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Here in Australia we’ve seen the latest example of ideological purity movements devouring themselves. What I find interesting about this particular case is that, to me, it accurately represents what seems to have happened in a lot of left wing movements over the last 20+ years.
Co-founder and former Queensland state leader of The Greens party, Drew Hutton, has failed in his appeal to his own party to reverse the revocation of his life membership. Hutton helped found the Greens with Bob Brown, both in Queensland (1990) and federally (1991), the initial ideological basis was for creating a party with “a historic mission to try to push the world to a more sustainable footing”. The parties platform that I recall, growing up as an Australian in the 90’s, was for combatting climate change, stopping deforestation, protecting fisheries, reefs and banning live export of cattle and other stock.
But both Bob Brown and Drew Hutton have long since departed from the front lines of the parties political battles. In their place we have seen a succession of leaders that promote environmentalism, but increasingly campaign on social justice issues. A party that (until the recent federal election) were making the majority of their electoral ground in inner city electorates (inner Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane).
Hutton was embroiled in drama from a twitter post (what else could cause so much drama) made over a year ago, which led to him being labelled a trans-phobe and promptly to the revocation of his life membership after he refused demands to delete the post and the comments below it. Today it was announced that the year long appeal process has not landed in his favour, but is in fact keeping with the original revocation. But if he’s espousing hatred and division online while somewhat representing his political party that he cofounded, then surely that’s a just result?
My initial thoughts were along the lines of “grandpa didn’t keep up to date with the terminology and unknowingly crossed the line”, however, after a bit of research it becomes clear that Hutton didn’t even make the hurtful comments, rather that he “provided a platform for others to do so”. Which after further research, revealed that he had publicly questioned his Party in their actions of removing membership from a different member for voicing concerns over a proposed amendment from the NSW Greens to change “pregnant people” from “pregnant women” in an upcoming act.
Interesting. I’ve run out of steam now, it’s a been a long day on site, but I wanted to post this and hear what other thoughts The Motte have - Australian and International.
Links:
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Note: reposted to this weeks thread as I foolishly did not check the day of the week.
To clarify, as far as I can tell the issue is that he refused to delete or censor Facebook posts by other people that were perceived to be transphobic. Hutton himself frames it as a straightforward free speech issue. He has since gone on to denounce the party as authoritarian and enforcing a cult-like orthodoxy.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised by this. That the Greens, the most progressive of Australia's significant political parties, enforce lockstep orthodoxy on trans issues is not a surprise to me. I daresay it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who's been paying much attention to progressive political spaces in Australia or in the wider world. Is it possible that trans issues are a wedge for parts of the left?
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When people talk about tribalism, they're usually only talking about the psychology of inter-tribal competition. The failure mode is xenophobia, and it codes masculine. But when our ancestors started to live in tribes, they also developed a psychology for intra-tribal competition. This is also a kind of tribalism, but it is usually ignored. It's failure mode is oikophobia, and it seems to code more feminine.
The types of people who join geen parties and such seem to excel at the intra-tribal competition. They tend to thrive in institutions, especially when there are few outside threats to their society (which they tend to not recognize and ignore). They join factions that push against or subvert the existing hierarchy, often surreptitiously. But whe they become surrounded by people just like them, their inherent oikophobia kicks in and they start to push against and subvert their own faction and start the cycle all over again. I think it's like a evolved social strategy that is now firing in an evolutionarily novel habitat, and it tends to create a lot of dysfunction.
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This is why I feel like environmentalist parties are not serious. Every single one inevitably ends up falling victim to the SJW, and care more about those issues than things like the environment. These days hear them all saying "climate justice" because more important than climate change itself is how it affects minorities and lgbt. I'd imagine if the roles were switched and whitey lived in the hardest hit areas, the SJW would be sneering with glee at their misfortune.
I actually wonder if the advent of electric cars and cheap solar will spur the development of an environmentalist faction of the right wing. Since the cost of pumping guzzoline into their monster trucks is the most salient reason why normies despise decarbonization efforts.
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What did he say?
Well, nothing really. It sounds insane but it was the fact that he criticised a previous move by the party of booting a female member of parliament for what they perceived as transphobic.
There is definitely not a slope, and were there a slope, it definitely would not be slippery.
