Why does Andrew Bolt admire Lady Gaga?

I should begin by making clear that there are things I admire about Australian columnist Andrew Bolt. He doesn't follow along timidly with political class opinions, but is willing to go out on a limb on a range of issues. In doing so he has helped to shake up the left-liberal orthodoxy in this country.

But it has to be said that he is nonetheless a liberal in his politics. What matters for him is that we self-determine our own individual identity. Therefore, he believes that it's wrong for people to have predetermined national or ethnic identities.

I've given examples of Bolt arguing for this previously. For instance, Bolt once criticised a group of Aborigines who wanted an historic artefact returned to them on the basis that the Aborigines were forgetting:

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race.

Bolt has also related the story of how he once, as a Dutch migrant to Australia, attempted to identify with his Dutch heritage:

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

That is a radically liberal, rather than a conservative, position to take. He is only allowed to identify with himself rather than with a communal tradition. It is his own self-determined, individual identity that is allowed to matter, rather than a predetermined one that is treated negatively as "a mere accident of birth".

One of the problems with taking this liberal view, that what matters is that we are autonomously self-determined, is that a whole raft of other positions logically follow on.

Bolt himself this week provided a small example of this. He has expressed his admiration for Lady Gaga on this basis:

Lady Gaga’s music is irrelevant. Her real art is in reinventing her identity, and for that alone I like her.

As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.

Gaga has demonstrated this possibility to millions.

There’s her personal story – of going from a bullied loner at school to the brash superstar.

And there’s her professional guises – tramp to vamp to sophisticate, costumed from the barely there to the heavily lacquered.

With every change, let the critics complain, Lady Gaga would be who she pleased.

What matters to Bolt is not whether Lady Gaga is virtuous, but that she is adept at being a self-creating individual. Freedom, asserts Bolt, is an ongoing act of self-definition - and doing and being what you please.

Bolt is supposed to be the leader of conservative opinion in Australia. And yet what we've ended up with is the idea that we should admire those who do whatever they please in order to define their own individual self.

There's no sense here that people might be oriented in a stable way to an objective good, or that our deeper sense of identity is tied to things we don't invent but that are given to us (which then means that those who trangressively reinvent themselves over and over might be thought of as disconnected rather than as liberated).

One of Bolt's readers left this comment:

“As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.”

With all due respect, you’re not a true conservative, AB. I too moved from town to town as a child because of my father’s employment, but I always longed for the stability and rootedness that I saw others had, even more so now, 40 years later. Conservatism is rooted in the stability of place, family, community and religion, and it transcends the Right/Left paradigm, knowing that the modern Right can be as destructive of community as the Left can be. Read Russell Kirk or Wendell Berry. No, you’re not a conservative, you’re more a reactionary modernist. Anthony of Toowoomba

That's well-observed by Anthony of Toowoomba. And yet for all that Bolt still manages to be a voice in opposition to the main current of left-liberal thought in Australia.

Bolt ruling dangerous and inconsistent

Australian journalist Andrew Bolt was found guilty this week of racial hatred. What was his offence? He wrote a column in the Herald Sun in which he questioned why light-skinned Aboriginal activists would identify with the minor part of their biological descent.

I have to say that I disagree with Bolt's position. The worst of Bolt's right-liberalism comes out on these issues. Bolt believes we should all assimilate on the basis that we are individuals only with no ethnic, racial or national identities. That's why he wrote of one mixed race Aboriginal activist that:

She could call herself English, Afghan, Aboriginal, Australian or just a take-me-as-I-am human being called Tara June Winch. Race irrelevant.

He even once opposed a tribe of Aborigines wanting the return of an historic artefact on the basis that we were forgetting:

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race.

"Free to make our own identities" is just stock standard liberal autonomy theory: what Bolt thinks matters is that we are liberated from traditional identities in order to self-create our own.

In his own comment on the court case, Bolt has explained his right-liberal position in more detail. I find it very sad:

I am the son of Dutch parents who came to Australia the year before I was born.

For a long time, I have felt like an outsider here, not least because my family moved around so very often.

You know how it is when you feel you don't fit in. You look for other identities, other groups, to give you a sense of belonging, and perhaps some status.

So for a while I considered myself Dutch, and even took out a Dutch passport.

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

So that's the background to the calamity that hit me yesterday.

That's why I believe we can choose and even renounce our ethnic identity, because I have done that myself.

This is a very radical position. He wants us all to renounce race, ethnicity and nation in favour of a self-chosen individual identity (one that is not "an accident of birth"). Why does he want us to do this? Because he himself had trouble fitting in as the child of immigrants (something I find a bit strange, as most Dutch migrants fit in readily to the mainstream Australian identity, being relatively closely related to it ethnically).

There is something narcissistic in ditching the larger and meaningful traditions you belong to in order to assert your own personal identity in their place. Is the temporary identity "Andrew Bolt" really something that matches in significance the larger Western heritage? What is he really connecting to in identifying with himself alone?

