The Defeat Of Politicians, Academics, And Commentators

To Australians, this sounds familiar:

The Irish people have just delivered a stunning rebuke to the political establishment.

[V]oters have not simply rejected the Irish government here – they have also rejected the entire political establishment. [The] proposals were supported by all of [the] major political parties, as well as by most NGOs, academics and cultural elites. The overwhelming defeat of these proposals shows how out of touch the political establishment is. So many politicians, academics and pundits have no real idea how ordinary people feel…

That’s Frank Furedi in Spiked Online yesterday, writing about the defeat on the weekend of three referendum proposals to change the Irish constitution. It’s funny what happens when you let people vote.

There are other parallels between what’s just happened in Ireland and the Voice referendum. Opinion polls in Ireland consistently showed the proposals would pass, just as here in Australia, the polls indicated that up until the last few months, the Voice would succeed. One difference is that while in Ireland, all the major political parties supported amending the constitution, the Coalition opposed the Voice. (Whether the Voice would have won had it received bipartisan support is an open question. Most likely, it would have still lost. It was the personal leadership of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine arguing for the equality of all Australians that carried the No case.)

What happened in Ireland is interesting.

The Irish constitution is quite different from Australia’s. Enacted in 1937, it’s more than 200 pages long, and is a combination of a legal rulebook setting out the functions of the legislature, executive, and judiciary, a bill of rights, and a description of a semi-socialist Utopia as imagined in the 1930s.

For example, Article 45 says, ‘the ownership and control of the material resources of the community may be so distributed amongst private individuals and the various classes as best to subserve the common good’ and ‘The State shall endeavour to secure that private enterprise shall be so conducted as to ensure reasonable efficiency in the production and distribution of goods and as to protect the public against unjust exploitation.’

The Irish were voting on three changes to their constitution. The first two would have changed the definition of ‘family’ and the third the description of the role of women.

Article 41 of the Irish constitution says, ‘The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.’ The first proposal was to add after the words ‘the Family’, ‘whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships’. The second proposal was to delete a reference to marriage as the foundation of the family. The third proposal was to remove a section that said ‘…the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties at home’ and replace it with a general statement about the importance of family members providing care to each other.

They’re not entirely unreasonable amendments. Yet they were comprehensively defeated. On a turnout of 44% of eligible voters (a statistic revealing the real priorities of most of the Irish population), 67% of voters rejected changing the definition of family, and 74% rejected changing the description of the role of women.

Furedi explains what happened:

Irish taoiseach [prime minister] Leo Varadkar said the government simply wanted to change the ‘very old-fashioned, very sexist language about women’ in the constitution. For the likes of Varadker, the term ‘old-fashioned’ serves as a pejorative way of saying ‘traditional’. As far as these woke technocrats are concerned, anything that smacks of tradition is bad.

The Yes campaigners claimed that the traditional idea of the family no longer reflects the contemporary reality of Ireland where, according to Politico, ‘two-fifths of children are born out of wedlock, and most women work outside the home’.

Yet it seems that the majority of Irish people prefer ‘old-fashioned’ ideals to those promoted by their cultural and political elites.

In Australia, the defeat of the Voice referendum was blamed on ‘misinformation’. In Ireland, the referendum’s defeat is being blamed on ‘confusion’.

Furedi is right:

Laura Cahillane, an associate professor at the University of Limerick School of Law, claimed that ‘when people are confused, they are more likely to reject change.’

Would the result of the referendums have been fundamentally different if the amendments had been crafted by a gifted wordsmith? That seems unlikely. The majority of the Irish people understood that marriage, an institution central to their way of life, was under attack. And so, fed up with the political elite’s relentless promotion of woke values, Irish voters used the dual referendum to say enough is enough.

Moreover, the attempt to put this ballot-box defeat down to people’s ‘confusion’ is an implicit attack on democracy. The elites are effectively saying that voters didn’t understand what they were doing. That they’re just not as smart as politicians, academics, and commentators.

The suggestion that the Irish voted No because they were ‘confused’ by the wording of the proposal is a more charitable interpretation than that provided by Ray Martin as to why Australians would vote No at the Voice referendum. As Martin famously said, ‘If you’re a dinosaur or a d–khead who can’t be bothered reading, then vote No.’ His implication being that any Australian who read the opinions of politicians, academics, and commentators would then inevitably vote Yes. That Australians could understand exactly what the Voice was and yet still reject it was beyond the understanding of those like Martin.

The idea that only politicians, academics, and commentators can discern ‘reality’ while the rest of the population lives in a state of confusion is as old as Plato’s allegory of the cave. There’s a long tradition of elites telling the common people, ‘You’re not really seeing what you think you’re seeing—you’re confused.’ These days, it’s called ‘gaslighting’. The Pop Culture Dictionary helpfully defines the term as ‘the act of distorting the truth in a way intended to make another person accept the deception due to doubting their own memory, reality, or sanity. It’s considered a form of psychological manipulation or emotional abuse.’

A story that dominated the news last week in Australia is a good example of how reality is distorted and twisted by academics and commentators to conform to the narrative of the elites. What the elites say happened is completely different from what most Australians would say occurred. The story was about a favourite topic of politicians, academics, and commentators—racism.

