It’s a commonplace assertion that Australians don’t do ideology. So, even throughout the chaotic year from which we’ve just emerged, we ended up with headlines like the one in The Australian, suggesting that the Morrison government’s post-COVID recovery budget heralded the triumph of ‘pragmatism over ideology’. Others pointed to the strengths of Scott Morrison’s transactional ‘pragmatism’ and to his blending of social conservatism with non-ideological ‘policy blankness’.
Time and again we’re told that a certain kind of politics, even the best kind of politics, runs free from ideological commitments. Ideology, from this perspective, prioritises programmatic coherence out of a penchant for rarefied and cumbersome theory, while pragmatism responds flexibly to experience and contingency, to the demands of the moment.
But the celebration of pragmatism in Australian politics obscures the role that ideology has always already played. In fact, one of the more stealthily ideological moves in Australian politics, generally made within that swirl of commitments people call ‘centrism’, is the de-politicisation of policy — the attempt to present policy as responsive to natural imperatives rather than to specific values and ideals. Such ‘pragmatism’ converts ideologically traceable ideas into naturalised orthodoxies or, in the language of the hardhat-wearing political everyman, ‘mere common sense’.
The call to ‘post-ideological’ pragmatism has a powerful ideological pedigree, and we should be wary of anyone packaging it otherwise. Over this past half-decade of social and political crisis one of the critical arguments that has justifiably gained popular purchase is that a certain kind of ‘post-ideological’ liberalism, marked by technocratic density and a confidence in rationally driven historical progress, has met with serious failure. Managerialism and formalism are used but made invisible by those who think that the law is neutral, that the economy is an apolitical framework for organising our ‘natural’ acquisitiveness, and that bureaucracy presents a greater challenge to democratic sovereignty than multinational corporations with turnovers larger than some national GDPs.
Its more freewheeling advocates are possessed by the idea that power may be exercised without politics, that the systems that organise our lives, including the system of the market economy, may be conditioned to function without prioritising the interests and values of favoured sub-groups. They see ‘good governance’ as the non-ideological, technically adept, management of human affairs. This form of jackdaw liberalism, which selectively snaps up authenticating tropes from Enlightenment and early modern sources. It was, until 2008 and with embattled fortitude afterwards, the heartland of ‘common-sense’ talk.
On the other hand, this year past, and more generally the last decade, have taught us how heartbreakingly glib the bipartisan and forcefully globalised economic and social orthodoxies of the 1990s and early 2000s were. In a very material sense, the mantras of ‘good governance’ and ‘common sense’ were impractical, even as they placidly claimed consensus. If pragmatism entails knowledge formed in contact with lived experience, then it was never pragmatic to imagine an economy distinct from a society, or that a state budget was analogous to a household budget. Nor was it pragmatic to suggest that there were few social costs to offshoring jobs in obeisance to the vagaries of comparative advantage, or that the impenetrable complexity of modern financial instruments wouldn’t diminish oversight and ethical constraint. This was all, of course, profoundly ideological.
'"A fair go" is an empty signifier; it’s an ideal that flags down our ethical sensibilities only to be filled with whatever content or meaning suits the moment.'
It rested upon the characterisation of economic doctrines as natural laws, systemic dysfunction as inevitable externalities, and stable growth as an end for which there was an evidentially settled formula. It called for workplace relations to afford ‘flexibility’ so that business could move with disruptive ‘agility’, mantras that concealed a darker human reality — of shortened lives, divided families, lost dignity, and eroded communities. It spoke in terms of structures, rather than cultures or communities, as if the latter were merely incidental.
In its end-of-history waltz with financial capitalism, and in its call for ‘good solid pragmatism,’ jackdaw liberalism has frequently lost sight of the anchoring commitments of key liberal thinkers for whom subordinating economic life to socially oriented, publicly articulated values was essential to the practice of democracy. The liberal American philosopher John Dewey wrote that ‘it would be a great mistake’ for us to view ‘economic laws as natural’. Dewey wanted to encourage a reflective democratic culture in which no set of ideas were placed beyond reach of inquiry and critique. Letting Dewey’s words resonate, we might recognise that when Josh Frydenberg mocks talk of social ‘wellbeing’ as a lodestar for federal budgets — as worthy of unpragmatic yoga-mat brandishing hippies — he’s speaking as one of the more committed ideologues in Australian politics. What he’s really campaigning for is the subordination of supposedly effete social values to avowedly anti-social market naturalism.
But we know better. The hardships of 2020, a year that has had such profound personal and material effects upon our lives, don’t call for a retreat to the kind of ‘common sense’ that avoids serious and testing talk about social goods and values. Certainly, we shouldn’t allow ‘pragmatism’ to become a vague synonym for 1980s mantras of inevitability, driven by what economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee call a ‘blind economics’ unanswerable to social ends. As we move towards recovery, amongst us are many who need material support — whether as vulnerable individuals or families, or in small businesses. So much is obvious and urgent. But this is also a moment for a consideration of the commitments that orient policy, as well as the ideological positions that constrain it.
With this in mind, and given everything we learned last year, we ought now not to speak of ‘common sense’ without an articulated sense of the common good. In Australia, a broadly shared sense of the common good has generally been communicated via one resonant but nebulous term — a ‘fair go’. Without further qualification, ‘a fair go’ is an empty signifier; it’s an ideal that flags down our ethical sensibilities only to be filled with whatever content or meaning suits the moment. But 2020 brought into sharp relief the centrality of social goods that we have reason to value — goods such our equal dignity as citizens, community, solidarity, stability of employment. We should now strive to make such goods the defining language of our political common sense. As this harsh year fades and we look to rebuild, it is precisely the time to recognise that true pragmatism means a critical search for our values.
Benedict Coleridge recently completed a doctorate in political theory at the University of Oxford. Follow him on Twitter @Ben_Coleridge
Main image: Illustration by Chris Johnston