liberals
Dear friends,
I have been thinking a lot about the ABC’s federal election coverage. Partly, concerned about how they continue to adhere to a 2PP system when clearly the Liberal/National coalition is seriously trending towards minor/fringe party, and partly about the way they continue to aid the shifting of the Overton window (rightward). But, today, I have a specific concern. I am concerned about the vilification of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Woo up – I can hear you saying from here – and while I naturally disagree with her on: bordering on 100% of her policy stances; her internal and external displays of racism; and her general lack of empathy and compassion – racialised responses to her are worthy of criticism. To be clear, I believe that any member of the LNP, actually anyone even so much as voting for the LNP, has a complete lack of empathy (maybe licking too much lead paint as a child). Their policies are more often than not extreme right, and they deserve no mercy.
However, Senator Price is not an idiot because she’s Blak, she’s an idiot because she’s a LNP Senator.
The media and liberals (note the small l) racialising and vilifying an Aboriginal person on the basis of identity is never okay. To get where we’re headed, we need to do a little digging into subliminal and covert racism first. Then we’ll “circle back” to how the deployment of the ABC’s vilification worries me theoretically, and it’s got nothing to do with being apologetic for the LNP – far from it. Rather, we need to examine the discursive normalisation of racism “when it’s someone the public mightn’t like”.
Covert racism is everywhere in Australia [1]. We may well be one of the most racist countries on the planet. This, naturally, extends and manifests significantly in political discourse in the country, both explicitly (think Pauline) and through subtle mechanisms that escape immediate detection, while reinforcing racialised power dynamics. The manifestation of this where Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander politicians are concerned, regardless of conservative or progressive political ideology, is a complex dynamic. Where Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is concerned, this emerges wherein criticism becomes entangled with racialised expectations of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander political expression.
Unlike overt racism characterised by explicit bigotry, covert racism, here, operates through “neutral” language that subjects Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander conservative figures to distinct scrutiny not applied to their non-Aboriginal counterparts [2]. The delegitimisation occurs not through rejection of their Indigeneity per se, but through implicit suggestions that their political positions represent a form of false consciousness or cultural betrayal. These frameworks are rarely, if ever, imposed upon white politicians whose ideological positions face opposition.
Covert racism, within progressive discourse, conflates otherwise genuine policy critique with racialised expectations of how Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander politicians “should” position themselves politically. The paradox rests where those who rightfully criticise racist structures simultaneously perpetuate ‘subtle’ forms of racial essentialism by presupposing authentic Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander political expression should necessarily align with progressive ideologies. Critical race theorists call this ‘progressive paternalism’, where well-intentioned advocacy nonetheless reproduces colonial power dynamics by constraining Indigenous political agency within predetermined boundaries. Thus, even within anti-racist movements, unexamined assumptions about racial authenticity and political expression continue to reproduce racial hierarchies which they, in other circles, purport to aim to dismantle. Okay, so, back to the election coverage.
A pattern of differential treatment emerged in how panellists engaged with Senator Price compared to her white conservative counterparts. While Coalition figures were afforded space to articulate their positions – even when they were outright lies – with minimal interruption, Price faced a barrage of challenging questions delivered with sceptical undertones and frequent interjections over her which undermined her authority. This asymmetrical application of journalistic scrutiny manifested, as described above, in persistent ways. This included dismissive body language, interrogative tones reserved specifically for her segment, and a readiness to contest her statements that wasn’t mirrored in exchanges with white conservative parliamentarians. The panelists’ tendency to respond to Price’s perspectives with immediate challenges rather than the consideration extended to others revealed an unconscious double standard that positioned her contributions as inherently less credible.
The differential treatment operated at the intersection of gender and racial bias, where Price absorbed disproportionate criticism that could have been directed at her party’s collective policy positions [3]. Almost as though the ABC were withholding their blows on white politicians who are equally, if not more-so, responsible for the policy platform – because it’s “okay to criticise a blackfella”. Naturally, paradoxically, Price would likely endorse such an attack on herself, just not of her policy platform, and so this should read in no way as a defence of her (it’s not). While white, typically male, Coalition representatives made similarly, if not more extreme, controversial statements without significant pushback, Price’s assertions were framed as requiring additional verification or dismissed through subtle facial expressions and tone shifts that signalled disbelief to viewers.