A year ago in London, the captain of the Australian women’s soccer team, Sam Kerr, is alleged to have called a UK police officer a ‘stupid white bastard’ in a dispute over a taxi fare. She’s been charged with the crime of racially aggravated harassment, and a four-day trial is scheduled for next year. If convicted, Kerr faces up to two years in jail. She denies the claim, but reportedly not that she used the words’ stupid’ or ‘white’.

There’s so much to this it’s difficult to know where to begin. While London’s streets are engulfed by violent mobs spewing anti-Semitism, the authorities are devoting their attention to something that just a few years ago would have been shrugged off as crass name-calling.

Those two developments are connected. As police lose control of the UK’s cities and are intimidated into being mere bystanders amid scenes of hatred not seen since the 1930s, they decide to act on an incident, which in the scheme of what’s happening throughout Britain is trivial. The police are pretending to take racism seriously. If Kerr had said what was alleged once upon a time, a sincere apology would have ended the matter. But in the UK, in 2024, the matter is settled with a four-day criminal trial. As I wrote last year after visiting London for Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, Britain is broken.

I want to concentrate on one particular aspect of the incident: the interpretation of ‘experts’ as to what happened. To most people, denigrating someone because of the colour of their skin is either racism or at least a form of racism. It doesn’t matter whether that person’s skin colour is black, white, or anything in between. This was the initial reaction of Craig Foster, former international soccer player for Australia and champion of left-wing causes. He said Kerr, if what’s alleged is true, should lose the captaincy of the national soccer team ‘to show how seriously the sport takes racism.’ He said, ‘Interpersonal racism against a white person…is still racism.’ Most people would agree.

Within days, Foster changed his mind.

Like many, I mistakenly thought that comments that referenced any colour and were discriminatory, demeaning or hostile were a form of racism. I apologise to Sam for that mistake.

Judging from the coverage, comments and conversations we’re all having every day, there were major gaps in knowledge about how to deal with situations where the descriptor’ white’ is used in a derogatory way.

As many experts and leading anti-racism groups have pointed out, interpersonal comments can be offensive, abusive or inappropriate, however, racism can only be perpetrated against a maginalised person or group, which anti-racism frameworks are specifically designed to protect.

[Definitions of racism] were not designed to protect me as a white, Anglo, Australian male nor a white police officer who has even greater legal and racial power.

[I am] not at all surprised at having made a mistake and am very pleased to be able to learn.

This statement from Foster is ridiculous. And it reveals how dangerous identity politics is.

The clue to what’s happening is in the first two words. Foster acknowledges that ‘like many’, he believed that abusing someone because of their skin colour was a form of racism. He then explains that what a normal person thinks is racism is not, in fact, racism at all. According to Foster, we know this because ‘experts and leading anti-racism groups’ tell us ‘racism can only be perpetrated against a marginalised person or group”. In that sentence is where identity politics meets Marxism. According to Foster, ‘experts and leading anti-racism groups’, and Marxists, the world is divided into the marginalised and the powerful, the oppressed and oppressors. Once, it was believed racism would be overcome when all people were treated equally regardless of their skin colour. No longer.

Apparently, it is now OK to oppress the oppressors. That is not a recipe of social harmony in a multicultural society.

According to a story in The Sydney Morning Herald about all of this, ‘some experts argue that labelling the alleged remark as racist simplifies and trivialises the true definition of racism.’ Note the reference to ‘the true definition of racism’ – a truth presumably accessible only to ‘experts’.

Victoria University professor Mario Peucker, an expert in multiculturalism and far-right extremism, said that while there is no doubt that Kerr’s alleged remark contained a racial element, it could not be classified as racist. ‘Racism, in its briefest form, is prejudice plus institutional power,’ Peucker said. ‘It’s very hard to communicate the complexity of systemic racism.’

Gemma Tognini wrote about this in The Australian last week.

They’re trying to say (wait for it) racism is now contextual. That using a person’s skin colour in an offensive context as has been alleged, can’t possibly be racist if the person on the receiving end is white. I don’t know where they come up with this stuff but it’s 10 out of 10 for creativity.

I’d like to point out firstly, how silly the whole thing is but concurrently, how there is a clear double stand when it comes to identity politics. You set standards and rules around identity, around race, and the minute they apply to the ‘wrong’ side there all go, contorting like members of Cirque du Soleil in a bid to explain why it’s not really a thing if you’re white. Or straight. Or Christian. Or Jewish. Or not on the far political Left.

It’s a fair question to ask – if a white player was alleged to have said the same thing to a police officer who was a person of colour, would the reaction be the same? Of course, it wouldn’t have. We all know that. And before you start talking about a power imbalance, I think a global football megastar on millions of pounds a year has considerably more social and legal capital than your average London copper. If that’s marginalisation, marginalise me ASAP please.

…the political left can’t write the rules on identity politics, force them upon us all, then conveniently say they don’t apply when the double standards are revealed in all their ugliness. We’re not stupid; we won’t stand for it.

Well said.

kind regards John