Having said all that, the decision against Bolt shows how dangerous these racial hatred laws are. I can't help but think the decision is part of a political climate in which the left-liberal establishment is concerned with the influence of the more right-liberal Murdoch press. The Greens in particular are pressing for the media to be licensed and for there to be an inquiry into press ownership in Australia.

The way the racial hatred law is framed means that it is very easy to run afoul of it. Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act outlaws public acts that are likely ''to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate'' a person or group, if the acts are ''done because of the race, colour or ethnic origin'' of the person or group.

It's not that difficult to say something that might offend or insult someone. In fact, Anglo-Australians could make a good case that most of the school curricula in Australia contravenes Section 18C. To reinforce this point, consider this part of the official judgement against Andrew Bolt:

People should be free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying.

Can we really say that any white person is free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying? Modern liberal societies are set up to discourage white people from identifying positively with their own race and tradition. More accurately, they are set up to persuade white people to identify against their own race and tradition. So Section 18C if applied consistently would require a massive upheaval within liberal society.

Note too that the judge insists, as a matter of law, that people should be fully free to identify with their race. And yet if a white person were to talk about his race to a liberal he would get the scoffing reply that race doesn't exist. So we have a situation in which young liberals are brought up to believe that their own race doesn't even exist, whilst the law insists that people should be free to fully identify with their race. Go figure.

It's not enough to be right

Andrew Bolt is easily the most influential right wing journalist here in Victoria. It's very important to understand, though, that he is not a conservative.

This isn't very hard to prove. Take a column he wrote recently for the Herald Sun, titled "Racism kills our heritage" (4/8/04). The column concerns two Aboriginal bark etchings, which were collected by a white landowner in the 1850s and which were then acquired by British museums.

The British museums returned the etchings to Australia on loan, but an Aboriginal tribe has laid claim to them and has won a legal order preventing their return to Britain.

Personally, I think it's wrong to accept the items on loan and then seize them. So I don't disagree with Andrew Bolt's basic position, that the etchings should go back to Britain. It is more the particular reasoning employed by Andrew Bolt to support his position which reveals his very straightforward liberalism.

The Aborigines claimed that they wanted to keep the etchings because, "We believe strongly that (the artefacts) connect us to our country, our culture and ancestry".

Now, the Aborigines are merely expressing here a normal conservative sentiment. Most ethnic groups feel a special connection to certain artefacts. Certainly, Anglo-Australians dislike it when prized artefacts are sold overseas. In fact, just recently there was even a huge outcry over the possible sale of a Don Bradman cricket cap to overseas buyers!

Imagine how important the bark etchings must be to the Bendigo Aborigines. These etchings must be amongst the precious few items connecting these Aborigines to their own history and ancestry. No wonder they would prefer to keep these etchings closer to home than Great Britain.

But Andrew Bolt doesn't see this. Instead, he claims that the Aborigines should have been "laughed to scorn" for trying to keep the etchings and he condemns them for being "racist".

Significantly, Bolt considers the Aborigines guilty of a "New Racism" which "insists that we are always members of a tribe". Now, this is pretty harsh: Bolt is telling a tribe of Aborigines that they are racist for considering themselves to be a tribe of Aborigines!

And here we come to the really telling point. Bolt goes on to state that the mistake made by the Aborigines is to forget,

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race. In this New Racism, we're driven back into tribes.

This is as intense, condensed and pure a statement of liberalism as you're ever likely to come across.

Remember, the liberal first principle is the idea that to be fully human we must create who we are out of our own reason and will. The point of liberal politics is therefore to remove any impediments to an individual freedom to create ourselves in any direction.

One such impediment to a self-created identity is our ethnicity. We don't get to choose our ethnic identity as it's something we're simply born into. This makes it illegitimate under the logic of liberalism.

Andrew Bolt has simply applied the basic liberal principle in a consistent way. He has declared an ethnic identity to be "racist" and therefore illegitimate, because for him as a liberal our equal humanity depends on our freedom to "make our own identities".

True conservatism is actually a resistance to such ideas. It is a defence of important forms of human identity and connectedness which are placed under assault by liberal first principles.

A true conservative, therefore, would admire the stubborn connection felt by the Bendigo Aborigines to their own distinctive traditions. He would not condemn these Aborigines for failing to discard an inherited group identity in favour of individual, self-created ones.

Andrew Bolt is therefore clearly on the liberal side of politics, rather than the conservative one. This doesn't mean that he isn't right wing, but that he is a right-wing liberal rather than a right-wing conservative.

The dominance of liberal principles, even on the right-wing of politics, explains why liberalism has been able to march forward, largely unchallenged, in Western societies. There was hardly anyone in the political class who stood outside of liberal first principles, and who could therefore take a principled stance against liberal policies.

That's why it's so important that the younger generation of conservatives is able to distinguish between right-wing forms of liberalism and a genuine conservatism. It's no use rejecting left liberalism by joining the camp of right-liberalism: both camps are dominated by principles which make traditional national, ethnic, family and moral identities and beliefs illegitimate.

To make real progress the first step is to free ourselves from the dominance of liberal first principles.

(First published at Conservative Central, 07/08/2004)