2023 As A Turning Point

I hope you had a nice Christmas and so far 2024 has been good to you.

On Monday The Australian Financial Review published a piece from by Joshua Chaffin, the New York correspondent for the Financial Times. It was headed – ‘Was 2023 the year of peak woke?’  It provides a neat starting point for thinking about last year and what lies ahead.  And the story overnight from America – that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University had resigned after weeks of controversy bolsters Chaffin’s argument.  If only the march through the institutions could be reversed as easily as a college president quitting.

Here in Australia the defeat of the Voice was momentous – but whether it’s a turning point remains to be seen.  Because it all happened so recently, less than three months ago, we probably don’t yet appreciate how significant was the vote for the equality of all citizens that was cast by 60% of Australians.  Without doubt the Voice is surely one of the half dozen most significant ballots in Australian history.  In importance it ranks with the plebiscites against conscription in 1916 and 1917 and the 1967 referendum, and ahead of the election of the Menzies government in 1949, the referendum that rejected the ban on the Communist Party, and the 1975 federal election.

14 October was an overwhelming rejection by a democratic vote of the cultural and social trajectory that had been attempted to be imposed by the country’s elites.  Which is why those same elites want us to forget the referendum ever happened.  In an interview before Christmas, Albanese basically dismissed the result as unimportant and claimed, incredibly, it was ‘not a loss for him’.

Meanwhile the challenge for Peter Dutton and the Liberals is to decide whether to understand the referendum as an opportunity for the Liberals to speak for mainstream Australians or whether it’s back to ‘business as normal’. Since 14 October the Liberals have largely been quiet about the referendum and its consequences.  Some Liberal MPs even talk about the need to ‘win back the Teals’ – which is the exact opposition conclusion to draw from the referendum.  The parallels are not exact – but there’s more than a few similarities between Brexit and the Voice.  The Tories won the Brexit vote – but lost the post-vote battle.  They had no heart for the fight that came after the battle – unlike their opponents who fought tooth and nail against Brexit, and who continue that fight to this day – more than seven years after the British people were led to believe that their vote had decided the issue.

Chaffin’s piece in the Financial Times is revealing. As you read it you can practically see the scales falling from his eyes.  In the way of a true disciple of woke he begins by apologising for his identity.  ‘As a middle-aged, white-ish man, I may not be best placed to pronounce the decline of woke.  Still, I can see its problems mounting.’  He continues:

Last month, Barbara Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty to criminal charges that she embezzled $US4 million from Facebook while serving as a top diversity executive at the tech company.  That tawdry episode seemed a fitting end to the year the woke wave crested.  In 2024, it is likely to recede.

Here in Australia we had our own such tawdry episode just before Christmas.

Few big businesses in this country champion left-wing progressive causes as enthusiastically as the ANZ Bank.  In 2020 the bank, ahead of any government to do so, announced it wouldn’t provide services to any new customers who didn’t have a ‘transition to net zero’ plan..  Michael McCormack then the deputy prime minister wasn’t wrong when he said the bank was ‘virtue signalling’.  Then there’s the ANZ and the Voice.  In September ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott confirmed the bank had donated ‘in the range of $2 million’ to the ‘Yes’ campaign.  ANZ employees used the bank’s website to campaign for ‘Yes’ and urged members of the public to write to their local MP to support the Voice.

ANZ proved it’s one thing to be woke.  It’s another entirely to open a branch after hours to help a customer whose house had just burnt down.  This is from the news of 24 December.

ANZ has apologised to a victim of this week’s Parkerville bushfire in Western Australia after he was turned way by staff at his bank 24 hours after fire destroyed his home and all his possessions, including his debit card.

Mark Norton, 65, is now living in his caravan.  He attended the Midland ANZ branch at 1.40pm on Friday to withdraw cash from his account, only to be told by staff that they had closed at 1.30pm and would not re-open until Wednesday.

‘They said, ‘we’ve balanced the till, we can’t help you’.  And I said ‘really, this is not normal circumstances, my house has burnt down, I have nothing’.  ‘The workers replied: ‘sorry we can’t help ya’.’  Norton said he explained three times his home was gone and he couldn’t use the ATM because his debit card was destroyed.  ‘Three ladies sat behind the counter, they just looked up and looked down again,’ he said.

I’m not sure whether what happened at Facebook or ANZ  proved we’ve passed ‘peak woke’.  They do demonstrate that those who preach woke are no more virtuous than anyone else.

It was the reaction to 7 October that woke up Chaffin to woke.

For me, what truly shattered the woke movement was Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel – and the astonishing images of students and activists either justifying the slaughter of innocents or finding ways to condemn Israel before it had yet dropped a bomb…

In my ultra-progressive suburb, where people plants signs on their front lawns advertising the many hatreds they oppose, fellow Jews have been startled by the lack of solidarity from groups they have supported in the past.  To them, and now me, the woke banner we marched under a few years ago feels hollow, even hypocritical.

Then came the now infamous congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT earlier this month, in which they struggled to answer whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct.  Their hedging was a revelatory moment for an idea undone by its adherents’ excesses and clumsy application.

Sometimes eras collapse in one horrific gasp.  A friend reminded me of this passage from Joan Didion’s essay ‘The White Album’, in reference to the Manson murders: ‘Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969 – ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true.  The tension broke that day.  The paranoia was fulfilled.’

