The Paranoid Style in Queensland Politics

The rise of Trump’s America has created renewed interest in the 1964 classic essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics by historian Richard Hofstadter. It was written in the year that Barry Goldwater, one-time staunch supporter of Joseph McCarthy, won the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency. As a career move, it proved disastrous for the candidate, as he lost in all but six states. However, it proved to be a watershed in American politics, kick-starting what New York Times op-ed columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman later termed ‘Movement Conservatism’.  Hofstadter’s essay trawled through the long history of conspiracy theories characterising political contests since the American Civil War. The tendency to see dark forces at work pulling the strings of power and pulling the wool over the eyes of honest citizens like one’s self and those one likes, runs like a continuing thread through the history of the Republic, according to Hofstadter. He applied the term to segregationist politicians in the Southern states – the ‘Dixiecrats’ – who persistently sought to depict the attempts to improve the civil rights of African Americans as a conspiracy of northern liberals and Jews to deny white Americans their basic rights. The coupling of racist and anti-Semitic tropes is a feature that continues to reappear to this day, and not just in the United States.

Also apparent in recent times has been the rediscovery of a crew of dystopian novels, such as Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, brilliantly brought to the Television screen by HBO in time for the 2020 American elections, and Sinclair Lewis’ darkly prescient It Can’t Happen Here. Interestingly, the TV version of Roth’s book leaves open the result of the all-important presidential election which is resolved (spoiler alert) in the original novel.

I grew up during the long rule of Johannes Bjelke Petersen as Premier of Queensland. Leading the Country (later renamed National, then Liberal National) Party with its control of the state’s unicameral parliament, Joh literally was a law unto himself. There were neither checks nor balance. Although I lived south of the Tweed River, it was impossible for anyone, no matter how young, who was interested in politics to avoid the Joh phenomenon. His antics were the stuff of the nightly news, pure entertainment. Even then I vaguely came to see that the media treated politics as a spectator sport. And Joh was gold. In his inarticulate ‘just folks’ manner – later taken over by a certain ex-owner of a fish and chips shop, he set about ‘feeding the chooks’, as he called the house-trained journalists who hung upon every cack-handed, language-torturing syllable uttered by the great man of the people. Queensland during his rule was a byword for official corruption. Even when a sharp Four Corners investigation documented his illegal share dealing, Queensland voters barely blinked. Joh’s disingenuous explanation when faced with incontrovertible proof was to say that Queenslanders would expect him to look after his family. And he did.

Joh’s Queensland was often referred to as ‘the deep north’, being that part of Australia that, like the deep South of America, lies closest to the equator. Perhaps there is a causal relationship between humidity and corrupt politics – or maybe it’s just a spurious correlation. Joh, like all populist politicians, was adept at finding enemies and scapegoats. Early in my academic career a colleague of mine used to regularly travel to Brisbane to engage in popular protests against Queensland’s Apartheid-like policies with respect to its Indigenous populations. This was not long after Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders had finally been granted citizenship in their own country. My colleague and her friends were dismissed by Joh as ‘southern white agitators’, a label they wore with pride. Eventually Joh’s hubris brought about his downfall. HIs attempt to become Prime Minister never really took to the air. But his shadow continues to loom large over Australian politics. His constituency didn’t go away.

Jump forward thirty years and Joh’s heir, Pauline Hansen, is firmly entrenched in the Federal Parliament. From time to time she is joined by fellow climate deniers and flat earthers, so as to provide a fig leaf to her claim to head an eponymous political party. The parliamentary presence of One Nation fluctuates because its leader is so determined to control the party’s message – her message. For a such a small party, the number and ferocity of the splits, feuds, recriminations, resignations, expulsions and dummy spits is staggering. This wouldn’t matter except for the fact that so often whatever the current configuration of One Nation, she, like Joh before her at state level, ends up with the numbers to actually influence legislation and policy, out of all proportion to her electoral support. Too often it is her votes that the government of the day is attempting to corral, for which she is able to wring concessions that play to her base.

At least one can admit that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation represents truth in advertising. Its name faithfully indicates that the party is indeed Hansen’s, she owns it. And it is all about one nation – Australia before World War II, when our six million white citizens rode on the back of sturdy pioneer rural folk and their sheep and our government kept out any one who wasn’t white, had a funny name, didn’t call the King of England their Majesty, speak the King’s English or worship Christ and Don Bradman.