I'm a social conservative, and the new orthodox faith of the One, True, Catholic Church of Trans Rights is not convincing me to shift on that. All the former gay rights activism that successfully sold the line "if you're not gay, this will have no effect on your life" to the mainstream and the trans activism that piggy-backed on this ("why are those bigoted conservatives so obsessed with bathrooms? no trans person has ever said anything about bathrooms, it's all them!") couldn't maintain the facade. Never mind "bake the cake, bigot", we're now in "um, aren't pregnant people women?/die, heretic! leper outcast unclean!" territory.
Yes, you too can be barred for life from the party you co-founded because you questioned a previous banning for life for not being 200% onboard with "we need this inclusive terminology so trans men and non-binary persons won't feel all oppressed and persecuted when turning up for their pre-natal appointments. Sure, maybe they're only 1% if that of people who turn up to maternity hospitals, but won't the 99% who are women be just overjoyed to make this teeny little change in being referred to not as a mother but a 'pregnant person'? And if they're not thrilled, too bad for them. They better know to keep their mouths shut, the transphobic bigots!"
Believe it or not, I want to be charitable to people who are unhappy with their bodies. I don't want to kick up a fuss about the changes. I'm not even that outraged about bathrooms. But when we're getting to the point of witch-burning someone for just being in the general vicinity of a witch, tell me how this makes society better for us all?
One of the things that has struck me about the trans backlash, which I think is real, has been its unwillingness to extend the slightest charity to social conservatives qua social conservatives. To put it bluntly and perhaps uncharitably: if the social conservatives warned you that this would happen, and now it has happened, perhaps you ought to consider that there was something to their perspective.
So, for instance, I see worries that opposing such-and-such trans issues might overspill into opposing same-sex marriage. But social conservatives at the same said clearly that one of the issues with same-sex marriage was that it would undermine the gender binary. They were right, on facts. They have in fact, regularly been right on the facts. So now that the thing they warned would happen as a result of gay marriage has happened... shouldn't that make their judgement of gay marriage more credible, not less?
The thing is, the push for gay marriage included a number of predictive arguments that have since proven to be incorrect. "Gay marriage will have no effect on your life" was untrue. "Gay marriage is not a stepping stone to more radical activism" was untrue. "The normalisation of and acceptance of homosexuality will not lead more people to identify as homosexual" ( deployed in gotchas like "gay marriage won't make you turn gay, why do you care?") was untrue. I suppose you could quibble causation and correlation, but the course seems pretty intuitive. Yet I still see this quite determined hostility to re-evaluating.
Not only did the bad things social conservatives predicted about gay marriage come to pass, a lot of the stuff social conservatives were jeered at (truly or falsely) for predicting about gay marriage came to pass. The gay marriage pie chart meme is over 15 years old now; since then the terrorists won in Afghanistan, schools have been teaching kids how to have gay sex, various plagues (monkeypox, COVID) have erupted (though no locusts or frogs), and we've got a war in Ukraine (OK this is weak sauce because the meme specified WWIII).
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The woke left is generally very tolerant of about anything except opinions. I think at this point they mainly attract people whose kink is to enforce social conformity.
The same people who reported their neighbors for keeping the Sabbath in 1600, or single people who received visitors of the opposite sex in their apartments in 1950. And in time, they will become just as cringe (or perhaps they are already).
As far as SJ is a subculture (which it only vaguely resembles), it is in the sociopath phase. The median leader might or might not be a true believer, but they surely know how to play zero-sum status games very well. At the end of the day, effectively reducing humanities carbon footprint might save the climate, but it will not secure your own status. Stabbing your own allies in the back and giving a speech about principles and painful decisions is much more likely to see you advance, at least until you slip up and use a term which was fine last year or some enemy digs out opinions you unwisely publicized a decade ago.
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I have never understood why green parties are woke. Their ideology is naturally anti woke.
Remove fossil fuels from society and you are going to have a society that reflects that material basis. A society without fossil fuels doing most of the work is reliant on male physical strength. If agriculture is going to be entirely organic and sustainable people are going to be skinny. Much of feminism builds on people leaning on the state or insurance companies for their old age and care instead of family. Social structures are seen as oppressive by the left if people can recieve a pension and be cared for by the state. A large state that takes care of people requires industrial civilization. Without a huge state people need families, children, and social structures for support.
