These are the liberal moderates? Really?

So Malcolm Fraser has finally quit the Liberal Party (he was PM from 1975 to 1983). And one of his former senior advisers, Petro Georgiou, is quitting parliament.

According to Michelle Grattan this represents a blow to the cause of the "Liberal moderates".

[with] the revelation that Malcolm Fraser has quit the party for which he won three elections because of its rightward lean, it's not a good time for Liberal moderates.

The bad news is that they're soon to get another blow, when two of their flag carriers, Petro Georgiou and Judith Troeth, leave parliament ... That will leave the small "l" liberals very thin on the ground.

Georgiou, who was an adviser to Fraser in government, is the philosophical voice of the moderates. He was a key player in Fraser's commitment to multiculturalism and setting up SBS ...

The generational change that is gradually under way in the Liberal party is not producing new strong moderate voices. It is throwing up some outspoken conservatives ...

Some of the high-profile people among the moderate minority are presently gagged because of position, ambition or both.

This has things exactly the wrong way round. The so-called "moderates" are the liberal purists. And this makes them more radical and extreme.

Consider Fraser's political history. Way back in 1968 Fraser gave a speech in which he noted that one Australian university, as an entrance requirement, "recognises the following languages - French, German, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Japanese". He criticised this selection by claiming that,

the list as a whole is one belonging to the last century except for one of the languages mentioned.

According to Fraser, the European languages did not belong in the twentieth century. Only the Japanese one did. He was prepared, as early as 1968, to junk Australia's European heritage.

When in power in the 1970s, he and his "moderate" mate Georgiou, declared Australia's Anglo-Celtic national identity to be null and void. We were instead to become a multicultural nation. Later, in the 1990s, Fraser argued for an extra 20 to 30 million migrants, claiming that "Australia must increase its population to 40 or 50 million if it was to become more than a bit player in world affairs".

Even if you support such policies, you'd have to recognise that they are anything but moderate. It's difficult to think of anything more radical. It represents an abrupt change to a country's population and identity.

Edmund Burke might well have been describing Fraser when he wrote back in the 1700s,

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.

There are those in the Liberal Party who believe that the party represents a "fusion" of a liberal and a conservative tradition in politics. I don't believe such a fusion is possible and nor do the so-called "moderate" (i.e. purist) liberals within the party.

Fraser, for instance, described the relationship between liberalism and conservatism this way:

As its name implies, ours is a liberal government holding liberal principles ...

I have stressed the commitment of the Government to liberal principles and values. Precisely because of that commitment it is also concerned to conserve and protect those principles and values.

Once liberal institutions are installed in a society, a government which wishes to preserve them must in some sense be conservative.

So the only purpose of conservatism, for Fraser, is to conserve an existing liberal orthodoxy in society. It is liberalism which is supreme. There is not even a pretence here at a fusion. It is a purist liberalism.

And an unbounded liberalism is going to have radical and not moderate outcomes. Fraser and Georgiou are therefore more accurately looked on as the purist, radical wing of the Liberal Party.

There's an excellent speech by another of the "moderates," George Brandis, which admits much the same thing - I'll look at this in my next post.

Liberal radicalism in France: fidelity a pathology, yelling a crime

Maryse Vaillant is a prominent French psychologist who has written a book, Men, love, fidelity. She says that the aim of the book is to "rehabilitate infidelity".

Her argument (according to newspaper reports) is that infidelity is essential to the psychic functioning of some men, making infidelity "almost unavoidable". If this were accepted it could be "very liberating" for women.

But her argument goes much further than this, it becomes much more radical. She claims that those men who are faithful might have something wrong with them - that they might be suffering from a pathology, a too rigid concept of duty:

However, in Miss Vaillant's book she insists that fidelity is not, by definition proof of love. In fact, "pathological monogamists" in many cases lack the strength of mind to take a mistress, she claims.

"They are often men whose father was physically or morally absent ... during their childhood. These men have a completely idealised view of their father and the paternal function," she said.

"They lack suppleness and are prisoners to an idealised image of a man of duty."

She has inverted the normal view of fidelity. Now it is the faithful men who are weak for not taking a mistress and immoral for following a principle of duty.

What's going on here? I don't have a chance to read the book, but it does seem as if Madame Vaillant is taking a liberal argument to a more radical conclusion. In the liberal view, the moral thing is to be self-sovereign and to do what we will. Therefore, the aim of reform is to remove impediments to our individual choice.

The older morality becomes one of these impediments. It's too rigid - it states clearly that the aim is to be faithful. This restricts what we can choose for ourselves. It makes us a "prisoner" to our sense of moral duty.

The hero is then the one who breaks through moral taboos (impediments). So it is the adulterer, in Madame Vaillant's eyes, who is the healthy one with the strength of mind to act for his own purposes.

It's true that liberalism also states that our actions must not limit the similar freedom of others. But, according to Madame Vaillant, women can find it liberating to accept that their husbands need to have a mistress. So adultery passes that little qualification.

I won't embark here on a defence of fidelity as an ideal in marriage. My intention has simply been to point out how radical liberalism is when applied consistently to such issues. However, there is one curious flaw in Madame Vaillant's argument that's worth pointing out.

According to her, faithful men suffer a pathology because their fathers were absent during their childhood. So father absence is recognised as a bad thing - a source of pathology. But wouldn't men taking mistresses create more father absence in society? Most men find it hard enough to combine a career and family. What if they have to combine career, family and mistress? Won't they be spending less time with their kids? So wouldn't then adultery (the supposedly good thing) create more father absence (the bad thing, the source of pathology)?

