Insurgent Right beaten this time but it won’t just fade away

Greg Barns warns that the forces that created the Liberal leadership crisis are a global phenomenon

MALCOLM Turnbull said something last week that is self evidently true.

The Liberal Party, said by its founder Robert Menzies to be a party that would walk down the middle of the road, is bedevilled by an insurgency from the hard Right. These are the same forces behind Donald Trump, the Brexit wing of the Conservative Party in the UK, and the governing parties in Italy, Hungary and Poland.

The election of Scott Morrison as leader is unlikely to stop the insurgency in the long term. One leader of this insurgency is Tasmanian Liberal senator Eric Abetz. His colleague Senator Duniam is another. These individuals and their counterparts in Australia and overseas stand for a shredding of liberal values such as open societies, compassionate communities, free trade and open markets and, probably most critically, respect for the rule of law.

What is represented by the hard-Right insurgency can be gleaned from the obsessions of Senator Abetz and those like Senator Duniam who rely on him for their political careers — opposition to same-sex marriage; a belief climate change science is some form of Marxist conspiracy; disdain for international and domestic human rights reflected in their justification of the cruelty inflicted on asylum seekers and their bullying of the former Australian Human Rights Commission head Gillian Triggs; seeing Marxism again, this time bizarrely in the form of a schools program on sexuality; and a deeply nativist approach to immigration that demonises and scapegoats certain groups and wants to tear apart multiculturalism.

The hard-Right insurgents claim, as does their ideological bedfellow federal senator Pauline Hanson, that they speak for “aspirational families” or “battlers” or to use that phrase oft used about former US President Richard Nixon’s wins in 1968 and 1972, the “silent majority”.

One of the favourite terms of abuse of the insurgent hard Right is “elites”. The world is divided into wealthy and well educated internationalist outward looking “elites” and the battlers.

In this sense they are comrades of President Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon. As Vox News described it on July 25, Mr Bannon “sees the world in broadly ideological terms, positioning a pro-migration and pro-trade elite against a global middle class that believes deeply in the virtues of nationalism.”

Make no mistake the insurgent Right is not in the least bit liberal. They pretend to revere the Liberal Party’s core belief in the primacy of the individual and opposition to an overweening state but in reality that freedom and opposition only matters when it comes to protecting their own. For example, the interest of the insurgent Right in freedom of expression is only relevant when it comes to protecting fellow travellers like columnist Andrew Bolt.

The insurgent Right identified by Mr Turnbull, and

led not only by Senator Abetz but the former PM Tony Abbott and ageing fading politicians like former Howard government minister Kevin Andrews and relative newcomers like frontbencher Michael Sukkar, are a danger to liberal values and liberal democracy in a very real way.

Edward Luce in his recently published work The Retreat of Western Liberalism notes the conditions that have allowed the insurgent Right to flourish. “We are taught to think that democracies are held together by values. Our faith in history fuels that myth. But liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth. When groups fight over the fruits of growth, the rules of the political game are relatively easy to uphold. When those fruits disappear, or are monopolised by a fortunate few, things turn nasty. History should have taught us that. The losers seek scapegoats.”

This is the fertile ground on which the insurgent Right sows its seed.

There is also the messianic belief by the insurgent Right in the role of Christianity in society. They can tolerate Judaism because it represents their unwavering support for Israel. The insurgent Right does not subscribe to the core belief that church and state should be separate.

Attempts by Senator Abetz, Senator Duniam and their colleagues who backed the Immigration Minister Peter Dutton for the top job failed badly. But do not think they will go away. They are linked to a global movement that stands for authoritarian illiberal democracy.

In other words, the values of tolerance and openness are replaced by a desire to turn the society in on itself and be resentful or fearful of the globalised and open world that has characterised the post World War II consensus.

If you believe that a hallmark of democracy is tolerance and a belief in continual progress, then the politics and policies of the insurgent Right need to be blocked. An ideal way to do that is not to vote for politicians who represent this reactionary world view.

Greg Barns is a human rights lawyer and former adviser to state and federal Liberal governments.