These ever present and ongoing patterns of racialised responses to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples might be described as heightened scrutiny bias, where marginalised individuals in positions of authority face intensified examination of their competence and credibility, particularly when their political alignment doesn’t fit with the paternalism of the liberal centre. The implicit message conveyed through these interactions suggested that Price’s perspectives, values, and positioning were less legitimate than those of her white colleagues, despite her equal standing as an elected representative.
Liberals (qua political alignment) often perpetuate a problematic dynamic through their selective accountability mechanisms that unconsciously reproduce colonial hierarchies. Despite “progressive” intentions, many liberals apply standards to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander conservative figures such as Price that presuppose a singular ‘authentic’ Indigenous (political) identity, one they decide is aligned with “progressive” values. This essentialising implicitly denies Indigenous people the same political complexity and ideological diversity afforded to white Australians. The disproportionate scrutiny directed at Price, while allowing white conservatives to escape similar interrogation, doesn’t show principled consistency, but that there are unexamined expectations about how Indigeneity ‘should’ position a person ideologically. And, while perhaps it “should”, on the basis of ethics and morals, condition one toward left-wing platforms, it is still no less “valid” to be Indigenous and conservative, nor should this cast into question one’s personhood.
To move toward genuinely decolonial politics, liberals need to reconstruct their approach to political critique by prioritising consistent standards across racial lines. And heavens know those anti-racist standards need to rise. The ABC’s tacit “equal voice” empowering One Nation, Katter, and Trumpet of Patriots, while marginalising the Greens requires significant scrutiny. This should be done alongside interrogating unconscious racial expectations about Indigenous political expression, which currently characterises ‘acceptable’ racism and is supported by the media, which is unacceptable. A decolonial approach separates substantive policy critique from identity-based delegitimisation, ensuring that criticism focuses specifically on policy positions rather than implicit questioning of authenticity. While we’re examining things, we should also take a moment to think even further on paternalism particularly in how it was mobilised by ABC panellists when discussing Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander politicians, concerns, and priorities both in election coverage and out.
For Critical Indigenous Studies, paternalism remains a chronic colonial mechanism that circumscribes Indigenous political agency through the guise of protection or benevolent guidance [4]. Scholars, including Distinguished Professor Aunty Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Professor Larissa Behrendt have identified how paternalism operates as a living form of colonial governance by positioning non-Indigenous actors as more capable of determining Indigenous interests than Indigenous peoples ourselves. This paternalism is clear in assumptions that Indigenous conservatives, for instance, must be operating from false consciousness or internalised oppression rather than any political conviction [5]. Again, we’re not agreeing with the LNP, just disagreeing with racial characterisation.
The paternalistic gaze, which works concomitantly with differential treatment and covert racism, functions to domesticate Indigenous political expression by casting certain forms as legitimate. Paternalism continues the colonial project, replacing explicit subjugation with subtler but equally damaging epistemic violence that presume to know what constitutes ‘proper’ Indigenous politics and identity [6]. Decolonial scholars the world over emphasise that genuine self-determination necessitates recognising Indigenous peoples’ right to political diversity, including the right to hold conservative positions without having our Indigeneity questioned or our agency undermined through paternalistic modes which position non-Indigenous observers as better arbiters of Indigenous authenticity than Indigenous people.
Critical Indigenous Media studies has documented how mainstream Australian media consistently reproduces colonial power relations through its differential treatment of Indigenous political figures [7]. When examining figures like Price, media discourse frequently employs deficit discourses that position conservative Indigenous peoples’ voices either as exceptional outliers or as fundamentally compromised by their association with conservative politics. The issue, again, being the racialised application of such views. The representational violence is subtle, linguistic and visual. From interruptions, to skeptical facial expressions and challenging tones, there are collective signals to audiences that certain Indigenous political expressions require additional scrutiny.
All these behaviours from the media, heck even your friends, enact a form of epistemological violence that positions Indigenous knowledge and political expression within subjectified boundaries and hierarchies of expression. The deploying of a verification process, predominantly by white institutional gatekeepers, reinforces colonial hierarchies that position whiteness as the unmarked standard against which Indigenous political expression is measured, evaluated, and frequently found wanting. It’s racist. It’s wrong.
