Somebody who used to work for Paul Keating, it might have been Don Watson* but I wouldn't want to verbal him, used to say that the real challenge of economic reform was what to do with dumb white males.
It was kinda harsh, but true. You take away all the protections and subsidies propping up an old industrial economy, and the first ones to get it in the neck are the low-skilled proles.
In postwar Australia that mostly meant working-class white men. Both Paul Keating and John Howard spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure those guys didn't get left behind.
I know, I know, it's heresy to lump them together like that, but when you move beyond the mythology and theatre of day-to-day politics and look at the distribution and redistribution of wealth, especially via welfare payments and family support measures, you'll see there was a lot of unspoken consensus on both sides of politics about the need to defray the harshest costs of economic reform.
I suppose the reason they didn't talk about it much was that they both tried to pretend there were no costs. It was all just hookers and blow for everyone.
I got to thinking on this at the weekend after talking to American journalist and author Joe Bageant at the Brisbane Writers Festival. This other JB published an amazing book a couple of years ago, which probably shouldn't have been that amazing as it was simply laying out some basic truths.
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War tried to explain redneck America to urban, liberal America. Anyone with a passing acquaintance of the US, or at least a cable subscription with Fox News thrown in, will know that those two cultures – for they are separate and all but irreconcilable cultures – seem locked in permanent and bloody contention.
Bageant was one of those curious Americans you come across occasionally, a true exile, in love with his country, or at least the idea, the potential of his country, but horrified by much of the reality. The peculiar and beguiling twist on his horror is that he identifies himself as a proud redneck, at the same time as he despairs of the toxic, self-defeating nature of much of modern redneck culture and, even more so, of the malignant, calculating corporate succubus that feeds on it and exploits it for cheap labour and ready canon fodder.
Class, it all came down to class, according to Bageant. The white underclass in America is now 65 million strong, and it is not just based in the south. It is everywhere. North and west and midwest, urban and rural.
It is often what foreigners think of when they imagine an Ugly America, which is odd and sort of unfair because elements of that culture exist throughout the English-speaking world and, I imagine, most of the entire developed world. But looking at the Australian underclass, and their British cousins, the two cohorts that are most familiar to us, you can see so much that is reproduced within the US underclass.
The difference is, when we think about these things we still think in terms of class. In the US, on the other hand, according to Bageant, class is rarely discussed in politics. To even raise the topic is to be branded a socialist – a term of vilification loaded with much greater rhetorical violence over there than it is here.
By defining class out of political discourse, by replacing it with a fraught, almost impossible series of exchanges about race or religion, the real brute business of politics, the distribution of power and wealth, is obscured.
Considered in these terms, it throws into stark relief some of the rhetoric that has attached itself to our own politics. We talk about battlers, specifically Howard's battlers and, God help us, Abbott's battlers now, rather than the working class.
Even Rudd, when he was opposition leader and later as PM, didn't talk about workers or the working class, he routinely invoked working families. This is explicable partly because of changes in the structure of our economy and our polity, which has seen old fault lines shift and blur.
The confusion that has arisen in place of those old certainties has also allowed some players, mostly on the right, to fashion a new rhetoric of power, with new invocations of who are your friends and who are your enemies. The rise of the word ''elite'' as a form of abuse is one of the more interesting examples of this. Why? Because it's almost always deployed as a rhetorical device by the pimps and apologists of the true power elites.
I'm not saying any of this to lay claim to working-class credit for myself. I'm a white, tertiary educated, well-paid middle-class male. Unless by some accident of birth I'd fallen arse backwards into a pile of inherited wealth, I couldn't be any luckier.
But I am constantly amazed at how the political classes are able to obscure the core issue of class in the distribution of wealth and power to suit their own ends.
Or am I wrong? Are we all just middle-class now?
Like America?
____
* Just had a note on Twitter that the ''dumb white males'' quote belongs to Bob Ellis.
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