is exactly the type of approach being pushed by a political parties in almost every country. The rise of authoritarianism, as people seek relief by relinquishing their freedoms, poses a serious challenge and threatens those values and institutions we need for a stable, flourishing society, such as healthcare, education, public transport including roads and infrastructure, environmental protections and welfare for the unfortunate. This lecture by Damon Silvers, the policy director of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, summarises the contemporary political trends and explains their causes.
At this point, it is important to note that nothing in this article is rooted in a controversial or especially biased political view. While it’s impossible to avoid bias, it is important to point to these biases and, maybe even more importantly, point to what is not bias but can be mistaken for it when taking a non-nuanced approach. This point of view of this article is rooted in the the fundamental belief that government in partnership with the private sector is what provides the means for a society to grow, flourish and innovate. The government is the representation of the people (see Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan) and is the mechanism which looks out for the people’s’ interests and gives them value, in the face of concepts such as profit and efficiency . People need dignity and opportunity to grow and provided things like shelter, food, mobility (both social and physical), meaningful work and a bunch of other basics to live, as well as fundamental values like honesty, transparency and integrity; these are unconditional in the sense that if you’re a human being, access to these basics and values are essential for long term sustainability. Now there will be those reading this who don’t agree, but that doesn’t necessarily make the expressed view controversial. If an individual doesn’t think all people deserve basic human dignity as a right and/or condone lying about or obfuscating things that are within the public’s interest, it likely puts them in a small fraction of political and/or socio-economic spectrum, and in a grouping which may have not been exposed to the importance of civics, economics and social cohesion within a society. To put it very simply, when people do not have dignity, they will look to despots as a mechanism of escape, which leads to rise of things like the Nazis, Tucker Carlson and human misery, while the values of the society are necessarily corrupted.
Again putting on our historical hat, for those interested to learn more, read about Communist China under Mao, Hitler’s Third Reich or Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union. This is just to name a few of the heavy hitters when it comes to mass famine, destruction of property and human death by the tens of millions, caused by the ideology that the individual is not valuable and of which coercion and scapegoating was the life blood.
*Deep Breath*
Now that that’s out the way, why is it important to make a distinction between government and political parties at a time like the one we are living in today. I’ll break it down into three main points:
It’s important because our civilized society is built on a set of rules and expectations. There’s a degree of trust and understanding required in order to participate sustainably and ensure the future for the coming generations.
1. The Government is not the Political Party which Sits in the Seat of Government
There is a very important distinction here which I’ll illustrate by using a leadership role. The Prime Minister of Australia, Albo, is a man. As a man he sits in the ‘seat’ of Prime Minister. One day Albo will get voted out and then someone else will take up the position. So, while one part of the Prime Ministership changes, Albo, the seat itself endures, potentially for hundreds of years. If the Prime Ministership is a chair, a chair in the sense of an object which has four legs which a person can sit on, Albo simply sits in that chair and then one day someone else does. The chair doesn’t change; so if we value democracy this chair needs to be kept in tact.
Now the same goes for a government, it is a chair. Currently, the Labor party sits in that chair and one day another party or a coalition or a cross-bench will sit in that chair.
Why is this important to know? Well, I’m sure everyone has been critical of Albo and his party’s policies at one time or another. It’s unavoidable and part of a healthy democratic dynamic to hold accountable those in power. What is not a healthy democratic dynamic is the critique of the seat of Prime Minister which is an attack on the Government itself. When you turn of SkyNews and see someone like Peta Credlin inferring that Albo is a traitor or a Chinese Communist spy, what she is doing is undermining and delegitimising the seat of Prime Minister, not just her target Albo. She is communicating that the systems of Australia are so corrupt that the highest seat in office is working for foreign powers. It is an incredibly wild accusation to make in such a nonchalant way. What this does is it begins to reduce the people’s trust in the institution of the the Government as a whole and that’s what’s bad. The entire democratic system in Australia is based around the legitimacy of the Australian Government through voting, conventions and a developed sense of trust in institutions, not to mention that the Australian Government is not just one thing or one person, but a hugely complex web of departments run by hundreds of thousands of people and developed over the last 120 years. Some political ideologues hone in on this sense of trust, like an wolf stalking its prey, and look to destroy it for their own short term benefit.