So, let’s do better. Let’s end racism – especially on the left, friends,
Aidan
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press. ↩︎
Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Aboriginal Studies Press. ↩︎
c.f. Fforde, C., Bamblett, L., Lovett, R., Gorringe, S., & Fogarty, B. (2013). Discourse, deficit and identity: Aboriginality, the race paradigm and the language of representation in contemporary australia. Media International Australia, 149(1), 162–173. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X1314900117 ↩︎
Behrendt, L. (2016). Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling. University of Queensland Press. ↩︎
Martin, K. L. (2012). Please knock before you enter: Aboriginal regulation of outsiders and the implications for researchers. Post Pressed. ↩︎
Rankine, J., & McCreanor, T. (2021). Mass media representations of Indigenous peoples. In P. Bilimoria, J. Bapat, P. Hughes, & D. Keown (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of contemporary Indigenous religion (pp. 226-237). Routledge. ↩︎
Langton, M. (2008). The end of 'big men' politics. Griffith Review, 22, 48-57; Bond, C. (2019). The irony of the Aboriginal banking apologetics. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 15(3), 243-249. ↩︎
Dear friends,
I’ve been “experiencing” liberal American post-election analysis on every form of media I visit. I’m sure you’re in the same boat as politically engaged people – but things have really reached frustration point today. So, without naming names, msnbc, I want to explore how “liberal politics”, or really what should be labeled soft-right after this Trump-slide, maintains hegemonic control through a variety of interlinked mechanisms that ultimately serve capital while preventing genuine social transformation. You know – the usual. Specifically today I’m interested in “sanewashing” and virtue signaling, because that’s the thrust of post-electoral fervor in the US – and I can feel it in my bones coming to Australia next (after all we’re just little USA, right? More on that soon).
It’s worth beginning with how liberals internally justify their political positioning. Their inaction, justification of government and corporate decisions, and general malaise unless something is a personal threat to them (even then, a stretch for action to occur). The bourgeois “left” engages in endless self-congratulatory rhetoric about being “reasonable” and “moderate”. Through this they position themselves as the “adult in the room” (in all things, really – yuck) while actively enabling fascism through constant concessions to capital. This manifesto of mediocrity serves to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse while portraying any genuine challenge to capitalism as dangerously extreme. Thanks, liberals (and to be clear to the Australians in the room I mean ALP supporters, not “Liberal Party” supporters who are Trumpian). The grip of the liberal mindset becomes a self-reinforcing loop: “we must be reasonable because we are moderate, and we are moderate because we are reasonable”. This circular logic conveniently ignores how their “reasonable” politic continues to enable exploitation and expropriation. Nice gymnastics.
Illustration required! The phenomenon of “sanewashing” exemplifies this mental HIIT workout perfectly. Liberals dismiss Trump supporters and other right-wing voters as simply “crazy” or “weird” rather than engaging with the material conditions and deliberate manipulation that drives working people toward reactionary politics. This is particularly important – the start and end of issues in US and Australian politics alike is that there are no parties supporting fair working conditions, socialised care, or ecological preservation – no parties beside the Australian Greens anyway. And even that is a concession to the change desperately needed in both countries to save our planet from climate destruction. “Those people are just nuts”, the liberals declare, while continuing to support the very economic system that creates the desperation and alienation fuelling fascism’s rise. This narrative conveniently absolves liberals of any responsibility to build genuine solidarity or challenge fundamental injustices, they can rest easy on their privileged boomeresque retirement fund. It also reinforces the false binary between two flavours of capitalism – one openly fascist, one with a pride flag – a dichotomy of the ages as the “political spectrum” tells you you can have your opinion, as long as it is ontologically capitalist.
From a sociological perspective, this othering process serves multiple hegemonic functions. It allows liberals to maintain their self-image as the “reasonable” ones while actively participating in systems of exploitation – hot. It fragments working class solidarity by creating artificial divisions between the “normal” and “crazy” segments of society. Most perniciously, it prevents meaningful analysis of how capitalism itself produces the social conditions that drive people toward extreme positions. The people who should be conducting the analysis, hell, they should be rallying on the streets, instead its “woe is me, some crazy people won the power” and “Kamala only lost because she was marginalised by the media” – not an ounce of introspection in the whole liberal core. The obsession with individual “sanity” versus “insanity” literally masks the systemic nature of our crisis – if you reduce all our problems to one faulty leader (Dutton, Badenoch, Luxon, Trump) then “capitalism is ok, it’s just the leaders who are wrong” while their more palatable leader (Albo, Starmer, Hipkins, Biden) institutes the same policy with a rainbow flag draped over it – do you feel sufficiently “washed” yet?
