Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold

Our political culture is in great flux. The admirable work of the Piping Shrike has detailed this in a series of posts as a political realignment. The major parties are catching up to the fact that they have no social base and hence are hostage to the nightly news cycle. This gives an apparent fragility to Rudd's stratospheric polling. However it rather forgets what has happened federally is merely an extension of the decline of state Liberal parties to the point of irrelevance. So much so, that in South Australia the Liberal party is now experiencing defections to the federally moribund Family First. A small group of pundits have either diagnosed Rudd as acting as permanently on campaign or like a political bubble ring - held in a kind of stasis by the vortex of his activity. Presumably they believe that Julia Gillard is the dolphin responsible.

Rudd has decided that the media is for the dissemination of this messages, and his chief conduit to said media is rumoured to have a nasty habit of abusing them. Consequently they are taking it personally and according him very little favourable coverage. It also fits within their frame of reference that budgets mean something to politics and that the opposition is merely dormant, to be revived under the appropriate leader once Nelson nicks one to the slips. Hence Rudd is nothing remarkable and will come down to earth once his honeymoon ends. The thought does not enter their collective heads that this is the new reality. Instead, we hear the Whitlamesque fairytale that Gillard will storm the barricades and burn the Treasury benches to the ground like Boudicea. Some in the Canberra Press Gallery witnessed the Whitlam crash firsthand, no one has ever witnessed a federal government sustain ratings in the high 50s.

Into this breach step the Howard-era acolytes, now spurned by the new regime and left to ply their trade on the fringes of mediocrity. They demonstrate a bitter, visceral resentment of Rudd for removing their great leader Howard. The great citadel of Howard's media support is the Australian, which has now altered its brief from acting as government gazette to Her Majesty's loyal opposition. Loyal to Washington, specifically the neo-conservative, market vision, where private wars and global hegemony are de rigeur. Ad hominem argument suits this band as their voice, their tribe, their man is always right and their opponent is always wrong. Hence distracting bloggers by trolling and pouring vitriol is acceptable in the name of new-age Foucauldian information politics. So while taking down those that support the agendas they oppose, they also fly assorted kites to either make the Liberal position appear mainstream, or change the mainstream altogether and push the polity in the right direction. This ad hominem strategy extends to the truly bizarre and inconsistent criticisms of the Rudd government, one minute pro-business, then anti-business, pro-China, then anti-China.

As the polity has moved right through waves of economic prosperity, the traditional Liberal party's role has become almost irrelevant. With Labor concentrating on technocracy, encouraging education and removing the complexity of business regulation, politics shifts to the nanoneconomics of petrol and grocery prices. The Liberals are left with an emoting leader and little else. Climate change represents the position perfectly. The agreed solution is an emission trading scheme - a market mechanism - yet the free market, user-pay Liberals strain to support it and even now seek to make political capital.

If Labor wins the battle on emissions trading, the Liberals will be split between the caterwauling right and the moderate left. The caterwaulers will most likely head to Family First. How much of the party ultimately survives depends on whether Labor can successfully manage this fundamental change into a new political constituency. If economic management becomes covalent with environmental management, then Labor could well benefit from demographic change and make serious realigning inroads into those leafy seats that polls make so tantalising. If the green barrier dissolves in the political sphere, it will dissolve in the minds of voters. One suspects though that long-term ideological, logical and intellectual poverty will eventually cause the party to split unless strong leadership can hold the strands together.

If, however, the politicians fail to act appropriately, then the results could be apocalyptic for all of us.