During the 70s, when Green parties got going, there was a large amount of "new causes" in the air in addition to environmentalism (second-wave feminism, antiracism, pacifism rights for criminals/the homeless/the insane/other subaltern groups etc). Since the established parties were already run by powerful interest groups that would at most humor the new causes a bit as an extra to their established program, a lot of new cause activists attached themselves to the new rising movement, made easier by the shared social milieu and the general tolerance for the new weird stuff that the early Greens had on account of being quite weird themselves. You sort of see the same now from the other side with a large amount of right-wing "new causes", whether they're actually new or not, attaching themselves to the rising right-wing populist parties, which often tolerates these causes better than the established parties of the political right.
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The Marxist mythology is very much based on the story of Eden and the fall of man. It is imagined that the first stage of human society was "primitive communism", which is when, contrary to your assertion, society was at its most egalitarian, gender and race relations were at their most egalitarian, society was not based on hierarchical relations of authority, etc. And then that whole "agricultural civilization" thing had to come along and ruin it.
The orthodox Marxist position is that "there's nowhere to go but forward", the only way to reclaim what was lost and make Man whole again is through the ever-increasing development of the technological forces of production. But there's also an anarcho-primitivist strain of leftist socialist thought that says that we should actually be going backwards, back to the garden, back to our lost innocence. For certain environmentalists, degrowth is the mythological symbol of the ultimate fulfillment of the demands of woke identity politics.
Not to say that every member of a Green party is a self-conscious primitivist of course, only that this way of thinking is "in the air". People who emotionally resonate with these ideas are disproportionately likely to be attracted to environmentalist politics.
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You are thinking like someone who does actual work. This is not a green party member or voter.
I'm being flippant, but this was never a labor party with union support. It was always champagne socialists- the wokest demo today, and the wokest demo then. Bluntly they expect to be on top of the pyramid because that's where they are now, and while feminism is a bad match for the military aristocracy who rule pre-industrial societies they don't face the same demands as the peasantry to drastically limit opportunities, force a high tfr, etc.
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Because of demographics. They are basically women's parties, and women organise along intersectionalist ways because of their inherent egualitarism and mean girl culture. Analysis about material society or industrialism or whatever are nonsensycal because they are social clubs about what is ick and what is not.
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Green parties in Europe reflect the policy priorities of highly-educated, middle class but not rich rich hippies.
This is true in Germany, in Britain and elsewhere. In practice their policies typically involve:
Limiting new housing construction on ecological grounds (good for NIMBYs and accepted by progressive students who think all pricing problems in housing have nothing to do with demand and are just because of ‘evil landlords’, who the Greens promise to deal with in vague terms).
Limiting any infrastructure development (especially airports and roads) - again good for NIMBYs / BANANAs and supported idiotically by young progressive college graduates who imagine cancelling this funding is some blow against the nebulous ‘rich’ who are both greedy and destroying the environment for sport.
Generic progressive positions on immigration, race, foreign policy etc as adapted to the circumstances of the broad left in their country and region, with none of the pesky non-college-going native working class who are still present in the established center-left parties.
Welfareism targeted specifically towards the young(ish). Greens certainly aren’t opposed to welfare for the old (pensions / social security) or children (tax credits etc), but will focus on growing the welfare state to cater more to college students and graduates, especially those destined for low wage careers.
Essentially they are parties for people who rarely encounter the underclass, and so have no resentment for them, but do often encounter the affluent as well as fellow young people on upwardly mobile career trajectories toward whom they bear a great deal of resentment.
For example, a typical Green-voting family in the Anglosphere:
Two highly educated parents, possibly retired, one [formerly] a publisher at an academic press or a teacher, the other one an academic in the humanities or soft social sciences or a therapist with a client list of middle aged women. Live a comfortable life in an outer suburban affluent town in a house they bought in 1992, now asset rich, cash OK but enough to vacation regularly and support their kids a little.
Their two kids; one a NEET / part time barista in a band who studied music at a conservatory for a few years before dropping out; the other a college graduate junior project manager at an NGO reliant on a government ministry for funding working on wildlife protection legislation that is itself funded by a levy on construction companies. Both kids rent is ‘supported’ by their parents, who are worried about them ever becoming self-sufficient and think the state should step in rather than letting all those fat cat bankers and lawyers take all the money.
