Thursday, February 16, 2023

Protestant Modern: Teal Kooyong


Australian politics isn't really followed by much of the Anglosphere, which is a shame because some of the best examples of the change in Western culture can be illustrated by its study.

But firstly a bit of background. Prior to the 1970's Australia was effectively a Christian country divided among Catholics and Protestants with this division being felt socioeconomically. The Catholics were predominantly the class of the workers while the Protestants were the class of the establishment. The main Protestant divisions being predominantly the Anglicans (equivalent to the Episcopalians) ,the Presbyterians and a significant minority of Methodists.  In comparing it to the U.S., Australia tended to be a bit more "mainline". And in voting patterns the Catholics tended to vote for the Left (Labour) while the Protestants voted for the Conservatives (Called Liberals, as in the classical liberal tradition.) The Liberal party was the political arm of the Protestant establishment.

For much of the 20th Century the Catholic component of the culture felt that it was treated as second class in the country, and I bring this point up not to raise grievances but to illustrate that the dominant governing culture was protestant despite the fact that there was no established religion in Australia.

The most conservative state in Australia was the sate of Victoria, and most of the senior establishment lived in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, it's main city. The electoral seat of Kooyong was geographically aligned with the demographic that governed and administered the country. The seat itself was considered a citadel of the conservative demographic, being the seat of Australia's most successful--and longest serving-- conservative Prime Minister, Robert Menzies. Menzies, himself, was quite religious, describing himself "as a simple Presbyterian."  The seat was always held by a conservative, even in times where there were massive electoral swings to the left.

A funny thing happened at the last federal election. 

The conservatives lost the seat.

What was also interesting was the losing incumbent was generally likeable and politically not really offensive. So why the loss? 

The candidate who won the seat, Dr Monique Ryan, ran on the "Teal" party platform. she represented the interests of the wealthy woke. Whats also interesting is the colour that they chose to represent their stand. Teal is a mix of blue and green and it illustrates the nature of the political shift which I also think is an apt description of the shift in ideological/religious values of the Kooyong voting demographic.

The Kooyong electorate was a bastion of traditional "Protestant" civic morality however with the collapse of Protestantism, both in terms of its number of adherents and shift to the left, the traditional governing classes have abandoned their traditional protestant values and assumed woke ones. The bottom line is that the conservative party has lost its traditional supporter base. The governing class, which used to be Protestant is Protestant no more. (At least in a traditional sense.)

Similar political swings and losses were seen in other areas of the country. The conservative political loss in this former bastion of conservative values does fully convey the catastrophe of this loss. For the seat of Kooyong is also the home of senior public servants, board members, executives and so on.  The senior apparatus of government and commerce is woke.

The political changes seen in Australia have been echoed in the rest of the Anglosphere and this has paralysed the political arm of conservatism.  Traditional conservative ideology has been abandoned by the class that established it and is now adrift. Protestantism, which gave the conservative parties their ideological strength has been drained especially in the ruling classes, and a conflict has arisen in its ranks between the woke benefactors and the traditional i.e. Christians who still hold onto the faith.

 





23 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is a similar shift in the US with upper-middle class suburban whites moving to the Democrats. This is partly due to wokeness, partly due to the Democrats moving to the right on economics and foreign policy.

Anny mouse said...

I was wondering if our host will reflect on the ongoing robodebt issues and provide his perspective.

I'd be interested in that. As a millennial from an adjacent former blue seat to Kooyong (mine is now red) one of the things that has driven me leftward is seeing and experiencing how conservatives/LNP behave to welfare recipents.

Also based on your thoughts on protestantism, an interesting article is this discussion on how the Mormon dealt with the New Deal and came out energised through that experience. Also some discussion on how the old mutual aid declined and government welfare won out. Parts 3-5 mostly
https://www.secondbest.ca/p/mormon-integralism-part-1

Which incidentally can be linked to Australian experiences (including my own historically), jobseeker our unemployment does many of the same things that have been shown not to work that the Mormons were able to beat. i.e rote job applications currently 20 a fortnight. Gets depressing not getting any callback after applying for several hundreds of jobs, because your unqualifed or no one is hiring

The Mormon essay has a quote "But the true secret to the LDS’s success lies in the trust and discretion they invest in those closest to the ground — what I’ve called “embedded autonomy.” Whereas counsellors at American Job Centers (Nevada) are chastened from recommending any specific program or career path, Deseret counselors have the discretion to make real judgment calls and tailor their advice to individual needs.".

Sounds like centrelinks job service providers are more like Nevada's. Seems that the conservative move to blanket opposition and hostility to welfare recipients has some role in the decline.

The Social Pathologist said...

There is a similar shift in the US with upper-middle class suburban whites moving to the Democrats.

The respective Anglosphere countries all have their differences but they're more alike than different.

@Anny mouse

was wondering if our host will reflect on the ongoing robodebt issues and provide his perspective.

It's not something I've taken much of an interest in.

one of the things that has driven me leftward is seeing and experiencing how conservatives/LNP behave to welfare recipents.

I'm not happy with how they deal with welfare recipients either.

Sounds like centrelinks job service providers are more like Nevada's

Centrelink is completely dysfunctional.

Thanks for the link to the Mormon stuff. I think there's much to learn there. It's obvious that there were serious economic problems in the West in the early 20th C, the question then is how to reform? I think the Mormons grasped what was needed in a way that the other Churches didn't.




Anonymous said...

Welfare recipient deserve nothing because welfare and the income tax shouldn't exist.

The Social Pathologist said...

@Anon

Welfare recipient deserve nothing because welfare and the income tax shouldn't exist.

I guess you may have missed that I'm not a great fan on Ayn Rand.

Anonymous said...

