In our relentless news and politics cycle, Australia’s media and political elite are grappling with a big question: why are our leaders, and the traditional parties they lead, so unpopular? What the pollsters call “net satisfaction” languishes in the negative for both major party leaders. The combined vote of the main parties in the last election fell below 70% for the first time.
It’s a global trend. In just about every country, political leaders from all sides poll poorly, and parties are dividing and multiplying. It’s also a feature of the social media age. For the past decade, the resentment, anger and uninformed cynicism that social media rewards (and a desperate news media mimics) has been fragmenting politics and subsequently disempowering change.
The commentariat love it because disruption makes news. But even as they join in, the political press corps insist on analysing this new world using their understanding of the old.
Media analysts have long recognised that the medium of the moment shapes the politics of the time: mass newspapers imagined nations (and nationalism) into being, according to Benedict Anderson; Marshall McLuhan identified that radio made engaged tribes; in the ’80s Neil Postman concluded that mass broadcast television delivered a politics of passively consumed light entertainment that centred the not-too-confronting news grab of a Ronald Reagan or, in Australia, a Bob Hawke.
The turn of the century interregnum of cross-platform “talk” — on radio, on TV interviews and in the blogs and chat rooms of the early internet — rewarded politicians with a lot to say about not much (giving us both John Howard and Kevin Rudd).
Now, it’s a time of monsters, with the social internet driving a fandom politics of passing passions, with leaders loved by fans and loathed by everyone else. Parties and politicians that refuse to join in the game risk engendering a now more lethal emotion in voters: indifference.
The art of politics has been splintered from the skills of governing. Success is no longer judged by the hard grind of coalition building and policy development, but by gaming the magic of the platforms’ algorithm through likes, shares and links, creating an environment where both information and misinformation compete for our attention.
In news media, reporting and analysis of policy — of the things governments actually do — has been overrun by the shiny surface of the attention-seeking stunt and the controversial shitpost – that sly winking irony, deniable at large, but clearly read by the in-the-know cult follower. The declarative dogma of junk politics — Cut migration! Go nuclear! — is puffed up. Nuance and the caution of social cohesion are dismissed with that most damning of critiques: too boring!
The world-weary cynicism of the media environment encourages an anti-politics that (as Hannah Arendt recognised in the early 20th century environment) migrates through splinter parties that claim to transcend “old politics” before, too often, ending up on the far right.
That’s the journey already made by supporters of the recent anti-political movements like Italy’s Five Star Movement who now vote for the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia, or Spain’s Cuidadanos who ended up with the Franco-admiring Vox.
On the extreme right, the dominant politics are being redrawn as a “neo-populism” that meshes the economics of an anti-government neoliberalism and crony capitalism (particularly a hostility to climate action) with the nastiness of a lightly coded racism and misogyny of a majoritarian “in group” against othered “out groups”, particularly migrants and minorities.
This neo-populism may bubble up in new parties as in France, where the Rassemblement National now dominates the right with its campaign against the “Islamo-left”. Or it may take over and radicalise the traditional centre-right party, as it has in Trump’s America.
Australia’s conservatives have long been in a state of transition, trying to embrace just enough of what are now neo-populism talking points on the climate emergency, migration and Indigenous communities to stave off the challenge from wannabe replacement parties like One Nation or the various Clive Palmer-backed entities.
Now, Dutton is solidifying the once proudly broad church liberals into a more sectarian right wing posture, ready to parlay a Trump win as US president into a 2025 election-winning strategy here in Australia.
While the right is leaning into the resentment generator that is social media, Albanese’s Labor — like Biden’s Democrats or British Labour under Keir Starmer — has tried to ”reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet”.
Laura Tingle noted in her now famous comments last month that, under Albanese “we now [have] fewer stunts like the ‘needles in strawberries’ affair and that, whatever its failings, the current government seemed serious about policy.”
Has the rise of social media changed the way you consume political news, or the way you think about politicians? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
