Something\u2019s amiss, isn\u2019t it? \u201cWe may live in the first period of human history where every demographic feels that they are somehow being violated and victimised,\u201d writes Mark Manson, capturing something at once familiar and bewildering about our moment.<\/p>\n
This is not simply one of those revolutionary moments when the long-downtrodden rise up against their oppressors \u2013 as witnessed, for example, at the height of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, or a century earlier with the women\u2019s suffrage movement.<\/p>\n
Sure, that may be part of the story, but such a summary would prove too partial. This is instead a moment when almost any issue can draw sharp lines between us: climate change, taxation, the language on a medical form. It is now entirely common for each of the opposing sides of a vociferous debate to consider themselves shamed and silenced, unable to speak without being branded in some malevolent way. In this respect (and perhaps only in this respect), advocates speaking of the existential erasure of transgender people speak the same language as gender-critical feminists who complain of the erasure of women under the axioms of gender fluidity.<\/p>\n
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Political discourse has crossed a line from anger to contempt.<\/span>Credit:<\/span>Andrew Dyson<\/cite><\/p>\n Black American activists talk of the existential threat they face at the hands of a white-supremacist culture, while repeated surveys reveal a majority of white Americans think anti-white discrimination is as bad as or worse than discrimination against blacks and other minorities. Among the white working class, the figure rises to about two-thirds.<\/p>\n So often we distil this as Sally, a viewer of the BBC\u2019s Question Time<\/em>, did in a tweet to the show in 2019: \u201cWhy is everyone, so angry about everything, all of the time?\u201d Predictably, that tweet invited its own anger, with respondents sneering at Sally\u2019s excessive use of commas.<\/p>\n But punctuation aside, everyone seems desperate to answer the question. The English-language internet is awash with articles diagnosing the incandescent tone of public debate and doling out advice on how best to handle it, especially with family and friends. That last point is fundamental, not least in the United States, where partisan division has hardened so much that it is now frequently terminating friendships and leaving family members unable to converse.<\/p>\n In 2016, the Pew Research Centre showed just how rapidly and deeply Democratic and Republican voters\u2019 mutual suspicion and disdain was advancing: majorities of each now had a \u201cvery unfavourable\u201d view of the other \u2013 more than double what it was at the turn of the millennium. By 2020, Pew found that Biden and Trump voters hardly knew each other. A mere 3 per cent of each had \u201ca lot\u201d of friends who supported the opposing candidate. About 40 per cent of each said they had no friends at all who did. Add to them those who have only \u201ca few\u201d such friends, and the number on either side approaches 80 per cent.<\/p>\n Australian polarisation is not quite so severe, but we can easily discern a similar direction of travel. Surveys show that voters regard the major parties as becoming more politically extreme, even though analysis of party policies, speeches and voting records by Political Compass demonstrates that ideologically, they have scarcely moved.<\/p>\n Data aside, we already intuit this. SBS can happily publish a comment piece on \u201cHow to survive your conservative relatives this Christmas\u201d, presumably because this seems a familiar concern. The aftermath of the 2019 federal election, in which Queensland played a decisive role, included a proliferation of tweets and memes calling for a \u201cQuexit\u201d, demanding Australia \u201ccut them loose!\u201d This, we think, was a joke, along the lines of \u201cWhat the hell is wrong with Queensland?\u201d But it was taken seriously enough to prompt earnest think-pieces pleading with Australians, \u201cdon\u2019t judge, try to understand us\u201d.<\/p>\n So, anger, sure. Rage, or even outrage, yes. All these are such common descriptions of our age because they capture something of the truth. And yet they miss something, too. People have always gotten angry at their loved ones, but they remained loved. Something deeper is going on here, when it leads not merely to flashes of disagreement but to a more permanent alienation. Whatever\u2019s amiss in public conversation, we don\u2019t seem quite to have diagnosed it precisely.<\/p>\n On September 9, 2016, amid the maelstrom of the US presidential election campaign, Hillary Clinton gave a campaign speech at a fundraiser in which she made what quickly became an infamous observation about Donald Trump\u2019s supporters.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump\u2019s supporters into what I call a basket of deplorables,\u201d she said, to laughter from the audience. \u201cRight? They\u2019re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic \u2013 you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that … Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable. But thankfully, they are not America.\u201d By contrast, the other half \u2013 the \u201cother basket\u201d \u2013 had Clinton\u2019s sympathy. They were people who felt \u201clet down\u201d by government and the economy, \u201cpeople we have to understand and empathise with\u201d.<\/p>\n Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during a 2016 presidential debate.