[csaa-forum] Bolt and the Ideologues

[stephen crofts]

Bolt and the Ideologues


I strongly agree with Christian McCrea about the importance of challenging 
Andrew Bolt, about his specious logic, and that we do best not to just 
demonise him.  For that is to play his anti-intellectual game.  He certainly 
appears to get up lots of leftish noses; and he doubtless greatly enjoys 
doing so.  It has to be said, too, that setting him up as Bad Object to make 
Cultural Studies sound Good seems to me a dubious political strategy.  I’d 
like to raise some issues about Bolt’s article, some strategic, some 
analytical.

What are the best strategies for critique?  I gather that a response from 
the Australian Academy of the Humanities is forthcoming.  (Stop Press!  
Graeme Turner’s rejoinder to Bolt in today’s Australian is an exemplary 
intervention.)  Does the CSAA wish to produce a response?  Big reading 
publics can be reached through the channels of op-ed pieces, Letters to the 
Editor, etc.  In the meantime, here are some questions that might be posed 
of Bolt.  One line of questioning concerns the tax dollars.

**Alongside ARC Humanities grants, would Bolt care to criticise other 
Government expenditures of our taxes?  Before Parliament broke for 
Christmas, massive Coalition pork-barrelling in rural constituencies during 
the election campaign was plain for almost everyone to see.  More routinely, 
what of the millions spent on bailing out failed companies?  What of 
politicians’ perks?

**And what of executive salaries in the corporate sector?  (Pollies’ perks, 
when raised in the media, are regularly a diversion from the real outrages 
of private sector perks.)  Ziggy Telstra will doubtless shortly be handed 
one of those risibly-named “golden parachutes” that will probably be greater 
than any individual ARC grant awarded this year.  And he will be receiving 
it for being a proven failure.  All Bolt can object to with the 
accountability of ARC grants is that they might fail.

**(Much as ad hominem questions are usually dodgy politics:)  How much is 
Bolt paid?  Who funds his research?

A second line of questions is what the ARC money is spent on.  The ARC may 
wish to deal with this more fully than I can; having had two ARC grants in 
the past, I’m no longer really in the loop.  But one question might be:

**What of Australia’s international competitors in university research?  
(Thanks to Jason Jacobs for reminding us of the importance of knowledge for 
knowledge’s sake.)  If the Australian tertiary sector is to deliver on its 
claims to be world-class, how can it discount research into such 
knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake projects as those derided by Bolt, projects 
such as are common in universities in the USA, Europe and Japan?  As a 
strenuous apologist for the invasion of Iraq, Bolt seems to admire the USA. 
Or is it only their foreign policy that he so admires?

It may be worth recalling that there’s a dismal history behind Bolt’s 
ascendancy.  He’s just one of many right-wing ideologues given their head 
since John Howard came to power in 1996 - like Piers Akerman, Stan Zemanek, 
Alan Jones, Paul Sheehan, Janet Albrechtsen, Christopher Pearson, many of 
these in the Murdoch press – and some, such as Paul Kelly – who have become 
more consistently right-wing since then.  Bolt might be just the most 
egregious of them, and probably the one most disposed to inveigh against 
matters cultural as well as political.  However, there do remain several 
commentators from the left or thereabouts who still believe in the 
principles of social democracy:  Adele Horin, Mike Carlton, Philip Adams, 
that seriously good parliamentary historian, Alan Ramsey, and probably some 
journalists at The Age whom I don’t know about.

Perhaps the most important concept in explaining the rise of Bolt and the 
Ideologues is right-wing populism.  Ian Ward (Australian Journal of 
Communication 29(1), 2002) valuably examined Howard’s preference for 
talkback radio over press conferences.  Not only does he thus avoid many 
curly questions; but he also poses as one of the ordinary folk.  This 
populist gambit follows his exploitation of Hansonism to shift the consensus 
to the populist right, about which I wrote in 1998 in the Queensland Review 
(5(2)).  Pauline Hanson may be politically dead, but Hansonite populism has 
been very skillfully co-opted by Howard.  And co-opted against the 
left-liberal intelligentsia, amongst others.  Whereas Paul Keating sustained 
an appeal to this elite as well as to the neo-liberal moneymakers, Howard 
has undermined the former (attacks and pressure on the ABC and SBS, on 
ATSIC, on universities, etc) using populist arguments of the kind deployed 
by Hanson, Bolt and the Ideologues.  Whereas left-wing populism attacked the 
causes of discontent – the inequities of capitalism – the fall of the Berlin 
Wall/end of Communism and the rise of the Washington neo-cons has so 
naturalised capitalism and its inequities that populism of the right doesn’t 
even feel the need to address causes at all (remember Francis Fukuyama’s 
absurd teleology of “the end of history”?).  And those inequities, both 
within and between nation-states, are in fact deepening in this neo-liberal 
phase of capitalism.