I’m surprised Chaffin is surprised.  His reaction reveals the size of the bubble the New York correspondent of the Financial Times inhabits.  If he’s ‘astonished’ by the hatred of Israel from students he obviously hasn’t visited a university campus any time in the last decade.  And he and his fellow Jews should not at all be ‘startled by ‘the lack of solidarity’ from the progressive groups they’ve supported in the past.  A core concept of the progressive/woke ideology is that there can’t be solidarity across identity groups – there’s only ‘oppressors’ and the ‘oppressed’.  Jews to the people who ‘plant signs on their front lawns advertising the many hatreds they oppose’ are oppressors.

‘To them, and now me, the woke banner we marched under a few years ago feels hollow, even hypocritical’ is particularly sad. Chaffin knows he’s been tricked – but he’s reluctant to confront the truth.  When he writes that the ‘hedging’ of the three university presidents (two of whom have since resigned) ‘was a revelatory moment for an idea undone by its adherents’ excesses and clumsy application’ he can’t see what’s staring him in the face.  What’s ‘undone’ woke wasn’t ‘its adherents’ excesses and clumsy application’ – it is the idea of woke itself that is fatally flawed.  The same thing Chaffin says about woke was once said about communism – ‘it’s fine in theory, it’s just been applied incorrectly’.

The reason none of the three university presidents did not unequivocally condemn the anti-Semitism is because, in the language of the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the chant of for example, ‘globalise the intifada’ is the ‘protected speech’ of the ‘oppressed’.  James Lindsay’s summary of Marcuse’s thesis is spot on: :

‘movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence’ – this asymmetric ethic has been the heart and soul of left politics in the West since the 1960s, and we’re living in the fruit of that catastrophe now.

If members of the elite, like the New York correspondent for the Financial Times, are beginning to realise the reality of ‘woke’ then maybe 2023 is indeed a turning point.  But there’s a gloss to add to Chaffin’s argument.  The roots of anti-Semitism, the blind eye to barbarism, and the hatred and sheer viciousness at the so-called ‘peace’ marches around the globe after 7 October lie deeper than in merely the world of ‘woke’.  The ‘woke’ approach of the authorities (from university presidents, the police, even from the ASIO Director-General who claimed the ‘peace’ rallies were a ‘pressure release’ against the threat of terrorism) effectively sanction the expression of hatred – but something much larger is at play.  The response to 7 October gives us a glimpse into what sections of the modern-day left have become.  Robert Gregory from the Australian Jewish Association is right.  In response to state governments banning Nazi symbols, he said a few weeks ago:

Jews are like the canaries in the coal mine.  It’s not a good sign when a society is not treating Jews very well.  It does not bode well for the future.

Quite frankly, there are not a lot of Nazis marching around Australia.  I think governments should redirect their efforts to confront a problem that is perhaps more unpleasant to talk about, which is anti-Semitism from progressive, university-educated, inner-city people.

The anti-Semitism of the Greens is something the media and the political class find unpleasant to talk about.  Julian Leeser was wrong on the Voice, but he was right when a few months ago he called for both the Liberal and Labor parties to preference the Greens last. He put it like this:

It doesn’t appear to be an accident that the epicentres of anti-Semitic rhetoric and action appears to be in areas where there is political jostling between Labor and the Greens.  The inner suburbs of our major cities.  We have seen from 7 October that the Greens are treating the horrors of the war on Israel as an opportunity to whip up anti-Semitic hate.

[A]nti-Semitism is now a full-blown feature of the extremists-Greens political ideology.  It represents a danger to Jewish Australians and all Australians who value freedom.

You can tell how unpleasant it is for people to discuss the anti-Semitism of the Greens because Leeser’s call has been studiously ignored.  During the referendum campaign when he was attacking the Liberals Leeser was the darling of the left – but his comments about the Greens haven’t rated a single mention on the ABC.  His remarks should have received a lot more publicity than they did whic, is why I wrote about them in my AFR column last month.

For a myriad of reasons it would be impossible for the ALP to ever preference the Coalition ahead of the Greens.  But that shouldn’t stop thoughtful Australians asking thoughtful Labor MPs why a Greens MP in parliament is preferable to a Liberal being elected.

The leaders of the country’s Jewish community should also ponder the consequences of Labor’s support for the Greens.  The Australian Jewish community has traditionally leaned left, and it must ask itself to what extent its support for the ALP has indirectly encouraged and enabled the Greens.  Jews across the world are now seeing what side the left is taking at this ‘civilisational moment’.

Just as the Liberal and Labor parties have done, Australia’s elites in big business, the media, universities, and our cultural institutions have for too long humoured the Greens.

Thank you for your support – John.

Recommended Reading

• With the resignation of Harvard’s Claudine Gay this piece by John Cochrane at the Hoover Institution a few days ago makes fascinating retrospective reading.  He says Gay should have been fired – not because she’s a plagiarist but because she’s a hypocrite.
• First it’s columnists at the Financial Times admitting they might have got woke wrong.  Now there’s the British environmental activist, Hannah Ritchie confessing in this extract of her new book that maybe things are not as bad as we’ve been led to believe.  And she laments she ‘had been duped by an education system that was supposed to teach me about the world.’  Ritchie’s not giving up on her climate change catastrophism just yet…but as you’ll see she’s starting to change her mind on a few things.