If you're not a socialist at age 20, you have no heart. If you're
still a socialist at age 40, you have no brain.
This hackneyed line (or variations of it) has been ascribed to no
less than Disraeli, Woodrow Wilson, George Bernard Shaw, Bismarck and
Bertrand Russell, but is most popularly attributed to Winston Churchill.
Similar statements of expiation have probably been grunted by former
radicals long before any of these men made their mark on history. But
for the sake of simplicity and in deference to Churchill's zigzagging
politics we will call this explanation for ideologically nomadic
behaviour the theory of Churchillian conversion.
Many prominent conservatives have made the journey from far left to
hard right and many of the current federal government's most
unquestioning media supporters were, in their youth, strident
left-wingers. A catalogue of their prior political leanings, which range
from anarchism to support for the Khmer Rouge, is semi-regularly aired
in public.
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Many of these media conservatives view their own ideological journey
as qualifying them to comment with confidence on an inexhaustibly wide
range of issues. They share a remarkable uniformity of opinion across
these issues and engage in a phoney war in the opinion pages of the
daily papers with the equally politically generic members of the
post-material left. The public is largely disinterested in this dance
and it sometimes appears the two sides exist primarily for the benefit
of each other. Yet these faux battles are followed by the people who
direct the course of the Nation and so the collective motives of those
participating in them are of significant interest.
The motives of those on the left have been picked over ad infinitum
by those on the right. They are bleeding hearts more interested in
assuaging their own guilt than in thinking practically. They are
indulgent and pick their politics in the unthinkingly trendy way that
one might pick out a jacket or a pair of shoes. Many of these criticisms
are valid.
But the collective motives of the ex-lefty conservatives are seldom
questioned. After all, they did not have to lurch from one end of the
spectrum to the other - there are plenty of perfectly respectable and
defendable positions in the middle. An examination of the Pauline
phenomenon of ideological conversion among conservative commentators is
long overdue and may go some way to explaining the collective motives of
conservative cheerleaders in general.
One thing that separates right-wing polemicists from left-wing
polemicists is the attempt by those on the right to claim that they are
somehow defenders of, or even part of, the voiceless mob. The absurdity
of people who fill acres of column space pleading voicelessness is lost
on most of them and particularly those who migrated across from the
left. Are they as pompous and humourless as the people they lampoon?
Many seemed to have retained the same priggish know-it-all stance of
the foot-stamping undergraduate leftist. They find
"establishment" straw men to attack (usually involving
accusations of "conspiracy" or "a stifling
orthodoxy"), are prone to a herd mentality, usually go for the
polemic over an exploration of life's infinite shades of grey and are
vituperative in their criticism of anyone who refuses to accept the
totality of their wisdom.
The ideological conversion of so many conservative commentators may
help to explain why they behave in much the same manner as those they
attack. So why did they convert? There is the theory of Churchillian
conversion - that a young person should be idealistic and an older
person wary and conservative. But this doesn't explain why radicalism
does not take hold among those young people who make do without a
tertiary education. It also fails to account for the many
university-educated middle-aged people who refuse to relinquish much of
the silliness embodied in hard-left politics. Most tellingly, this
theory does not explain why ex-lefties like to paint themselves as
radicals, storming the establishment citadel of political correctness
and attacking the Evil Keating Government, which (someone forgot to tell
them) was defeated way back in 1996 by a man whose star they worship.
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I would suggest that many commentators on public policy move from the
left of the ideological spectrum to the right because it is the socially
and economically convenient. Any politically active person who passes
through a university will have an easier time of it if they are on the
radical left. Those seduced by the absolutism of the hard left find a
ready-made community with an in-built orthodoxy that is eager to
reaffirm their views. This commune is held together by the notion that
they are being persecuted by a power elite. They relentlessly pursue
their own interests while depicting themselves as selfless and squabble
over institutions alien to the experience of the average Australian
(like student unions).
A good many of these university lefties progress into business, the
professions, community groups, academia and public policy circles. In
many of these places there is a ready-made support group for anyone who
subscribes to the conservative point of view on any given issue. Those
seduced by the absolutism of this blanket view find a ready-made
community with an in-built orthodoxy that is eager to reaffirm their
views. This commune is held together by the notion that they are being
persecuted by a power elite. They relentlessly pursue their own
interests while depicting themselves as selfless and squabble over
institutions alien to the experience of the average Australian (like
Quadrant).
It's not hard to see how a person might slip effortlessly from one
group to the other.
The theory of Churchillian conversion is limited in its capacity to
explain many prominent conversions from left to right. In fact, if
someone is interested in the way the world works rather than just being
interested in their own economic interests or social standing, they will
usually start out somewhat conservative, believing with youthful
optimism and arrogance that people are the authors of their own destiny
and deserve what they get. They may then tend to become mildly
left-leaning when they realise that the accident of birth really is the
main determinant of where a person ends up in life.
Any young person contemplating left-wing politics of the
sloganeering, doctrinaire undergraduate variety should accept the
following advice. Read the CVs of any number of Australia's most
bellicose conservatives, read some of their columns and reflect,
ironically, on the words of Robert Frost:
I never dared to be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.