What I would see as a necessary political-economic analysis has been usurped 
by a cultural politics of blame, picked up by Hansonism, then developed by 
Howard and the Ideologues.  The logic goes something like this:  “We’ve just 
lost our jobs/local bank/childcare centre, and if it’s the fault of the 
system, we can’t really understand that - and anyway that’s what those 
chardonnay-drinking elites go on about; we just feel threatened and 
insecure, with not knowing how to pay the rent/mortgage if Mitsubishi/the 
local meat processing factory go belly up, or how to pay for the kids’ 
education, and with all these terrorist threats too; some people are doing 
all right, and it sure isn’t us; and the TV and the radio report all this 
money spent on Aborigines/immigrants/university research on politically 
correct stuff; so why do they get money, and we don’t even have a bank or a 
dentist closer than fifty miles from here”?  The crucial shift from trying 
to understand political-economic causes to a cultural politics of 
scapegoating opens a baleful revolving door of moral panics in the media (my 
preferred name for the Brisbane Sunday Mail, which printed Bolt on the ARC 
projects a week after the Sydney Sun-Herald, is The Queensland Weekly of 
Moral Panics).  Howard and the Ideologues have indeed progressively 
constricted the space for dissenting voices. Those most likely to articulate 
a critique of the causes - the left edges of the fast-dwindling union 
movement, and of the “chardonnay/latte/inner-city elite” - are central 
targets of this populism bereft of any real-world logic beyond the 
maintenance of plutocratic elites.

Scapegoating’s displacement in electoral awareness of efforts to understand 
causality is splendidly summed up by Malcolm Knox in Saturday’s Sydney 
Morning Herald, where he reviews Thomas Franck’s What’s the Matter with 
America?  Knox points to the parallels between the USA and Australia:  “The 
story is the same:  workers, disillusioned by neglectful Democrat (or Labor) 
governments, decide to vote on ‘moral values’ rather than economic 
injustice.  So they are motivated by outrage at homosexuality, abortion, 
moral relativism in schools – at the ‘liberal elites’ whom they see as their 
enemy – and what they are getting with their vote is greater insecurity in 
employment and faster flow of wealth towards their bosses.  Workers rush to 
Bush and Howard like turkeys voting for Christmas.”

For anybody interested, a couple of additional readings on these matters 
come to mind:  Philip Bell contributed a sharp commentary on populist TV in 
his co-edited AmericaniZation and Australia (1998).  And apart from his 
excellent essay on Howard in his 2004 edited collection, The Howard Years, 
Robert Manne also wrote a fine piece for the Sydney Morning Herald last year 
on the Ideologues’ slovenly argumentation, concentrating on Paul Sheehan.


Stephen Crofts,
Honorary Research Associate,
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,
University of Queensland.