The normalising of “sanity” as defined by acquiescence to capitalist relations represents another victory for ruling class ideology. And with liberals it is always ruling class ideology – not anything born of organic intellectualism – because they seek only to become the next oppressor (landlord, CEO, investor), not defeat systems of oppression. Those who accept endless war, environmental destruction, and grinding poverty as “normal” get to claim the mantle of “reason”, while those who suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of profit, planetary destruction, and genocide are dismissed as extremists. Again, cool work liberals. The deep irrationality of a system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet gets naturalised as “just the way things are” and this pervasive hegemony informs all of what is “allowed” on the political spectrum – policing the possibility of change.
Particularly galling is how this discourse completely ignores the role of education. (Here we go Aidan’s back on the high horse). Not in the liberal sense of “if only they understood facts and logic” but in the Gramscian sense of developing critical consciousness – consciousness born of their class origin that enables a shared understanding of the failings, expolitation, and fundamentally cancerous nature of capital – rather than vanguarding and justifying it endlessly for “sanity” against both the socialist left and the alt-right. Instead of building systems of popular education that help people understand their material conditions and collective interests, liberals fixate on sneering at the “uneducated masses” while offering no alternative vision. They posture about how the “poors and illiterates” can’t truly understand their big brain political system, and yet when they do vote they somehow choose “insanity” rather than their candidate. Their conception of education remains trapped within capitalist logic, naturally – training “better workers” (read: complicity in capitalism’s exploitation) rather than developing revolutionary consciousness.
The political spectrum, here, serves as yet another tool in this same hegemonic arsenal. By positioning “moderate” pro-capital positions as the reasonable centre, with socialism relegated to the “extreme” fringe alongside fascism (no, not in horseshoe theory’s twisted worldview – if those liberal kids could read they’d be very upset), this framework naturalises exploitation while pathologising resistance. It is no accident that the “centre” always seems to align perfectly with the interests of capital – and over time creeps ever further rightward as capital’s crises and metastaticisation destroy our ecology, demand more socially gruelling positions, and continues painting anything that challenges these interests as dangerous extremism – anything. This false equivalence between left and right “extremes” serves to maintain capitalist hegemony by preventing genuine alternatives from gaining traction. Again, harming progressive causes and trapping the broadest discourse within a narrative controlled by binary and “sanity”.
The manufactured spectrum, with perhaps its most damaging feature, enables the alt-right to position itself as merely the “opposite” of some imagined radical left, thereby normalising its fascistic tendencies through false equivalence. “Well, if there are communists on the far left, we must be the reasonable counterbalance on the right”, goes their twisted logic. But this framing fundamentally misunderstands (deliberately, of course) the dimensional nature of political thought. The spectrum isn’t a simple line from left to right, it’s not even a two-dimensional political compass. The reality is that while fascists and liberals argue about various flavors of capitalism, genuine socialist and communist thought operates on a different axis (because their values are concerned with freedom from oppression, not “how would you like your oppression today?”). Fundamentally, it is an axis that questions the very premises of capital that both “ends” of the mainstream spectrum take for granted. It’s like watching two people argue about the best way to arrange deck chairs on the Titanic while refusing to acknowledge the iceberg – or better yet, refusing to acknowledge that boats could be steered differently altogether. The right’s success in positioning itself as just another “pole” on a reasonable spectrum serves to further entrench capital’s hegemony by making any genuine alternative appear literally unthinkable. Through this sleight of hand, they can paint socialists as “just as extreme” as fascists, while the real extremism – the endless extraction, exploitation, and expropriation required by capitalism itself – gets completely naturalised as the water we all swim in. The bourgeois media’s obsession with “both sides” reporting only reinforces this dynamic, creating an artificial equivalence between those who want to accelerate capitalism’s death drive and those who dare to imagine we might organise society differently.
