I’ve been wanting to write something about the launch of the new Teal party, “Community Strong Australia”, but before we get into that I think it’s worth saying something more about the background to it and to the whole Teal movement. A good place to start is with last week’s conference in London of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
I don’t need to tell you too much about the conference because Benjamin Clark, who was there, has done the job for me in Monday’s Crikey. You should read the whole thing; he conveys a nice sense of the sheer strangeness of the gathering. (David Crowe and Rachel Withers also have good reports.) But what struck me as most interesting was the apparent ideological diversity of those present.
The ARC is the brainchild of [link added] Canadian pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson, whom I’ve previously described as a “führer-aspirant”. If you’ve forgotten (or never learnt) about Peterson, this 2018 profile by Nathan Robinson is a good place to start. He wasn’t present at this year’s conference; he has been plagued by health problems for some years and no longer appears in public, but the organisation still very much partakes of his spirit.
The Peterson spirit is all about ambiguity, edging towards the truly outlandish but never fully committing to it, thus retaining a sort of plausible deniability. As Robinson put it, “People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.”
Last week’s conference looks like a collective version of that ambiguity. The speakers ranged from people who would once have been described as ordinary mainstream conservatives – John Anderson, Michael Gove, Glenn Youngkin – through to unmistakable fascists and fascist-apologists, with almost everything in between. There were Trumpists like Nigel Farage and Eric Metaxas, anti-Trump culture warriors like Ross Douthat, religious nutters like Scott Morrison, opportunists like Boris Johnson, and so on.
As I’ve said before, the key thing to understand about the current decay of the Liberal Party (and of similar parties in some other countries) is that the previous division between liberals and conservatives has been supplanted by a division between centre-right and far right, or between conservatives and neo-fascists. People are being put to the choice of whether they side with civilisation or its enemies.
The ARC represents something like an organised denial that such a division, and therefore such a choice, exists. Probably the majority of its participants are not fascists and not sympathetic to fascism. But they seem determined not to see fascism as the enemy; not to admit that they have any enemies to their right. Their overriding project is fighting the left: if they see the fascists at all, they see them as possibly useful allies in that project, but better still just not to see them.
One can see why the fascists would want to erase the distinction between themselves and the centre-right: they want to annex the centre-right’s territory and present themselves as the only alternative to the left. (This is the mirror image of the attitude often seen on the far left, which pretends that social democracy or centre-leftism just doesn’t exist as an option – except that the far left doesn’t get blanket global coverage for its conferences.)
But there is no corresponding tactical advantage to be gained for the centre-right. The idea apparently is to revitalise conservatism by taking in elements from fascism, borrowing some of its dynamism and (supposed) appeal to the masses without the lawlessness and violence. Hence the willingness to paper over what to others might seem like fundamental differences: such as their attitude to the war in Ukraine, with both pro- and anti-Putinists liberally represented at the ARC.
It’s unlikely that many of the conservatives would admit, even to themselves, that that’s what they are doing, although exactly what they think they are doing remains mysterious. For their edification they could do worse than read up on the history of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s – starting, perhaps with this passage from AJP Taylor on the predicament of their German counterparts in 1933:
They soon found that they were in the position of a factory owner who employs a gang of roughs to break up a strike: he deplores the violence, is sorry for his workpeople who are being beaten up, and intensely dislikes the bad manners of the gangster leader whom he has called in. All the same, he pays the price and discovers, soon enough, that if he does not pay the price (later, even if he does) he will be shot in the back.
The World is Not Enough 