The Real Politics of Envy

Conservative interests and the politicians that defend them are quick to play the politics of envy card whenever the suggestion comes up that the wealthy and privileged should share some of their fortune with those less privileged than themselves. To call for redistribution through the tax and expenditure actions of democratically elected governments is inevitably to be accused of stoking class warfare and seeking to bring about the collapse of civilisation as they know it.

This is understandable. Being a conservative, seeing society through a particular lens, means being comfortable with things as they are. That is what they wish to conserve, not the specific outcome but the social structures and conventions that routinely deliver up things as they are and have always been. Any change aimed at modifying current outcomes of income, wealth, status and power, no matter how small and targeted are held to threaten the whole edifice, like removing a brick from the base of a column. This familiar justification for opposing change – any change – is a case of the ‘slippery slope’ argument. Once begun, reform tends to run away. Revolution, the complete upturning of the current order of society is seen to follow with remorseless efficiency.

The definitive statement of this creed was advance by Friedrich Hayek in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek was concerned, understandably at the time, by the rise of totalitarian regimes and the very real threats to democracy posed by fascism and Stalinism. He sought to convince western citizens and politicians that the Keynesian approach to macroeconomic management was a sure slippery slide to unfreedom. A second threat was posed by attempts to supersede the market by government provision of universal education and health care, funded by high and progressive taxation on the wealthy. Together with likeminded intellectuals from Europe and America he established the Mont Pelerin Society as a ginger group to spread the warning through the universities, media and political classes of the post war West.

Like all great thinkers, Hayek’s position was much more subtle than the bastardised form in which it was avidly consumed by those whose interests were to be protected. Hayek at that time, was in fact a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, in whose work he became an acknowledged expert. He was far from being an unqualified champion of free enterprise. In that, he was much closer in spirit to Keynes than his Austrian teacher Ludwig Mises and the classical liberals of the Chicago school, Frank Knight, Milton Friedman and George Stigler, most of whom were active participants in the regular meetings at the foot of Mont Pelerin. It was not until after the War when he moved to a chair at the University of Chicago that Hayek developed his classical liberal approach in books like The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty. Underlying his hard turn to the right was a psycho-social epistemology of radical uncertainty about the future. He argued that the limits of human knowledge about future events meant that good intentions – like improving the lot of the poor – would often result in the opposite due to unforeseen outcomes. The only option was to allow the collective information and actions of countless individuals and firms in free markets loose, with the chips to fly where they lie. In short, attempts to change the outcomes of markets would be fruitless at best and dangerous at worst.

This became a powerful ideological underpinning of conservative politics and jurisprudence. (Ironically, though, it sat badly with the academic development of orthodox economics that continued and continues to build models based on the theory of rational choice in which representative agents were assumed to have complete and accurate probabilistic knowledge of all possible future events.) It meant that attempts at interventionist reformist policies could be dismissed as warm-hearted but woolly-headed pathways to failure.

Clearly, the whole conservative project, from its modern inception by the Whiggish eighteenth century politician Edmund Burke to the rise of the neoliberal order in the late twentieth century, has provided justifications for the emerging patterns of inequality in Western capitalism to the current day. To argue for the restoration of higher progressive taxation on incomes and wealth to fund social provision of health, education and affordable housing is to be accused not only of fermenting class envy – with the implication that everyone loses – but to demonstrate an ignorance of the unchanging nature of human society and its fallible members. Leave things alone and all will rise with the tide. Tinker with the boat and all will be thrown into the sea.

What this conveniently hides is that not all reforms ‘destroy the very fabric of society’. By implicitly falling back on the slippery slope argument, defenders of the status quo rule all change off the political agenda. The vast bulk of people around the world who have been on the wrong side of globalisation in the neoliberal order are encouraged to embrace heir collective fate as ineluctable, a life sentence from which parole is denied. To attempt to escape one’s fate is to betray ignorance and envy of those who have risen by their own talents, luck and hard work. The implication is that if they have done so, you too can. If you only try. You may have noticed the slip in logic here. If one’s social position is fixed by the laws of nature and society, how is one to rise by one’s own strivings? But logical consistency has never been the hallmark of conservative ideology. Any justification that shores up current arrangements and outcomes will do.