Meanwhile liberals engage in endless virtue signalling about inclusion and diversity while actively participating in systems of exploitation and expropriation. They need to “look” reasonable, after all, as the moderate centre in all this. They’ll put “Black Lives Matter” in their social media bios while opposing any policy that might actually challenge racial capitalism. Similarly with decolonial efforts – full support for Indigenous movements unless they challenge capitalism – but knock-off art piece looks nice on their wall right? They’ll celebrate pride while supporting politicians who maintain the carceral state. I could go on but I’m feeling physically ill at the thought of liberal performativity, capture, and misappropriation of genuine causes into identity based squabbles [1]. The performance of progressive values without material commitment to transformation only serves to recuperate radical movements into channels safe for capital – and serves to both disempower the genuine movement and fuel capitalist “washing” – i.e., greenwashing, queerwashing, and so on.
And readers out there from the philosophical tradition may be troubled by my espousals today, but let’s be clear – contemporary liberal politics has devolved far from the aspirational heights of philosophical liberalism. While classical liberal philosophy, emerging from enlightenment thinking, at least attempted to grapple with fundamental questions of human freedom, rights, and the relationship between individual and society, today’s liberal politics has abandoned even these intellectual ambitions – verging on libertarianism. Philosophers like Locke, Mill, and even Rawls – raced, gendered and classed as their conclusions largely were – engaged seriously with questions of justice, liberty, and the social contract. Their theoretical frameworks, which integrated into the bourgeois interests of their time, maintained some commitment to universal principles and rational inquiry. By contrast, contemporary liberal politics circle jerks itself to pure pragmatism in servitude to capital. The profound questions about human nature, freedom, and justice that animated classical liberal thought have been replaced by shallow technocratic discussions of “what works” where “works” is defined entirely in terms of maintaining capitalist social relations (slavery of the 99%). This degeneration of liberalism from a philosophical project (however flawed) to pure ideology maintenance exemplifies the broader crisis of bourgeois thought under late capitalism.
All of these varied techniques the “washing”, othering, normalisation of capitalist “reason”, and the shallow performance of progress – are the modern day tools of hegemonic enforcement – these are the ways that capitalism is protected, steered, and remains in a state of growth and subsumption forever – liberal engines perpetually powering and justifying capitalist heat death. These techniques, and the broad approach of liberals to contemporary politics fragments solidarity, mystifies power relations, and channels dissent into dead ends. Most dangerously, it prevents us from building the kind of intersectional movement for justice that could actually challenge capital’s death grip on our future [2]. The liberal framework offers no tools for addressing the deep interconnections between various forms of oppression because it cannot question the capitalist system that produces and requires those oppressions.
Through Chomsky’s lens of manufactured consent, we can see how the liberal worship of capitalism – dressed up in the language of pragmatism and progress – represents the ultimate betrayal of human potential. The media apparatus, educational institutions, and cultural frameworks that reproduce liberal hegemony don’t just maintain capitalism – they actively work to prevent us from imagining alternatives – they inform our epistemology and shape our ontology [3]. When liberals valourise “moderate” politics while demonising genuine resistance, when they perform inclusion while defending exploitation, when they preach “civility” while enabling fascism, they aren’t just expressing personal political preferences – they are carrying out essential ideological work for capital. This betrayal cuts deepest at the intersections of oppression, where the violence of capitalism compounds with racism, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and other systems of domination. Liberal hegemony works overtime to obscure these connections, to prevent us from seeing how capitalism requires these interlocking systems of oppression to function [4]. The result is a profound distortion of human nature itself – our inherent capacities for solidarity, creativity, and collective flourishing constantly twisted into competitive individualism and performative politics. Breaking free from this hegemonic web requires more than just critiquing liberal politics – it demands building new forms of consciousness and organisation that can unite the multiply oppressed in struggle against capital and all its mutually reinforcing systems of domination. Only through this kind of radical, intersectional solidarity can we begin to imagine and create the kind of world our human nature actually calls for – and the start point, as always, is education.
In solidarity,
Aidan
https://mndrdr.org/2024/identity-politics-and-the-crisis-of-working-class-solidarity ↩︎
Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T., & Fraser, N. (2019). Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. Verso. ↩︎
Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers. ↩︎
Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books. ↩︎