2. How Political Idealogues Muddy the Water
Political Idealogues tend to fall into the extremes of politics, either right or left. However, if we look at the policies of these two sides we start to see a of a lot of similarities. It’s a like the circle illustrated below. You’ll find a hard right fascist like Mussolini murders civilians and wastes public resources at a comparable rate to an extreme left-wing communist like Mao ZeDong. Now they themselves will lead to you believe that they are opposites, but looking at the circle, they are actually almost in the same place politically.
What’s also similar about them is that they use the same tactics to get into power and once in power they start to ruin everything for everyone else. A critical tactic here is to muddy the water between government, the private sector and people, sowing confusion, conflating concepts and not allowing people a fair chance to gain an understanding of events, people and history in a meaningful way. The right-wing convinces people that business is more important than government, while the left does the opposite. This lays the groundwork for division.
To look at a contemporary example we can look at the newly democratic republic of Armenia, a small country in the South Caucuses which went through a bloodless revolution in 2018 to become democratic. The forces at play are 1. A newly elected democratic government, and 2. An extreme right-wing opposition sponsored by the overthrown kleptocratic ruling elite. The key muddying water tactics to delegitimise the institution of government are:
And I’ll note once and more it’s important to remember that I haven’t given any political opinion on anything at this point, I have simply stated the events which are occuring or have occured in the past.
What all these tactics have in common are that they confuse and conflate the meaning and purposes of democratic institutions and attempt to disconnect the people from them:
While these goals and communications are not expressly stated, these are the messages being sent by means of muddying the waters looking to delegitimise the government itself (i.e. the chair) for short term political gain through division.
3. Why this is Helpful for Political Idealogues to Garner Support
To serve the kleptocratic ruling elite coming into power and in order to gain popular support, the delegitimising of a scapegoat, or a common enemy, is an age old political tool used to gain political power. One of the architects of this type of politics was a man from the same region called Talat Pasha, who used division to the point of genocide as policy to unite the Ottoman Turks and to create what we know as modern Turkey today.
For those interested in learning more, Hans-Lukas Keiser published a book at Princeton University describing on these polices named Talaat Pasha : Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide.
So very simply put, division, through the vilification and differentiation between groups is a politically expedient way to policial power at the cost of, at worst, millions of people’s’ lives through genocide. All of the Big Three (Stalin, Mao and Hitler) have done this in one form or another with their own respective groups. Hitler targeted the Jews, Stalin targeted the Kulaks (then eventually anyone else who was a human) and Mao the right wing, capitalist spies.
In terms of the example used above of Armenia, the scapegoat is now is Armenia’s Prime Minister and is being used to divide the nation for political expediency by delegitimising legitimate democratic processes under the guise of ‘political differences’. I have made no comment on the Prime Minister’s policies, I am simply looking at this from the frame of democratic process and governance. It’s not to say the Prime Minister is good or bad for the country. What’s important is the basis of every democracy on earth: that the faith in public institutions is kept and developed. The skill of those in office is a whole other question.
Even in Israel today, a country undertaking the extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza, the political parties were able to unite in a time of ‘war’. Left-wing and right-win all make up the government in a unified approach for the country. Unfortunately for Armenia, sycophancy to authoritarian power is the main ingredient in the strategy of the Political Idealogues, like chicken in a chicken schnitzel, and as such, it is unlikely Armenia’s parliament will see any such unity at a time of real existential threat from its neighbours.
So, political division ends up hurting all of us and only helps a small handful of people. The term ‘useful Idiots’ was coined during Vladimir Lenin’s time to describe those who helped extremists to come into power. Do you know who these Bolsheviks killed and jailed as soon as they got into power? You guessed it, it was the useful idiots who helped overthrow the Russian monarchy and turned Soviet Russia into a literal hellscape for the next 40 years. Don’t be a useful idiot. Let’s ensure that the infrastructure of our governments are kept intact because in this case the end doesn’t justify the means. We want to ensure our institutions and democratic conventions are kept intact for generations to come.
To summarise, policy can be used as a tool to divide, and extreme political views serve only a few at the expense of the many and the future. We need to value our institutions and show them care and respect in order for them to remain strong to protect what we value. Hopefully, it will help people understand the differences between real political debate and bad-faith critique of the opposition. The point is, use of history and information to support one’s views on anything, not just an individual’s politics, is always important but especially in today’s climate. This will help immunise people against the zealotry of political extremists and create another layer of protection for the institutions that allow us to live freely and to choose our own destinies.
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