I can well understand how the demographic you're describing supports nimby with welfare to try to make up for it, and doesn't realize the circle gets squared by rationing, but there's simply not enough of them to explain the politically relevant forces we see in eg Germany, Australia, etc.
Really? Career bureaucrats who are fine but not rich but know rich people seem like a large group
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My impression based on left-leaning friends & acquaintances (of which I have very, very many) is twofold:
The first is a general aesthetic. When people draw images for the green future, it's just a really nice-looking, organic neighbourhood, farms with happy animals, it's clean, people still live in modern-style housing right next to a beautiful forest. On the other side, when climate change and fossil fuels are shown, it's dirty, it's ugly same-looking cities with large heavy industry, animals in pain from ugly, pustulous wounds, people in cramped apartments far away from any green (which probably is dead anyway). On that level, it really is just the good ol' politics of in-favor-of-everything-good-against-everything-bad; If given the choice, absolutely everyone would take the former over the latter, if there are no other ramifications (which at least aren't shown nor talked about). Woke is mostly the same; It generally sells itself first and foremost on extremely benign-sounding slogans and tries to just ignore, talk away and suppress the mention of any and all problems. Of course trans is just about letting a small minority live as they please, of course women's rights are only about not being taken advantage of by evil men, of course anti-racism/colonialism is just about giving formerly oppressed groups their freedom back, etc. And the - primarily - women who make up the bulk of the support really aren't unpleasant for the most part, often the opposite, they just want everyone to get along, everyone to work towards the obvious, common good and to exclude the minority of evil men. If you just avoid calling their politics into question - which in daily life will be 99% irrelevant anyway - they are usually exceptionally helpful and pro-social. But, of course, they have a massive, noble-lie shaped hole (and also, they can be irritating busybodies, but that's more manageable).
The second is a general distrust of the profit motive. Several of my (mostly male) friends who are much more successful than me (managing-your-own-company or high-tier BigCorp middle-manager successful) have had more than enough personal experience of engaging in what they perceive as anti-social behaviour just to keep their company/section afloat (stuff like cutting out a newly emerging competitor with legally grey tactics, deliberately hiring badly-paid interns with the promise of a permanent position over and over, actively managing a funnel into addictive behaviour for your freemium game, etc.). They genuinely feel bad about this and want to restructure society so that this isn't done anymore in the future. They're rarely communists and are aware of its failure modes, they want markets, but their experience makes them believe that a many of the arguments against renewables are as bullshit as the old pro-smoking arguments; If you put up just the right limits on the market, we will have a great, green future!
Tbh the latter isn't even that far from my own position; It's just that I'm much more suspicious of government intervention blocking progress and protecting old, wasteful structures in an unholy BigState BigCorp marriage (also frequently called the cathedral).
I've seen a lot of this too. It's pretty simply a lack of awareness about the last 50+ years of the political-economics of employment law and state regulation. I've written about this before.
The champagne liberals who engage with the "capitalism - but nice!" fantasy fail to see that many of the market dislocations that result in a race to the anti-social bottom have been created by well-intentioned but economically illiterate federal and state policy. "The road to hell..." and all that.
One of the more effective coups of the left has been to make the term "deregulation" associated with Enron and Lehmann Brothers scale fiascos in the popular conscious. When, in reality, deregulation means more, cheaper, and better houses in the places that need them most. Or, as my self-linked comment outlines, a much lower friction coefficient in hiring. Or making it possible to cut women's hair without demonstrating you can shave a man with a straight razor. (I'll admit that the "licensing to become a barber" meme is a but of a trope at this point.)
But change is scary and real meritocracy might mean you aren't quite as sharp as you think you are. Credentialism is the soft mattress of the careerist - so long as they/them have the right master's degree from the right university, they can probably secure a coastal sinecure for between $150,000 - $250,000 depending on level of technical rigor and direct connection to revenue generation. These people who want "capitalism - but nice!" sure are excited about changing the marketplace, so long as their jobs aren't effected. "No, you see, I am an enabler for my team. I remove obstacles for them so they can do the really cool work! I'm just so thankful I get to be around such amazing people," says the functionary who will later fire one of their staff for being a "bad culture fit."
