Fear and loathing in the vagueness as Howard examines Liberal ideology

A Sense of Balance. John Howard. Harper Collins.

There’s always been something confusing to many in the use of “ideology”, the word chosen by Marx to describe the self-serving but also deeply held ideas that a social class will have of the nature of the world. The term sounds like the study of ideas, not the lack of such. So it was.

Napoleon, at the height of his campaign to remake Europe and the world, commissioned a number of scholars to give an account of the history of ideas, from Egypt to the present. Unsurprisingly, they came back with the suggestion that everything had been trending to the point where a short Corsican general would remake the world. Marx nicked the term for the bogus process to describe what was really going on.

It is not something that is simply understood by a single act of apprehension. The theorist Louis Althusser made it clearer: it is not simply different sets of ideas that one class has — the small-business owner thinking that of course the economy is like a business — within a broader shared view of the world, of what trees and planets and sneezing was. It is an “imaginary” relation to the world, in which every element is seen through an ideological frame, whether it be capitalist, monarchist or Stalinist. This wider notion of ideology was later held by some people to be overstated.

Those people have never read anything by John Howard. Because here is the champion of seeing the world exactly as he has always believed it, and wants it to be. This short book — HarperCollins has fluffed up a small mix of manifesto and historical reflection into a major tome using big font and wide spacing — comes, I guess, as Howard’s possible swan song, and it leaves the reviewer in a quandary. It is possibly evidence that Howard is more marinated in his ideology than anyone has ever been. Or is it the opposite?

Is it that, in some Carl Schmittian move of total commitment to his chosen politics, Howard has devoted what may be his final book, and his remaining cultural power, to spruiking a fantasy vision, that this privatised, marketised, hollowed-out, de-socialised, post-Anglo continent-nation-state has some continuity — modified, but present — with the Australia of Curtin, Chifley and Menzies that Howard grew up in?

If the latter is the case, then Howard is the true politician, uninterested in the verdict of posterity on his works, preferring to get in one final swipe at Labor, using the gravitas of an ostensibly disinterested tome to try to lay down an essentially Howardian worldview. If that’s the case, then there is something almost heroic about it, the final sacrifice. But I doubt it so, alas. I suspect it is heartfelt belief, more Sandy Stone in his Genoa armchair than history on horseback. That said, compared with his Menzies volume it reads like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

To say that someone is bound within ideology is not necessarily to cast doubt on their intelligence, and Howard is definitely that, though the chapter divisions of this argument for a liberal politics through the medium of recent history is somewhat disorganised.

The core argument appears to be that Australian politics has lost its capacity for bipartisanship, that this is mostly Labor’s fault, and dates back to the Hawke/Keating/Howard period, when Labor never returned the favour that Howard, as opposition leader, had granted them, that the Liberal Party should be a broad church (not a Broadchurch, a decaying pseudo-English town populated by murderers and paedos), and that this is a mix of classical liberalism and conservatism, which continues the tradition of Menzies in modern circumstances. The Liberal Party has “a sense of balance”, whereas the Labor Party, for all the lip service he pays to figures from its right, is a collectivist, authoritarian and sometimes downright sinister outfit.

This is, like all ideology, a portrait in a convex mirror, everything reversed and distorted, and most interesting where the illusion comes apart at the edges. Watch him justify Dubya’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq via Obama’s judicious decision to kill Bin Laden:

To his great credit Obama authorised the operation in Pakistan that disposed of Bin Laden. History would have been very unkind had he adopted the advice [not to] … It could be said with even greater force that if president Bush had held back and Saddam had possessed WMDs that were handed to a terrorist group then used against the US, he would have been forever damned by history…

Oh, don’t try this at home, folks. But do admire the mastery. It’s like an Escher picture, isn’t it? No matter how carefully you follow the individual lines, the brain ends up bamboozled. You can learn how to do this to a level, but the sheer genius of something like this? You’re born and raised with it. It’s the heritage of the pre-1960s, pre-Freudian subject, defended against self-doubt, that they believe what they believe because it’s true.

