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For the Wall Street Journal, which is pop­ularly referred to as the ‘Bible of cap­it­al­ism’, the events of the past 1 – 2 years have been dif­fi­cult. The elec­tion of left-leaning gov­ern­ments around the world, par­tic­u­larly in the United States, and the shift back towards more Keyne­sian policy leaves WSJ Pro­meth­eus Tri­umphant: A Fugue in the Key of Flesh release

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down­load An Incon­veni­ent Truth edit­ors and colum­nists gap­ing (and pos­sibly fum­ing) chiefly because it does not fit within their nar­row view of the world. To them it is quite lit­er­ally incomprehensible.

And, like any animal that per­ceives it is under siege, the WSJ is hit­ting back the only way it knows how — tak­ing up arms as an ideo­lo­gical war­rior. What else would explain this screed against Kevin Rudd

Pop­corn

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The Tal­en­ted Mr. Ripley rip , whose gov­ern­ment is enact­ing an eco­nomic stim­u­lus pack­age in line with most other developed countries.

Out­side the con­fines of Can­berra and Wash­ing­ton polit­ics, the social mood is dis­tinctly post-ideological, with an emphasis on policy that works rather than that which adheres to uto­pian doc­trine. Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama both under­stand this; Obama expli­citly cam­paigned on it. Yet within the echo cham­ber of the national cap­it­als, ideo­logy still runs rampant in the oppos­i­tion parties — the Repub­lic­ans in the US, who recor­ded exactly 0 votes for Obama’s eco­nomic bill in the House of Rep­res­ent­at­ives, and the Lib­eral party in Aus­tralia, who implac­ably opposed the Aus­tralian stim­u­lus pack­age. This is not because they are offer­ing some kind of coher­ent altern­at­ive to the cur­rent eco­nomic crisis, but because they are fight­ing an internal battle of relevance.

For the past dec­ade, at least, the con­ser­vat­ive side of polit­ics has raised phony issues with which to take stances on to cre­ate reas­ons for their exist­ence — in Aus­tralia, it was indus­trial rela­tions, in the US gay mar­riage and ‘small gov­ern­ment’. This hid the fact that mod­ern national gov­ern­ments engage in little more than ser­vice deliv­ery in the domestic sphere. The phoni­ness was read­ily appar­ent. Aus­tralian Work­place Agree­ments (AWA; indi­vidual employee con­tracts) were intro­duced in 1996. WorkChoices, designed to beef them up, and presen­ted as ‘essen­tial’ indus­trial rela­tions reform was intro­duced a full dec­ade later. Yet, in 2006, the total num­ber of work­ers on AWAs was a mere 3%. In the US, George W. Bush presided over large expan­sions in gov­ern­ment size, power and scope. The War on Ter­ror gave fleet­ing legit­im­acy to the lat­ter. Yet as an ideo­lo­gical totem, it was fra­gile, and any politi­cian rais­ing it as jus­ti­fic­a­tion for action today is a laugh­ing stock.

What peeves the WSJ

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so is Kevin Rudd’s polit­ical skill. He is deliv­er­ing one mes­sage — of com­pet­ence, and yes, hope — to the post-ideological masses, and splin­ter­ing the Lib­eral oppos­i­tion with an ideo­lo­gical mes­sage designed to break apart Mal­colm Turnbull’s tenu­ous hold over his own party. It does not mat­ter that Rudd’s 7700 word essay in The Monthly con­tained some minor errors, or straw­men cari­ca­tures of Hayek and his fol­low­ers. No-one who votes cares about that. The only ones who do are in the polit­ical class. They work them­selves up into a tizzy and end up kick­ing own goals. The right con­tin­ues to describe the Rudd government’s plan as ‘Whit­lameqsue’. Yet, who under 50 even under­stands this ref­er­ence, or per­ceives it as an insult? The right con­tin­ues to struggle by speak­ing only to its base, and this is clearly reflec­ted in the opin­ion polls. How they will recover is a mys­tery, but they must do so soon. It is not healthy to have polit­ics so one-sided.