When you throw in a disproportionate fixation on egalitarianism, it gets even worse. That's trading both sides of the distribution curve for the fat middle and stasis. If we deregulated at scale, yes, there would be even more giga-billionaries. But the wage floor for those who can simply work full time would shoot up as well. Those who would suffer? That sliver between about 80 - 90th percentile who are the poster children for bullshit jobs; HR managers, compliance (literally a regulation created job), some level of accounting, lots of legal-ish jobs, tons and tons of "report A into slot b" information processing jobs. And that's the sliver that contains enough people with enough extra time and extra income that their votes and organizing matter. And that's the sliver that, over the last 50 years, has zoomed to the left.
I'm not anywhere near the 'sperg level of Elon to say whatever he said about compassion being the worst virtue ever. In fact, as an
LARPingpracticing Catholic, I try to live virtues like that daily. But I do it of my own accord in my private life. I am against trying to turn personal, emotional relationships with virtue and metaphysical ethics into a political platform or party. Because, if you do that, you give yourself license to ruin a whole lot of materially important policy.I don’t know, im personally of the opinion that there are good and bad ways to achieve any goal and that there are always trade-offs that come with any of it. And for my own personal ideal state, im in favor of tge Scandinavian model where sure you aren’t going to be the biggest baddest economy or a global hegemony, but by and large the bulk of people can get along just fine. I’m not opposed to universal health care of some sort, but I understand it rations care by wait times where the American system rations by money.
I’m generally with at least tge idea that whatever the form a government takes, the most important thing is customer service— getting things done that create a healthy, thriving country full of thriving people. I’m not convinced that the money-maximizing system we’ve built in the USA delivers on that. That doesn’t mean socialism or communism or nationalism or theocracy would do better. I just want a country where the bulk of people can live a reasonable lifestyle, and where a setback isn’t fatal.
Define "reasonable." Because what you define as reasonable may be reprehensible to me.
A lot of the tradeoffs we're implicitly talking about have to do with security over possibility. If the shot at a successful and independent life means that I could also, with equal or even higher probability, end up destitute, i'll take the deal so long as I am in control of myself. Sacrificing autonomy and independence so that the government can spoon feed me a "comfortable" (but dependent) life? No thank you.
For a lot of bedrock constitutional reasons, the American government can never be good at what you term "customer service." The only way is to let the customers help themselves - i.e. less government.
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Almost everyone in America who doesn’t ’live a reasonable lifestyle’ has themselves to blame, mostly through drug use. The American working class are wealthier than the Scandinavian middle classes.
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I'm someone who subscribes to the capitalism but nice theory. I read your linked previous comment. I think some mandatory training is stupid, but I think you're picking some low-handing fruit. Capitalism but nice can just as easily be EU telling phone manufacturers to stop making proprietary phone chargers when USB exists, or that John Deere needs to stop making their tractors unrepairable by third-parties for arbitrary reasons. Good or bad depend entirely on which law we're talking about.
Strictly speaking EU hasn't forbidden proprietary phone chargers. They've only mandated that phones must also support USB-C charging. Of course for phones this is in practise meaningless but it's quite relevant for some other devices covered under the same directive.
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My whole point is that we should be talking about fewer laws.
When you use legislation and regulation on a case-by-case basis as you described, you're playing whack-a-mole without ever looking up at the bigger picture. You create a patchwork of laws that, unintentionally, start to bleed into one another and now you have "spaghetti code" of legislation. Businesses - and consumers! - are painted into corners without realizing it and after it's too late. It is also extremely unlikely that these corners will "balance out" fairly across various industries and consumer segments. And then you have the situation we have today.
Complexity is the enemy, especially when refactoring of the system is slow or difficult. Congress likes to pass laws, but it very, very rarely retracts previous legislation.
I could tell by context that that's what you believe, and I am contesting that.
My thesis is that sometimes moles should be whacked, otherwise your yard turns to shit. You state that bad case of having too many laws, and I state the bad case that the rules are being created to attempt to stop a bad thing, so without them you have the bad thing. An example that was brought up was rotating interns baited by promises of full-time work. You might claim that it is a symptom of overcomplicated hiring laws, and I might claim what I see as a simpler explanation - they wanted cheap labor but felt bad about it.
