Left or right, stupid or evil? Even friendships founder in the politics of hate

There’s a popular saying with which people on “the right” wryly explain to themselves why their opposites are the way they are: “The right think the left are stupid,” it goes, “while the left think the right are evil.”

The statement is obviously too broad to be universally true. And yet it feels pretty accurate at times. Questions over whether progressive policies are on the right track are often met with accusations of bigotry, racism, xenophobia, or nasty neoliberalism. Ideas that are unpalatable to progressives are labelled “problematic”. Not challenging, nor disruptive, counterintuitive or uncomfortable. But somehow problematised by the unseen forces of social rectitude which watch over the virtue of the post-Christian West like a neo-pagan Elf On The Shelf. The implication is clear: evil lurks in the hearts and minds of the enemies of Progress.

The adage sprang to mind the other day as I read through reader comments. There it was, perfectly illustrated. “I have never been a fly on the wall in either an LNP or ALP cabinet meeting or party room meeting,” the reader noted, “but if I were, I wonder where I might most likely hear phrases like, ‘how do we improve the health outcomes of our hospital system?’, ‘how do we raise educational standards?’, ‘what are our infrastructure priorities?’, ‘how can we reduce poverty?’, ‘how do we best allocate taxpayer money to do so?’.”

The valued reader thought those questions would only be tackled in the cabinets of left-wing politics. Right-wingers, it seems, sit around plotting how to make people poor, undermine educational standards and ravage public health.

The right is not innocent of its share of negative stereotyping. While people I’ve spoken to on the right don’t, for the most part, believe the left is uncaring, they do think left-wing policies end up hurting people because they are poorly thought through. A popular sentiment, shared on social media by rapper Zuby, among others, contends that “whenever I want to imagine being a liberal [in the US sense of left-wing] I just pretend I have no idea of second or third-order consequences”. It’s a neat contraction of a concept articulated by American economist Thomas Sowell, which criticises a focus on the immediately visible impact of an action, ignoring “consequences of consequences” – the second- and third-order effects.

In Australia, examples of good intentions with bad downstream effects abound. Raising the tobacco tax above the useful threshold created an opportunity for a thriving black market, run by organised crime. Abolishing offshore asylum-seeker processing for humanitarian reasons led to a sharp increase in drownings as people-smugglers packed customers eager to reach Australia into rickety boats. And the effect of a rushed NDIS has been to erode the interpersonal trust on which social safety nets rely, by exposing the enormous waste in public programs bankrolled by taxpayers. The University of Wollongong points to similar levels of fraud in Medicare and the childcare system to those in the disability support scheme.

The conclusion drawn by the right is that the side of politics which clamours for kindness is a bit childlike in its inability to imagine how consequences might unfold. Or maybe narcissistically preoccupied with performances of superficial virtue.

The left, on the other hand, sees the right as defending Big Tobacco, demonising asylum seekers and opposing programs that help people. They are baffled at how anyone could be so venal and cruel. I suppose it’s understandable if they conclude the right must be heartless, possibly evil.

This creates an uneven debate. The right treats the left as incapable of reason. The left treats the right as a cancer which must be excised. The asymmetry stands in the way of constructive discussion.

History is marked by the conflicts that these differences engender, so I don’t want to contend that this is something new. Revolutions, hot wars, cold wars, and – on a much smaller scale – elections are fought over which approach should prevail. But it feels like it has been getting sharper, harder and more absolute over the past few years than I remember it before in my lifetime.

I started noticing the temperature ratcheting up a couple of years before the pandemic. I lost friends. Topics that had once been the subject of fertile debate as we tried to solve the world’s problems over too many wines were no longer up for discussion.

In 2020, historian Anne Applebaum published a short book with the poignant title The Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. It tells of how political polarisation led to the alienation of friends who used to disagree warmly. It struck a chord. Our personal experiences were the expression of something more universal.

Over the past couple of years, many of the big policy ideas of Team Left and Team Right have converged. Protectionism, tariffs, and nationalisation dressed up as “sovereign capability” have found adherents on what used to be opposing sides of politics. Yet instead of bringing supporters together, converging ideas have been accompanied by increasing hatred. With policy no longer contested, each side impugns the other’s motive for championing the thing they both agree on.

The Farrer byelection is providing a live-action demonstration of this. The two leading candidates declared themselves in favour of many of the same things, with little to differentiate them except for their funding sources. Both were decked out in orange, as though to underline the overlap. The independent, who receives money from the same sources as the teals, departed from Climate 200s preferred lines by calling net zero by 2050 “untenable”. She wants Australia to open new oil refineries. The One Nation candidate, David Farley, said Australia should actively contribute to foreign aid – a huge departure from his party’s preference to cut billions from the aid budget. Supporters seemed oblivious to the contradictions and became even more defensive of their fighting rooster.

When politics is reduced to “good” and “evil”, it becomes personal, hateful and unproductive. People will accept anything their team serves up. Which pretty much guarantees that what they get will be pretty stupid.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

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