The charge of class warfare is particularly useful as a political weapon when wielded by members of ruling classes who deny that class inequality exists. If social position and power is allocated by relative ‘merit’, however that measure is defined, then entrenched inequalities based on birth, immediate social milieu and political order cannot permanently exist. The corollary is that those who attempt to advance their interest by challenging the dead weight of such barriers are simply demonstrating their lack of merit – and worse, threatening to fool others into capsizing the boat.

Conservatives who blather on about ‘merit’ betray ignorance of the term’s aetiology. The term first came into prominent use after British sociologist Michael Young published a satirical book in the 1950s called The Rise of the Meritocracy. Young disputed the claim that social position was simply a matter of natural talent and personal application. However, his pithy equation ‘Merit equals IQ plus effort’ caught on.  Working with London’s poorest populations he was well aware that this view was an ideological Godsend to conservative interests. Members of Britain’s establishment could relax in their clubs and Houses of Parliament secure in the knowledge that they deserved to be there. Young suffered the fate of many satirists who lived to see their barbs accepted at face value.

Young was also concerned to question another trend in contemporary sociology, ‘the embourgeoisement thesis’ that claimed that the distinction between the working and middle classes was breaking down in advanced capitalist societies of his day.  The evidence was mixed, confined to particular countries during the post war ‘long boom’ and soon overtaken by the impacts of the rise of neoliberalism over the ensuing fifty years. The myth of the meritocracy and its salience for conservatives, however, lives on and is doing well, thank you.

The conservatives’ defence of privilege and power by the practice of accusing reformers of stoking envy and social warfare is at large in Australia today, particularly in the current referendum campaign to enshrine ‘an Indigenous voice to Parliament’. The move to have the Australian Constitution grant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a right to advise the Commonwealth Parliament and government on issues and prospective policies that impact their lives and circumstances followed a long process of consultation with and among Indigenous Australians, culminating in ‘the Uluru Statement from the Heart’, calling for such recognition along with a formal treaty with the Crown and a truth and reconciliation process. One or more of the three reforms have been introduced in other ex-Dominions of the British Empire like Canada, New Zealand and South Africa to reorder relations with their first-nations peoples. At the time of writing none of the latter have collapsed into anarchy. And yet, the Jeremiah brigade are out in force. The two major conservative political parties have led the charge drawing on the support of opponents ranging from traditional conservatives to the populist right. At the forefront of argument against the referendum is the familiar cry that giving ‘special’ constitutional recognition to a particular group will grant’ them’ privileges over the ‘rest of us’. The dog whistle differentiating ‘them’ and ‘us’ is not really below the range of the human ear. It’s pretty audible. It’s a message that resonates loudly with non-indigenous Australians whose life chances have been badly dented by the neoliberal experience of falling real wages and impoverishment. “Why should they get a special deal? What about me?”  “That’s right” reply the large mining companies and their political servants, “they’re coming for you”. It is in the interest of the mining companies to block effective opposition to their unfettered access to minerals on traditional lands of Indigenous Australians. A constitutionally embedded voice may make it harder for governments to roll over on the predatory demands of big mining.

The upcoming referendum will struggle to pass given the double-barrelled arithmetic. Success requires majority support nationally and in a majority of the six states. In the past, amendments have succeeded when supported by both sides of politics. In disputed cases it generally pans out that some combination of three of the four small states trumps the national majority. The economies of two of those states, Queensland and Western Australia, are dominated by mining interests. American readers will appreciate the conservative force of political arithmetic in their electoral college.

The utility of the charge of inciting division between non-existent groups of Australians (we are a meritocracy, aren’t we?) is brilliantly demonstrated by the federal leader of the coalition Peter Dutton’s move designed to create racial division by arguing that proponents of the amendment are creating racial division. George Orwell would have been impressed.

The political struggle in Australia over the current referendum is a textbook case of the real politics of envy.

Mike Berry. July 2023.