White resentment, zero-sum games and the populist politics of Voice opponents

Victimhood and grievance are at the core of populism, and are the primary means by which populism is exploited by the media and political figures. The populist politician and the clever media mogul sell the same thing: a belief that their target audiences are victims of “others” outside that audience, that those “others” are seeking to illegitimately take what belongs to the group, or even supplant that group.

That this isn’t necessarily true is irrelevant; indeed, in some ways the less true it is, the less the target audience are actual victims, the more successful it can be.

That white Americans, particularly affluent white Americans, continue to enjoy economic and health outcomes far in advance of those of Black or Hispanic Americans, along with privileged status in criminal justice systems and in influencing governments, has not prevented a long succession of populist politicians and right-wing media figures, culminating in Donald Trump and the Murdochs, from successfully marketing the belief that white Americans are being torn down and replaced by minority groups as the result of a liberal/woke/communist/Muslim/Jewish/UN/maybe-all-of-them conspiracy.

Selling victimhood, however, requires the identification of some loss that the target audience has suffered — necessarily hard when you’re selling to the most affluent segment of the population. Right-wing media and politicians thus focus on arguing that “other” groups are being given something affluent white people aren’t: “favoured treatment”.

This always takes place in a zero-sum context: any effort to improve the lives of “others” must be framed as inevitably damaging to the interests of the in-group, even if no damage actually results, or even if the whole community benefits — as is the case for improving the health, educational, economic and criminal justice outcomes for minority groups.

The alternative is to obsess about culture wars. Unable to point to material reduction in living standards or favoured treatment, populists argue a more nebulous loss to, say, “freedom” — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to use toilets, freedom to infect others by not wearing masks, to make cakes, use stoves, etc. The ill-defined nature of these losses makes them all the more valuable in convincing people they’re losing out.

The right-wing campaign against the Voice to Parliament fits perfectly into this pattern: faced with the problem that the Voice won’t actually deprive non-Indigenous Australians of anything, opponents must either argue that Indigenous peoples are being given something non-Indigenous people aren’t, or that some vague non-material loss is being inflicted or could be inflicted on non-Indigenous people.

Racist groups such as the Institute of Public Affairs that are opposed to any form of recognition of Indigenous peoples have long tried the “they’re getting favoured treatment” by arguing Indigenous peoples are just another minority group like, say, Greek Australians, redheads and the left-handed, so why should they receive specific recognition — an effective restatement of the terra nullius fiction, since it rejects the fact that Indigenous peoples were here before invasion, were dispossessed of their land, and were systematically deprived of human rights by white Australians.

Proponents try to hide the racist nature of this argument by claiming they wish to thwart racism — in this case, in the words of the extreme right “Rule of Law Education Centre”, by “injecting a permanent element of racial privilege” into the constitution.

That argument also lay behind the now-abandoned “third chamber” argument, with the suggestion that Indigenous peoples were being given some sort of additional democratic rights the rest of us didn’t have — though the privilege of having extra politicians might seem dubious at best. Arguments that a Voice would lead to a “lawyers’ picnic”, activist judges (a favourite of conservative lawyers) or excessive appeals to the High Court similarly fall into a category of threats that sound good on 2GB but may not exactly strike terror into the hearts of Australians.

The effort to find some sort of damage to non-Indigenous Australians, or at least something they would miss out on, took a culture war turn when the opposition began warning that a Voice body could veto Anzac Day, and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton warned that it could seek to dictate Reserve Bank decisions, raising the frightening prospect that a successful referendum might lead to a significantly less stupid monetary policy. While the Indigenous threat to cancel Christmas never quite made it into the Liberals’ talking points, reactionaries like Murdoch’s bloviator-at-large Paul Kelly are still obsessed with Invasion Day being moved (yet again) by the Voice.

The only coherent argument for damage from the Voice has come from Indigenous sovereignty advocates, who argue it would simply further entrench colonial control over Indigenous peoples as part of a fundamentally illegitimate framework of occupation and dispossession — although, again, identifying the specific harms that would further be inflicted on First Nations peoples even within the logic of that argument is difficult.

None of this has stopped opponents from simultaneously maintaining that a Voice would be merely symbolic, and not deliver any practical benefits — leading to the ABC, with its obsession with false balance, carrying warnings that the Voice would do both too much and not do enough.

The lack of coherence and evidence around the arguments of harm and unfairness, however, is hardly fatal — and may not even be inconvenient to the No case. In selling grievance and victimhood, all you need is to convince your marks that they are somehow, in some way, missing out, or even might miss out, at the hands of an “other” group, even when that group dies younger, lives poorer, suffers more ill health and more discrimination that the rest of us. For the populists, it must always be a zero-sum game.