I have a suggestion on that that I think should be followed regardless of my feeling of being more big government. The government should have an agency or committee dedicated periodic review of laws to see which laws can be retired, or if multiple overlapping laws can be combined for clarity and brevity.
Yes! So ask the next logical question; why is labor so expensive? Why is there the need to exploit interns? Why can't they just hire a guy or gal who wants a job for a reasonable price? Because labor laws make it too expensive to hire people cheaply!
And then what?
The only body who can actually change laws in Congress. Do you know how many congressionally mandated reports there are? Approximately eleventy billion. Do you know how many congress deeply reviews to implement their recommendations? Approximately negative eleventy billion. What would be the point of your hypothetical new agency? And, in order for it to be created, Congress would have to authorize and fund it. That's not going to happen. You're suggesting a "fix" that is obviously and demonstrably untenable.
Because in a prosperous society people want a lot of money for their labor, because they have a lot of opportunities and everything costs more in a prosperous society.
Begging the question. You assume they did it because they needed to, yet somehow most other companies don't do this. Why did those other companies not need to?
Yes, and said body uses agencies and interns to provide them information, because they are old men whose major skill is campaigning. Hell, Republicans actively campaign on there being too many laws. An agency designed to find laws that are obsolete and clean up spaghetti laws sounds exactly in line with what they claim to want.
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I've talked about this, not at great length, but I've mentioned it, before- cheap labour is cheap for a reason. Interns are a vast improvement over people who'll work for $15/hr in a corporate setting(and BTW, the tenth percentile wage is just above $14/hr. American labour is just really expensive).
There's plenty of working class people who happily make $15-$22 hr. There's a reason they don't get better jobs eventually. Corporate interns generally know things like 'how to keep themselves on track to hit deadlines without constant supervision' and 'how to follow directions correctly without asking for fifteen clarifications every sentence'. These may not be specific skills, but working in a white collar office environment requires abilities like this. Yes, requiring a college degree for this work is excessive, that's why students(who don't yet have one) are doing it as an internship. No, there's not really a solution here(go ahead, name it- no, things like 'flying pigs will provide character references' and 'we'll just kick everyone out of highschool who isn't college material so a diploma counts for the same thing' don't count).
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Have any of them left the positions in question? This sounds a lot like rationalization for pulling the ladder up behind them.
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What's funny is that this exact series of events (male founding figure of a Green party focused on environmental policy becomes ostracised and removed from power by the next generation of overwhelmingly female party apparatchiks who want the party to revolve mainly around woke identitarian politics) is now turning into a recurring trope across Western democracies, virtually always following the same beats.
The Austrian Greens sabotaged Peter Pilz, a founding figure of the party and a star investigative journalist who uncovered (and to this day still keeps uncovering) some of the biggest political scandals in modern Austrian history. After he was denied a safe seat for an upcoming election, despite being a senior leadership figure, he left the party to found his own movement, after which the vengeful Green party leaked years-old internal party protocols that revealed he had once called his secretary "Schatzi" (essentially the German form of calling someone "honey"), she had complained, and they had resolved the issue internally without further problem. This complete nothing-story was of course blown up to the scale of serial predation (this happened in MeToo years) and Pilz was pressured to resign all political functions and retire from politics.
An almost identical scandal happened in Germany in the run-up for this years election, Stefan Gelbhaar - an established, handsome, charming, popular male Green partisan - was slated to receive a safe seat for the Greens until one of the fattest, ugliest women in the Greens party structure started spreading anonymous false accusations against him that collapsed the second anyone tried to verify their legitimacy - but by then it was too late, as the Greens had already decided to remove Gelbhaar from his seat without even sharing the nature of the allegations with him. As the head of the Young Greens said, regarding the matter - "the presumption of innocence exists in the courts, not in the Green party".
I think there's a similar story within the French Greens, but I'm not that knowledgeable about them since they're a largely irrelevant presence in French politics.
I was thinking of the SNP (Scottish National Party) myself. They got rid of male Salmond in favour of hip female Nicola sturgeon.
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Gotcha
I think that there is too much digital ink used in explaining why and how modern western parties behave in an almost erratic way, about philosophy, material reasons or political doctrines etc, when the usual explanation and the one that we use in a Occam's razor way is women dominate them.
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