All of which raises another question. Does liberalism at least leave people alone to do their own thing, even if it does so by rejecting or inverting normal moral standards? The answer clearly is no. It does not even achieve this. Far from leaving people alone in their relationships, it is extraordinarily intrusive.

For example, the French government has announced it will introduce a new law which bans 'psychological violence' in relationships. A man might end up with a criminal record if he insults his wife during an argument:

Married couples in France could end up with criminal records for insulting each other during arguments.

Under a new law, France is to become the first country in the world to ban 'psychological violence' within marriage. The law would apply to cohabiting couples and to both men and women.

It would cover men who shout at their wives and women who hurl abuse at their husbands - although it was not clear last night if nagging would be viewed as breaking the law.

The law is expected to cover every kind of insult including repeated rude remarks about a partner's appearance, false allegations of infidelity and threats of physical violence.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said electronic tagging would be used on repeat offenders.

The law makes every adult person in France a criminal. Who hasn't at some time shouted at or insulted a spouse during an argument?

It's possible that the law might catch out some of those men who do systematically bully their wives. But it does so in an incredibly intrusive way, by criminalising behaviours that occur in nearly all relationships, thereby making men in particular dependent on the good will of their wives (and of the magistrates who will judge the cases).

So in liberal France men do not end up getting left alone. There is a sword hanging over their heads in their relationships, courtesy of a state which thinks it best to manage relationships through crime laws.

The last surviving extreme?

The twentieth century was plagued by extreme political ideologies, most of which were finally seen off. But does one remain?

I'd like to argue here that one extreme and destructive ideology does remain, namely liberalism.

Not everyone will immediately accept this claim. After all, liberalism is the political ideology that dominates Western countries like Australia.

Suburban life in Australia mostly revolves around going to work, shopping, watching TV and so on. There's not a lot of political excitement in the daily routine.

Nor does the liberal political class in Australia rely on a secret police or the threat of being sent to a labour camp to maintain control. The political class is generally able to stay dominant through the influence of the media, the schools and the universities.

Nor are liberals in countries like Australia revolutionary in the sense of wanting violent change or demanding a complete and immediate implementation of a revolutionary programme. Instead, they tend to be reformist, using the state to advance their aims one step at a time.

Nonetheless, I think it's accurate to claim that liberalism is a surviving extremist ideology we need to see off. Liberals in power may not be revolutionary in seeking to violently impose a vision of utopia; even so, they do follow a "transformative" urge: they need to feel they have made a difference in making progress toward the liberal ideal.

So decade by decade we are pushed further along toward more extreme and more destructive outcomes. Examples? The following spring to mind:

• Andrew Neather admitted recently that the mass influx of immigrants into the UK was not an accidental oversight as the Blair Government claimed but was done deliberately to permanently transform the population of that country - and was therefore hidden as a policy from UK voters. One commentator had this to say about the admission:
  
  

  A speechwriter who worked for Tony Blair has said that the unprecedented mass immigration into the UK was done intentionally and purely for political reasons. This is utterly devastating news. Some people ... have said for a long time that certain government elites have been deliberately and actively trying replace the indigenous populations of their own countries without asking the people what they thought about the idea. It now turns out they were correct. This is the greatest betrayal in human history that I can think of.
  

  It isn't easy to think of a greater betrayal. How many governments, prior to modern liberalism, set out to secretly replace their own population with another one as a "transformative" project? There wouldn't be too many more extreme political projects than this one.
  
  What immediately springs to mind is Bertolt Brecht's famous response to the crushing of a workers' uprising in East Germany in 1953 by the communist regime:
  

  After the uprising of the 17th of June
  The Secretary of the Writers Union
  Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
  Stating that the people
  Had thrown away the confidence of the government
  And could win it back only
  By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
  In that case for the government
  To dissolve the people
  And elect another?
  

  It has been liberal and not communist governments which eventually have set out to "dissolve the people and elect another". It is a clear case of just how radical mainstream liberal politics can be.
  
• In 2004, 500 modern art experts were asked what they thought was the most influential work of modern art. The 500 experts voted for "The Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp. This was a public urinal exhibited as a statue. High art had been reduced, in a modern liberal society, to toiletry. This is especially significant as high art exists not just to entertain but to communicate the ideals of a particular society.
  
• Jens Orbeck, as a minister in the Swedish government, declared that it was official government policy that male and female had no real existence but were merely social constructs:
  

  The government considers female and male as social constructions, that means gender patterns are created by upbringing, culture, economic conditions, power structures and political ideology.
  

  Just in case people weren't listening Monica Silvell, representing the Swedish ministry of gender equality, again denied the distinction between male and female in 2004:
  

  The government must regard "male" and "female" as social constructions
  

  How can this not be considered extreme? What other ideologies have gone so far as to deny the distinction between male and female?
  
• Liberalism has given rise to the idea that an action is made moral simply because we ourselves have chosen it. Dr Mirko Bargaric, an Australian human rights lawyer, believes that:
  

  we are morally complete and virtuous individuals if we do as we wish so long as our actions do not harm others.
  

  Similarly Dr Leslie Cannold, an Australian ethicist, has put forward the idea that:
  

  defining your own good ... is at the heart of a moral life
  

  This is extreme in the sense that it denies the existence of an objective good existing outside our own individual will. In this sense it is nihilistic.
  

These are a few aspects of liberalism which should, at least, suggest the possibility that liberalism can be looked on as an extreme political ideology.

In my next post I'd like to take the argument further, by going beyond individual examples and identifying what is extreme within liberal philosophy itself.