>From: Christian McCrea <saccharinmetric at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Christian McCrea <saccharinmetric at gmail.com>,CSAA discussion list 
><csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au>
>To: CSAA discussion list <csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au>
>Subject: [csaa-forum] The Narrative of Andrew Bolt (a.k.a. The 
>BurningAcademy)
>Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 08:30:51 -0800
>
>Since I can't be at the CSAA, I'll write up my Bolt rant, which is
>probably what I'd be spouting after a couple of (government-sponsored)
>gins over there anyway.
>
>
>The Narrative of Andrew Bolt (a.k.a. The Burning Academy)
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>It is absolutely imperative then when we publicly fight people like
>Bolt, we fight on ground on which he is weakest, rather than futile
>defensiveness about the relevance of our work.
>
>Bolt's narrative is the familiar one of moral decay, and again
>humanities academics, as the favourite low-hanging fruit of this
>particular fairy tale long before Murdoch et al descended from the
>moral empyrean to grace us with consistent, balanced journalism.
>Bolt's narrative is actually well-researched for the most part - where
>he is weakest are the massive leaps of common sense, the very energy
>he wishes to harvest.  In his manicured declarations of war against
>the grant-funded left, he finds himself stating some fairly circular
>things. It isn't just a matter of his proclamations having a grain of
>truth, but genuine lapses in editorial quality. The gaps in the
>narrative he is telling are incredible - that, or as Bolt says of
>himself, that he "might be a friend of the new, exicting, sensible
>Left, that stands as united for justice as they used to."
>
>Ob-soive.
>
>--------------------
>"And we're reassured that a $140,000 study of "moral panics and the
>law in 18th century England" has "contemporary relevance" for
>Australians who now see "governments legitimise their authority by
>helping to constitute popular anxiety about threats to moral and
>personal security".
>
>Nice, but wouldn't a study of these alleged moral panics in Australia
>today be more useful than one of moral panics in Britain three
>centuries ago?
>-------------------
>
>To me, this reads as if Bolt is telling the particular academic
>(whoever this brave soul is) to reject their historical work, and
>becoming active in analysing contemporary Australian moral panic,
>which would probably first mention Bolt somewhere soon after the word
>"preface".
>
>There's another moment, weeks ago, in which he provides an answer to
>Arts funding:
>
>--------------------
>"Hand these grants to the public. Let's do that by using the money to
>subsidise the seats of the theatre and not the playwright; to
>underwrite the book and not the author; to finance the opera house and
>not the composer; to make tickets cheaper for local movies, and not
>make the movies themselves."
>--------------------
>
>... which is pretty similiar to how the Greater London Council (at the
>time, an admixture of activists, mad communists, bureaucratistas and
>lackeys) and Hackney council managed to develop an incredible arts
>scene despite late-Thatcher era crushing of the Arts. Sure, Andrew, if
>that's what you want... but be careful of what you wish for.  Fairly
>disasterous for several reasons in our circumstance, but making local
>movies cheaper isn't the dumbest way I've heard to revitalise an
>industry that only recently let the henious act of Japanese Story go
>not only unpunished, but rewarded. (Don't fight me on this, I care
>more than you do.)
>
>Finally, and absurdly, Bolt develops a fairly accurate representation
>of the ARC grant system and provides a solution:
>
>----------------------
>"Think of the money wasted by this system. An academic wanting a grant
>can spend a couple of weeks, with staff help, to prepare an
>application. Then another two academics spend perhaps a day to see if
>it's good enough for the ARC to consider, before several "readers"
>examine it. The grant-seeker then gets to respond to their reports and
>only then does a panel of 12 experts, all paid, make a final decision.
>IN the end, the panels reject three in four applications for Discovery
>grants, all of which means taxpayers may well spend up to $1 to
>administer every $3 we actually hand out. And now the ARC wants to
>check the results, too. How much cheaper it would be to simply give
>the grants money to the universities to hand out themselves, and to
>make them account for the results?"
>-------------------
>
>The last time I heard someone suggest that it was... oohh, someone
>working for the NETU.
>
>We say Bolt is racist, sexist, idoitic all the time in private
>conversation because we are bound to, he is arrayed specificially
>against us. To merely decry him just makes him more famous. If you
>anything to say about Bolt, in private, public, or in your work, be
>sure to apply pressure to his leaps of logic. Apply pressure to his
>circular politics. Apply pressure to the specific instances of his
>bigotry; but be consistent. His greatest weapon to use against
>academics is the fact we allow ourselves to appear abhorrently
>inconsistent, useless, wasteful, morally disinvested. It is partially
>because, at the worst of times, we are all of these things - but when
>an academic generates good work, it is precisely these things which
>they can work against.
>
>I don't think we should be afraid to have our work questioned for its
>usefulness because we are government funded. I am mightily irrational
>about the defense of free study, but I realise the conditions that
>that presupposes - widespread superstition of the academic as some
>sort of evil money-burning warlock who can twist their words and cast,
>at will, the mighty spell of Political Correctness Gone Mad. So I'm
>willing to defend and explain what I do to anyone who asks - because I
>believe its when we don't that people like Andrew Bolt get to keep
>their jobs one more day.
>
>More generally speaking, there is a big difference between a cullture
>of in-fighting and a culture of productive self-analysis, and we have
>to bridge it. Continuously. Bolt is able to rally the terms "radical
>chic", "chardonnay-sipping intellectual" and others so effectively at
>the moment, to genuine political effect, because we let ourselves be
>the butt of the national joke without a real fight. It may be that the
>best way to avoid defeat next time is to truly deserve its victory.
>
>About a month ago, I took a (government-funded) taxi across town, and
>in the petit conversation that was generated, I explained of my
>day-to-day that I was a writer - never did the word 'academic' pass my
>lips. That is not to say either that writers are merely that, or that
>I am technically an academic (I am, in fact *merely* a postgraduate
>student). It struck me afterward as a missed opportunity. The fear of
>class hatred, of all things, was at the centre of my momentary
>retreat. I had become utterly worthy of the type of inane criticism
>that is emitted from the morally narcoleptic Boltian linguo-trough. If
>I can't defend who I am, or want to be, in situations of
>micro-political importance, how I can expect writers and academics of
>genuine worth, like Arundhati Roy to be treated fairly in the press?
>
>-Christian McCrea
>
>(PS -  I do wish someone more verbose and intelligent than I had been
>driven to make this particular gesture. Either I am alone or you all
>have to deal with my attempts at wit. In the writing of this rant,
>I've already been told it will ensure I am never given an academic
>position - let it be said I'd prefer to go down in flames than to be
>soaked in petrol, waiting for a newspaper columnist to ignite me.)
>_______________________________________
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