The Guardian: Just who let those deplorables vote, anyway?

The Guardian: I don’t just read it so you don’t have to, I also read it because I like to keep myself open to different ideas. The left used to be big on ideas – whether or not most of them were bad – so, who knows? Maybe the Grauniad might have some interesting insight into the Australian election and why Labor were almost completely wiped out in Queensland especially?

Sadly, no: all it’s got to offer is the bog-standard leftist pabulum of “far-right”, “racism”, Marxist dogma and, of course, Evil Rupert Murdoch, the left’s greatest Goldstein.

North Queensland politics have always been volatile and subject to the lure of populism and protest votes but this is new […]

One thing that has been so far underplayed is News Corp’s newspaper monopoly throughout the region. Those newspapers have mounted a sustained propaganda campaign in favour of the new mine. On the reef coast they have downplayed the damage to the Great Barrier Reef owing to the climate crisis. And if anyone can be blamed for turning Bob Brown’s visit into a harbinger of doom, it’s these papers.

The left is utterly convinced that they are the only smart people in the room. They alone make informed decisions: anyone who disagrees with them must be an uninformed moron, manipulated by wily Murdoch. Which is a far more comfortable explanation, presumably, than just admitting that people completely reject the left’s dogmas.

But there’s a far bigger problem – historical, existential – which can’t simply be laid at News Corp’s, or even wholly at north Queensland’s feet.

A friend, artist and researcher Rachel O’Reilly said on Facebook on Sunday that “Queensland is not a discrete geography but a dominant mode of production”.

This is Marxist gibberish, of course. The conceit that people are just so much moronic clay, moulded by the “mode of production”. This idea did much to fuel the destructive murderousness of communism: change the mode of production and the people must change. If they refused, they could only be counter-revolutionaries, to be dealt with accordingly.

A recent leak showed the Guardian’s editors instructing its writers to use specifically tendentious language to skew its stories (i.e. “climate emergency” instead of “climate change”). So, it’s no surprise to see this dutiful apparatchik robotically seeding his Jeremiad with the left’s new catch-phrases.

All of us have benefited from theft and environmental degradation, all of us have depended on new mines, new finds. North Queensland is just at the sharp end. There’s a real question after this election as to whether Australia knows any other way to be.

The country has foundered for so long on the issue of the climate emergency because no one has a clear, politically salient vision for a post-extractive, post-carbon, post-colonial economy…People in a district which was rich during the boom and presented with no real alternative prospects voted transactionally.

Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. People voted in their own interest? How dare they! If only rural Queenslanders were rich enough to vote as virtuously as a Greens supporter in a Sydney harbourside mansion or inner-Melbourne million-dollar terrace. Green Pharisees can afford to nail their vote to the stump of their assumed virtuousness because they can afford an electric car that costs more than a luxury vehicle. They don’t have to worry about paying for the skyrocketing electricity bill caused by useless “renewable” targets.

If all else fails, just call them racists. Every Guardian reader knows that anyone who disagrees with them has to be a racist, after all.

It is high time to stop pretending, for example, that people vote for One Nation out of any other sentiment than racism; or that extractive industries have not been connected with colonialism, environmental destruction and racism from the beginning…Perhaps our political system as it’s now constituted will never frame an adequate response to the climate crisis. And elections probably cannot save us in the absence of popular pressure, resilience and creativity.

theguardian

Nice. If the left can’t win elections, just do away with democracy altogether. Worked a treat in the good old days of the Soviet Union, after all.