There’s plenty of such bits, and the section on climate change is a doozy — classic soft denialism. The climate always changes. Humans may not blah blah blah. Yes, and one always gets the occasional skin mole. But this one is black, rough-edged and the size of a casino chip. Such absurdity, the capacity to hold it together, has been central to his political career.

For Howard, that career has been in service to the primacy of the individual, and this cause was one consecrated for Australia and the Liberal Party by Menzies in the “forgotten people” speech:

We took the name ‘Liberal’, because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary, but believing in the individual, his rights and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea.

Now this claim of continuity is a misconstruction, but it’s a complex one, and it goes to the heart of Howard’s capacity to misrepresent himself — to others, and to himself. For when Menzies speaks against the “socialist panacea” and in favour of the individual, he is not speaking of the individual of our era — which is the fragmented subject of hypermodernity, growing up in fluid cities, blended families, zoom schooling, iPhones for five-year-olds, three-month contracts, the gig economy and the rest, living in a nation and economy where everything has been privatised, de-bordered, opened out. The individual of our time is increasingly precarious, fragile, trauma-centred, medicated, and psychologised.

The “individual” of the Menzies era grew up in a country bound within the British empire and its mission, racially monocultural (in the mainstream), with publicly owned utilities, transport and city works, and the rural economy run by state monopsonies. Working-class people had their trade, their union, their neighbourhood, their clan, their team. The middle class had professions, marriages, schools, clubs and associations. Everyone had their church. There was radio, a few newspapers, magazines, and two channels when the TV came.

By our measure then, they were barely individuals at all; the choices people made occurred within tight cultural lattices of expectation and expression. Nor was Menzies keen on opening that out: thousands of books and films were banned, most of them “lifestyle” books, on sex, non-conformism and the like.

Howard is thus guilty of disguising a rupture in a self-serving fashion. He and Peter Costello did not pioneer a version of the Mingusian — phonologically, the only way to adjectivalise our Sir Robert — settlement, modified for the present. Something like that was last seen in Australia around the early part of the Hawke years. Instead, the Howard governments demolished all the (very limited) limits that Keating had placed on his neoliberalisation. What an actual cultural conservative would have understood — and Howard, on the evidence of this book, never has — is the degree to which market capitalism, let out of all bounds, is the great deconstructor, the great annihilator of… everything.

What Howard remembers as the good society of Mingusian “balance” was one which allowed for stable cultural structures and stable personalities, which held the market within strict bounds. Howard and Costello let it out, and the result, as everywhere, is a society where shared meaning and a universal public sphere has collapsed.

Furthermore, Howard knows this to some degree. He’s read his Christopher Lasch and Robert Putnam on the collapse of social life in our era (though he misconstructs both to a degree, as a chapter on Putnam shows). Howard is no Thatcher, who believed that “Victorian values” — animal spirits in the economy, continence at home — would naturally reassert themselves, and was shocked to find hard-working Thatcherites taking party drugs and having gay sex at weekend raves.

Indeed Howardism has an explicitly “social technocratic” understanding of what conservatism is — the notion he’s expressed often, and several times here, that the state must be used to guarantee values that the market starts to pull awry.

It’s less credible when you come to write the book. This is ideology’s final act, where it becomes a full Mobius strip, its inside generating its outside and vice versa. For the fact is that the person John Howard is, and the party he would very much like the Liberals to be, was only produced by a very different Australia, one that Howard used his immense political skills to finally dismantle, demolish and destroy beyond revival.

There is much that is of interest in this book, on recent political history, decisions made, and things thought. There is a looootttt on the GST. It’s a wonk’s delight. It was definitely worth writing. But as a book of ideas, it is a symptom of the condition to which it purports to be a diagnosis, and thus fits the nature of ideology to a tee, our Earlwood Napoleon standing under the Sphinx’s absent nose, shielded by its shadow.