She has also taken on Joh’s mantle of conspirator-in-chief, ably assisted today by her current reborn Senate colleague Malcolm Roberts. The latter is more articulate than his leader, better able to string words together, and makes up for a weaker ability to conjure up righteous rage by an infuriating smugness, especially when proving the world’s scientists wrong on climate change and riffing on the united Nations conspiracy to extinguish Australia’s sovereignty. Other Senate colleagues temporarily passing through include those who explicitly promote anti-Semitic and racist slurs. Hansen herself entered politics by claiming that Australia was at risk of being swamped by Asians and has accused those who disagree with her of wanting to ‘give the country back to the Aborigines’. She seems not to recognise the implicit corollary – namely, that ‘we’ took it away from them in the first place.

Normally, it would not be worth devoting too many digital keystrokes to Hansen. Except! For the foreseeable future she and Roberts have the numbers to potentially influence how Australia comes out of the current Covid-19 crisis, and in particular what concessions they might wring from a conservative government keen to get back to their core policy programs while ensuring a fourth term at the 2022 elections. This potential to influence the concrete outcomes of reconstruction is not just confined to the deliberations of the Senate. The Labor Party knows that to win in 2022 it will need to win back a number of seats in Queensland, around and outside Brisbane, without imperilling its electoral grip in the big cities to the south. This means appealing to working class and small business voters who were lost to the Coalition moving right to shore up against One Nation in 2019. Opposition Leader Albanese is already finding this a difficult dance to perform. The appeal of populist leaders like Hansen is that they claim to speak for the forgotten people, the real Australians – the rest of us can sing, ¶we are, we are not Australianne.¶ (apologies to Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton).

The electoral threat of One Nation in Queensland, the state the coalition needs to retain government, has empowered the hard right in the Liberal Party and its minor coalition partner to mount a remorseless internal attack on moderates within the coalition ranks. This accounted for Malcolm Turnbull’s Prime ministership and pushed many of his moderate colleagues out of the game. Turnbull’s recently published memoir traverses the story in gruesome detail. (I usually refuse to read retired politicians’ memoirs, since they are generally remorselessly self-serving and smack heartily of payback. I may make an exception in this case.) Turnbull describes the cabal who toppled him as ‘terrorists’, though he did admit that his enemies refrained from using guns and bombs. Malcolm is, of course, blameless, always honest and open in his dealings with his colleagues. His only fault – too trusting. As it turned out, he should have been paranoid.

But Australia’s problems with xenophobic populist politics pales when looking at Poland, Hungary, Turkey and, above all, the United States. Trump’s America is Joh-land on steroids. It was clear after Trump’s 2016 victory and chaotic installation that there were existential threats posed by this commander-in-chief’s control of the world’s largest nuclear weapon arsenal. Almost four years of subsequent policy failure. – no wall, no repeal of Obama care, no ‘victory’ in the trade war with China, no sustained economic recovery, no end of war in Afghanistan, no draining of the swamp, no deal with North Korea – one single success, large tax cuts for corporate America, is his puny legacy. His bizarre handling of the Covid-19 crisis is the latest demonstration of what on any reasonable grounds would be seen to be his unfitness to serve in the highest office. The fact that his approval rating remains high enough to give him a good chance of winning a second term in November suggests the incredible degree of partisanship in America’s two-party system, the biases engineered by Movement Conservatism in debasing the electoral system and his success in playing to his base in the white, non-urban and small business populations. In spite of his actions consistently disadvantaging the vast bulk of working and middle class Americans in favour of the most privileged by his tax policies and the appointment of anti-labour officials to his administration and via a compliant Republican controlled Senate to the Supreme Court, he continues to sell himself as the little guys’ champion. Paranoia and populism are his MO.

As a final comment, consider the definition of populism below, taken from Populism: A Very Short Introduction, by Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser.

[One] approach considers populism predominantly as a folkloric style of politics, which leaders and parties employ to mobilise the masses… in this understanding, populism alludes to amateurish and unprofessional political behaviour that aims to maximise media attention and popular support. By disrespecting the dress codes and language manners, populist actors are able to present themselves not only as different and novel, but also as courageous leaders who stand “with the people” in opposition to “the elite”.

If the shoe fits.

Leaders like Hansen and Trump do exhibit character traits like this. But behind them, fuelling their egos and funding their programs lie monied interests which gain from the policies enacted (like tax cuts) and those kept off the political agenda (like super profits taxes on minerals and carbon taxes on pollution). Dark money is a cancer eating away at the entrails of American democracy.

Such criticisms are breezily dismissed by Trumpinistas as paranoia, no matter how well documented by reputable researchers**. But, as someone once said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”  We are, after all, back in a world of the Paranoid style in American politics.

**See Jane Mayer’s book, Dark Money: Th Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, (Scribe Publications, 2016).