You're not a great fan of really anything good, neither is your anglo pfizer dump victoria. The legalized confiscation of assets for the unproductive and for strangers, not even real countrymen at this point, is a farce. That's all it confiscatio

Anonymous said...

Continued:

That's all it is. Confiscation without real compensation except some weird notion of social or public good, whatever that means.

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Hoyos said...

Moving left because of how the right treat those without employment is a real cutting off your nose to spite your face situation. The left in as much as it “benefits” anybody, does so by dogrobbing, by just shifting resources around as opposed to increasing real productivity. That’s even if they deign to follow through on their promises at all; many leftist voters live under leftist regimes they voted in only to find themselves worse off than before. Meanwhile prices raise to cover the cost of production being raised, and I mean prices on everything. Because as a rule leftist leadership are Machiavellians who pretend to care to get power. Policies fail but don’t change.

There’s really only two ways people work together, by compulsion or cooperation. I’m not a libertarian, some compulsion may be necessary. But cooperation ought to be favored and you can’t have that without freedom.

Anonymous said...

@Hoyos: "many leftist voters live under leftist regimes they voted in only to find themselves worse off than before"

There was a massive, unprecedented increase in productivity and living standards in the US between the New Deal and the 70s stagflation era, which according to US libertarians was an era of "leftist" dominance led by "socialists" like FDR and LBJ and "statist" Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon. US libertarians constantly strawman economic policies they don't like by comparing them to Leninist command economies like the USSR and third world crap holes like Venezula, and not the extremely successful version of moderate social democracy implemented in the US within living memory, partially by Republican presidents. The one time US went relatively left economically it seemed to work out fine, at least for several decades.

The Social Pathologist said...

@Anon

There was a massive, unprecedented increase in productivity and living standards in the US between the New Deal and the 70s stagflation era

Agree.

I've spoken quite positively about Protestantisms modulation of modernity but I should say that there were also some serious faults. The relationship between labor and capital being one of them as well as a strong individualism which downplayed the role of the community. Laissez faire Capitalism was the midwife of communism as the wealth disparity that it produced, even while raising everyone up, provided the fuel which legitimised socialism.

Yes the left does mismanage the economy but the reality of human nature is that a rough equality in poverty is preferable for many than a wide disparity in wealth in plenty. The "moderated Capitalism" of Eisenhower, De Gaulle or Adenauer did more than just increase wealth, it stablised the social divisions in society. The Europeans were quite aware that wealth discrepancy had to be tackled in order to push back the communist tide. Even Bismark, no sentimalist, realised he had to "out socialist" the socialists to win public support, introducing the first universal pension.

The thing about laissez faire capitalism is that it does produce incredible wealth but it does so by burning up the social capital that enables it. I think that many libertarians miss this aspect, The trick is how to maximise wealth while maintaining social capital something the immediate post-war guys got right but which later social engineering destroyed.

Anonymous said...

If you try to out-socialist the socialists then there’s no point in not just being a socialist.

Anonymous said...

The US government, let alone the Europeans, were never trying to push back the communists. Quite the contrary, from the very beginning they did absolutely everything they could to make sure they would win both the Russian Civil War and everything afterwards. Lenin’s regime would have crumbled in months without the unreserved backing of Wall Street.

Hoyos said...

Well rats you answered that better than I did. Ironically almost nobody is actually suggesting full blown laissez faire, but modern leftist parties are not at all pushing the line of Ike or CDG or Adenauer. If we kept government interference along the biblical lines of the Old Testament judicial law (restricted usury, some social safety net like gleaning, aggressive attitudes towards fraud and theft), we’d be on safe ground. But no, the government needs to either dictate everything from price to hiring or we go full anarchist and hope it all shakes out.

Anonymous said...

Lol wut. The US overthrew a great many countries and stationed a huge amount of troops to deter communists. A myriad of red scares happened some in the twenties. Dude just because communism wasn't fought to the extent you wanted it to doesn't mean it was fought.

Anonymous said...

Well to be fair Adenauer and Ike supported pensions/social security and arguably that type of welfare is totally inappropriate for the modern with the giant asset gaps between generations.

The Social Pathologist said...

@Anon

Dude just because communism wasn't fought to the extent you wanted it to doesn't mean it was fought.

Yep.

Well to be fair Adenauer and Ike

The problem wasn't Adenauer and Ike, it was their successors who failed to make the appropriate changes to social security as they were politically unacceptable. One thing that no one hears today is concern by the boomers for the young.

Anonymous said...

No, it stationed troops around the world to make sure no evil right wing reactionaries could possibly hold any power or genuinely push back communism, such as when it systematically dismantled all the monarchists, Buddhists, and traditionalist societies in South Vietnam that genuinely opposed foreign imported leftism, making communist victory a certainty.

The fact that Lenin’s regime would have imploded without the US backing it to an absolute hilt shouldn’t be a shock to you, it’s doing the exact same thing with the Taliban now. If it merely banned aid from itself and its vassals to those openly sworn to wage perpetual war on its people in the name of their false god, Afghanistan would implode in a tidal wave of starvation and economic collapse within months, and the Taliban would be relegated to the history books.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, after the "liberation", actually conquest of the free world. Divide the spoils and get your highest share like the lefty unions until you have competition again. See how much spoils you can get when the managers got sick of their shit as the powell memo adequately explained and decided time to protect themselves against the lefty mobs.

Hoyos said...

About boomers and the young, that’s part of the appeal of Jordan Peterson, leaving aside some controversy and some of what he’s said, he was very overt with “WHOA young men are in trouble we need to help them out!” Loads of young men had their concerns overtly addressed in a public forum for the first time in their lives.

Anonymous said...

Sure, I we wanted to implement the full plan of agrarian justice first laid out by Thomas Paine than we need free money for everyone when they turn 21 in addition to the free money the old people get.

Anonymous said...
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