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News from Australia: we're probably not going to have a Constitutionally-enshrined "Voice" for Aboriginals.
Background: there was a statement by a bunch of Aboriginal groups a while back that they wanted a constitutionally-enshrined advocate in the governmental system*, along with a couple of other things. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Australian Labor Party, included this in his platform for the 2022 election, which he won**, and we're a bit under a month from a referendum***.
New information: support started high, and certainly the Usual Suspects want a Yes vote. But support has now crashed to the point that it's considered highly unlikely to pass.
Up until now I'd been thinking "well, maybe the US people are right about SJ having peaked in the USA, but that's cold comfort to me", but this has given me some real hope that it's peaking here as well.
*NB: Aboriginals can vote and run for office, and are slightly overrepresented in Parliament compared to the general population.
**Labor is our centre-left party; the other major parties are the Liberals (city-based centre-right), the Nationals (small-town conservatives, in a semi-permanent coalition with the Liberals), the Greens (historically a "hippie" party, and they still do hold basically all the stereotypical "hippie" positions, though they've gone majorly SJ of late), One Nation (alt-rightists since before it was cool) and the United Australia Party (alt-rightists since after it was cool, because an alt-right billionaire had too big an ego to support the existing alt-right party). I actually wound up voting Labor; the Liberals had gotten too comfortable in government to the point that they refused to discuss a bunch of what they were doing, which I consider a threat to democracy, the Greens want to ban One Nation and the UAP, which I consider a much larger threat to democracy, I live in a city so the Nationals weren't on my HoR ballot, the UAP is a bad joke, and while I preferred One Nation's stance on this particular policy (i.e. "get the fuck out of here with your reverse racism") I preferred the rest of Labor's platform to the rest of One Nation's by more.
***Our constitutional amendment procedure - a majority of citizens and a majority of citizens in at least four of the six states must agree to the amendment. Like most other Australian votes, it's mandatory.
In Sweden woke peaked 9 years ago and has been in steady decline since then. It has been strange to see the anglosphere go woke while watching social media and society in general lurch to the right at home. A leading antifa member in Sweden once said the difference between a green voting liberal feminist and a neo nazi race warrior is a non white mob threatening their condo. The liberal middle class is only liberal and woke until it has consequences. Threaten their property values, and they will often demand whatever it takes to defend their lifestyle.
What happened in Sweden was that middle class areas experienced an increase in crime. Schools in good areas experienced diversity, and the dysfunction caused by hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the medical system started to impact the life of people who used to be woke. Unlike the US that much more urban sprawl, richer people in Sweden often life in downtown areas. When their daughters had to go home at night while Afghan gangs sold heroin in their neighbourhood, the interest for BLM narratives was replaced with enthusiastic support for law and order. Surging electrical prices limited enthusiasm for the anti nuclear left and has caused real economic damage to the Swedish middle class living in large homes that have to be heated in the winter.
Australia probably has gone woke because woke hasn't had a major negative impact on people's lives. You haven't had gun crime increase 1000% in 17 years, you haven't seen your electrical grid become unreliable, posh schools don't have 15 year olds pretending to be twelve causing mayhem in class.
The online right thinks the masses can be inspired by ideas and ideology. Rightwingers tend to have little interest in ideology and are content as long as they can barbecue. Australia will stop going woke when woke has an impact on people's lives.
To quote a Swedish white nationalist from the old subreddit who made the same argument 3 years ago:
The big problem in the long term for the alt right is that America is so suburban. Suburbs are very blue pilling. When whites left cities in the 60s after being forced out by race riots they moved to suburbs and their views on race did a 180. We see similar trends in Europe where suburbia is the one place where nationalist groups can't make progress at all. In Sweden the weakest results for the Sweden democrats in every election has been suburban areas around Stockholm. Those areas are solidly neoliberal. Unfortunately for American nationalists urban areas are small, rural areas are too spread out and the suburban population dominates white people. The suburban demographic is naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist.
This really doesn't match my experience in the US: the average suburban dweller I know has a mortgage "rooting" them to their dwelling and presenting nontrivial costs -- real estate sales, movers, etc -- to up and move elsewhere. There may be some individualism, but the average suburban school has an active parent organization donating time and funds to local education. And there's no shortage of other groups meshing the community together: churches, youth/adult sports leagues, and so forth.
I wouldn't expect support for the alt-right to take off in suburbs -- whose inhabitants seem generally happy and content to just grill in their backyards -- but I think "solidly neoliberal" reflects what is actually a general conservatism in the sense of being change-averse: suburbanites don't want major political changes (locally or nationally: these might, gasp, impact property values), and garden-variety neoliberalism seems to be one of the least change-seeking platforms currently. In general, I think they want to keep things as they are, with an eye toward modest, gradual improvements and at least a stated preference for "be nice" policies with modest price tags. These folks aren't pushing to (re-)overhaul American health-care because they're largely employed and prefer the devil they know in their existing insurance plan. They aren't pushing to defund their police departments. But they might agree on increasing Medicaid spending or buying body cameras for police.
But perhaps Sweden's idea of a "suburb" is very different from what I experience day-to-day.
I suppose if you're a dissident rightist observing your outgroup from, well, the outside, it's easy to conflate a) the leftist urban laptop class / PMC who are mostly renters or at least live in inner-city flats and who are relatively eager to wage the culture war and are indeed "naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist" a) neoliberal/centrist suburbanites who are recognizable by occasionally publicly spewing the same liberal/woke snark as group 'a'.
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I would say that this is probably a factor, but what little I've seen of suburbs in Europe (example: the suburbs in Cry of Fear, a Swedish-made game set in a Swedish town, which I presume is all modeled fairly faithfully to real life) suggests that they aren't fundamentally different from American suburbs in terms of layout, construction, and even appearance.
And yes, I would also say that suburbs, in terms of their neo-liberalism, probably can be thought of in the leftist-sneering-sense of neo-liberalism in that they are foundationally conservative with some helpings of Blue Tribe-ness.
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