There’s a strange phenomenon amongst
Australia’s left-leaning chattering classes and that is to profess an emotion for
a right-wing politician Malcolm Turnbull that brings to mind fan worship and
puppy love. They talk admiringly about his leather jackets and love of
contemporary art, his handsome visage and cool demeanor and his enviable
relationship with his wife. Why isn’t he one of us – he is one of us! They wail
and bemoan, we fancy him, we want him, like teenage girls at a Justin Bieber
concert. He likes contemporary art!!
Admittedly it is highly unusual for Australia’s politicians to show interest in
art, but politics and art are not the same thing. A leather jacket on Q&A is not a policy
decision. And we can safely assume that the man in question has made his
political allegiance, not accidentally, or for aesthetic reasons, but for the
political rationale that he holds rightwing liberal, that is, conservative*
convictions.
Turnbull-love would seem to be an odd form
of displacement. Maybe it’s easier in
this time of compromised left wing ideologies and action, for those who still
like to see themselves as left to
project their own sense of responsibility for (not) taking action, onto a bizarre
desire that a right wing politician should
move to the left!
Maybe those supposed left
(non-conservative) voters who have turned Turnbull-love into a fetish, should
take their own advice and themselves move to the left.
*Could
this be a symptom of a new projection of the confusion of the traditional
idiosyncratic use in Australian politics of ‘liberal’ for a
set of beliefs that in other western democracies is termed ‘conservative’? Or maybe it also bespeaks the failure and collapse of distinctions between left and right in consumer capitalism?
Ruth
Skilbeck 2012.
1 comment:
The left like Turnbull because he believes in Global Warming.
As a 'believer' he obviously supports the Carbon Tax which will catapult Green Labor into the political wilderness for the next 12 years...the right detest him for the same reason, he is therefore caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
Which is where he belongs!
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