<\/span>Credit:<\/span>AP<\/cite><\/p>\n The furore was immediate. \u201cI regret saying \u2018half\u2019 \u2013 that was wrong,\u201d Clinton said in a statement, which of course didn\u2019t specify what proportion would have been better. Simultaneously, though, her campaign cited polling showing Trump supporters had negative attitudes towards Latinos, African Americans and Muslims.<\/p>\n \u201cHow can you unite the country if you\u2019ve written off tens of millions of Americans?\u201d asked CNN\u2019s Anderson Cooper during the next month\u2019s presidential debate. Clinton replied that her argument was not with Trump\u2019s supporters but with Trump himself. But his supporters didn\u2019t see it that way. They defiantly adopted the label, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with \u201cDeplorable\u201d and hats saying \u201cProud To Be Deplorable\u201d. At a rally, Trump walked onto the stage to the sound of Do You Hear the People Sing?<\/em>, the revolutionary anthem from Les Miserables<\/em>. On the screen behind him was a photoshopped image from the musical with the original flags replaced by a mixture of Trump and American flags, beneath the parodic heading Les Deplorables<\/em>.<\/p>\n It was a turning point. Clinton later conceded it contributed to her defeat, but people who worked on her campaign were more forthright. \u201cAll hell broke loose,\u201d wrote a Clinton pollster, identifying it as the moment \u201cI saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDeplorable\u201d and \u201cirredeemable\u201d are words with enormous weight. They go to the very worth of people.<\/p>\n This potent response, much like our public conversation, is rooted in something more than mere anger. And it was Trump\u2019s senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, who identified it with precision: \u201cJust when Hillary Clinton said she was going to start running a positive campaign, she ripped off her mask and revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n There it was. Contempt.<\/p>\n \u201cDeplorable\u201d and \u201cirredeemable\u201d are words with enormous weight. They go to the very worth of people. They signal a kind of excision, a total severance between the describer and the described, even a desire for excommunication. No doubt having honed the line of attack carefully, Trump was incisive in his response. Here he is, standing in front of his Les Deplorables <\/em>banner, on Clinton\u2019s use of \u201cirredeemable\u201d: \u201cBoy, that second word is tough. You don\u2019t hear that as much, but that means you\u2019re never going to come back, folks … Irredeemable, they don\u2019t talk about that one, but that was, to me, pretty bad.\u201d<\/p>\n You\u2019re never going to come back, much like that friend or family member who is cut off, or the entire state people want to excise. The problem isn\u2019t merely polarisation. It\u2019s the contempt with which each side regards the other. Once that happens, political debate ceases to be an exchange, heated or otherwise. It ceases to be about persuasion. It becomes existential. This, we suspect, is what people are trying to capture when they say things like \u201ceveryone is angry about everything all the time\u201d.<\/p>\n Australian politics has had no shortage of contemptuous episodes, led by politicians and echoed by their followers. Here it would be easy \u2013 and accurate \u2013 to cite the sexist hectoring of Julia Gillard during her prime ministership, or the frequent dehumanising of asylum seekers in which politicians were prepared to accuse some of them of setting themselves on fire or throwing their children into the sea as a cynical strategy to cheat their way to Australia.<\/p>\n But it has also infected our climate wars, in which ardent demands to shut down coal mines, for instance, tend to come from those who stand to lose the least from this, with little regard for the communities whose history and identities are so bound up in the coal industry \u2013 viewing them as a problem to be overcome rather than people whose lives and concerns are to be taken seriously. This took an issue on which some agreement may have been brokered and made it an identity conflict, and ultimately a culture war. So, in the words of the Labor-aligned mayor of Isaac Regional Council in central Queensland, \u201cto date, it\u2019s been an \u2018us and them\u2019 discussion, not a \u2018we\u2019 discussion … We\u2019re not talking about not setting a target. We\u2019re not naive to climate change. Our message is, \u2018We feel invisible\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n That is why the \u201cStop Adani\u201d convoy from Tasmania to North Queensland during the 2019 election campaign would have seemed contemptuous to so many. Here was a group of southern interlopers, with no deep concern for the lives of those up north, demanding they forgo what many will have seen as an economic opportunity, while their own jobs in the knowledge economy were secure. Local politicians credit this convoy with solidifying the swing away from Labor in Queensland that year. This sort of approach also underwrites the rhetoric of Nationals leaders \u2013 itself contemptuous \u2013 that banging on about climate change is the preserve of \u201cinner-city raving lunatics\u201d. None of this has been productive.<\/p>\n When more and more issues become like this, and politics becomes primarily a matter of condemning and vanquishing the opposition, a democratic society finds itself in serious trouble.<\/p>\n Democracy cannot survive contempt. Democracy is about cultivating a common life even in the presence of serious disagreement. Contempt is about having no life in common at all.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n