I wanted to write something thinky this week on a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. Most of you will know, because I can’t shut up about it on the socials, that I’ve been working on a long essay about the rise of the Far Right in Australia, mostly about the growing support for One Nation and Pauline Hanson, but more generally about the rise of blood and soil nativism. Specifically, what I want to think about today is politics and memory, because for the reactionary right, politics is all about memory.
I’m still playing with these ideas. They’re new to me, so you’ll excuse me if they seem only half formed, because they are in fact only half formed; they arrive here in front of you in their dressing gown and slippers — possum eyes blinking, bed hair everywhere, not yet quite ready for their close up.
Here’s what I’ve landed on, tentatively, that generally speaking, parties of the right traffic in memory, and parties on the left in imagination. For the latter, it’s right there in the name, “progressive”, because you can’t progress into the past, however much your drunken Uncle Roy would like to. If you look to the true parties of the left and right in Australia, the Greens and One Nation, they are in turn about imagining a very different future or fondly recalling a lamented past.
Now, I’m putting my surrender hands up here, admitting that these really aren’t two cast-iron buckets into which our politics can be neatly decanted. I’m sure if you pressed Hanson and her party of aggrieved nostalgics, they would insist that they too imagine a bright future for Australia. But if you kept poking, that future would start to look very much like a Tuesday in 1953, with a Holden in every driveway, a factory job for every bloke, and not one tricky vowel of Arabic to be heard on the wireless news at 6 PM, when the pubs shut.
I didn’t intend for my essay to go down memory lane—see what I did there?—but it became inevitable when I decided to revisit Ipswich. Ipswich is Hanson’s origin story, but also my own. I grew up there, and I was hunting for some way into this subject that wasn’t just a rehash of David Marr’s definitive take, The White Queen, when I hit upon the idea of just driving up the highway to my old hometown to find a couple of childhood friends. One Labor voter, one Liberal voter and a freshly cooked, still-warm-from-the-oven One Nation convert.
This plan seemed rather elegant to me. I’d sit with each of the three and simply listen. I would offer no arguments or judgments, and let their personal narrative and political reasoning form the spine of my essay. Has a certain ethnographic elegance dontcha think? However, I soon found it also had one critical weakness.
Turns out I don’t have any friends who vote Liberal or One Nation.
I solved that problem because that’s what I do.
Having Wolfed that problem, another one arose… or perhaps it wasn’t a problem because, without it, we wouldn’t be here, you and me. After driving back into my past, I soon discovered it was not as I recalled. Not because things had changed. That’s what things do. But because my memory of them, long assumed to be the bedrock of a personal hero’s journey, revealed all such memories to be mere sediment, treacherous and shifting. I don’t want to give away spoilers for the finished essay, but I can confess to some surprise that my personal map of the past was drawn with great confidence and no particular accuracy. This led to the aha moment of wondering if progressives and reactionaries organise themselves around competing poles of memory and imagination.
I wonder that because in spite of Hanson and her party’s dizzying (even sickening) rise in the polls, there is a natural breakwater against her ever taking that tide at the flood and riding it to power. It’s called being young. Again, like memory and imagination, we’re not talking about some iron law of demographics. There are plenty of twenty-somethings who will vote for her, and there are pensioners who would sooner eat the ballot paper. But on the whole, her project sputters and dies beyond the confines of Gen X and the boomer cohort. I’m just riffing now, but I wonder if it’s because everyone younger than that possesses no memory, whether faded or false, of a golden age to be restored. They have only the present and a future which seems increasingly contingent and even hostile. Having no past into which they might retreat, they are obliged to imagine a future instead, there being, for them, simply nowhere else to go.
Your Friday puzzler from Adam.
I've been spending some time lately wondering what I would do today if I was 20-25, or what advice I'd give to my kids if they were around that age. It hasn't been a positive experience, what with hostile climate change accelerating, neo-nazis increasingly poli-washing themselves into the mainstream, all the money accumulating at the top while the rest of us go broke, and so on.
In the end my conclusion was: train in a useful manual trade that would be difficult for robots to replace, learn some survival skills, cosy-up to a commune of some kind, and indulge your deepest desires on weekends when you have some spare cash, because the whole societal shebang could collapse at any moment.
The bit that really stings about our current predicament is that we're being brought down by ignorance promoted by liars. Apparently a lot of us can't do even the most basic critical thinking. For example, does our lives being tough right now have anything to do with migrants? Shouldn't take long to see that no, it doesn't, these things are almost completely divorced. Unemployment is low, they aren't tekin yer jerb, we actually need them to FILL ALL THE JERBS!
The actual reasons life is increasingly tough are complex, 30+ years of policy failure in a range of portfolios from housing to environmental and financial regulation by the political duopoly. But, no, it's convenient to blame the other so that's what's happening. It all just makes me very sad.
I think it's a truism that conservatives (including the FR) are about the past and progressives are about the future (it's in the name!), but the populist / fascist FR is about gathering around an *idea* of the past, not the past itself. And, per Umberto Eco, that idea of the past can't be interrogated too closely or it falls apart and stops being useful as a rallying cry. Actual history is suspect *because* it is intellectual and complex. And we can say the same about nostalgia itself—it doesn't refer to the past but to the feelings we remember having when we felt safe and familiar. That's why we see little kids as young as 4 or 10 sighing and saying 'when I was young'... nostalgia is a feeling, and it's available to anyone. I like your construction of 'aggrieved nostalgia', because it connects one rallying cry of a wistful feeling of 'times lost' (pure fantasy but what does that matter) with another rallying cry of 'it's not my fault it's that lot over there wot done it let's get em'.