Class warfare

Australian liberalism is under threat from culture warriors who view all human interaction as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. By Nick Cater.

The principal of a Victorian school now concedes it was “inappropriate” to shame her male pupils into standing before the women and girls to atone for the sins of their gender.

One might have wished for a little more contrition from the head of Warrnambool’s Brauer College but, since responsibility is collective rather than personal these days, inappropriate is probably the best we can expect. As Thomas Sowell writes: “We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.” The delusion that the culture war is being fought in a far-off land is shattered by events at Brauer College and countless other incursions into our everyday lives.

Political correctness has hardened into a ground war headed by an activist vanguard enjoined by teachers, journalists, bureaucrats and other professionals who lack the courage to resist. Their crusade is informed by critical theory, a virus that escaped from the lab of French philosophy, germinated in universities and running rampant though our society.

Those in public life ignore it at their peril. Its fundamental assumption, that society is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and that all human interaction is a struggle between these two groups, is disrupting civic life, undermining liberal democracy, and dividing the nation into tribes.

The casual abandonment of the presumption of innocence by the ABC’s Four Corners in its unsupported allegations against a senior cabinet minister is more than a dereliction of professional duty. In critical theory, guilt is determined not by wrongdoing but by membership of the wrong class. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained this system of justice in The Gulag Archipelago, quoting from the Russian revolutionary newspaper, Red Terror.

“The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused.”

The new radical feminism in which leading politicians are now entangled is very different from the liberal feminism that greatly advanced the position of women in the 20th century. Liberal feminism’s champions included men as well as women, driven by the egalitarian principle that every citizen, regardless of biology, should enjoy the blessings of liberal democracy, starting with access to education and employment. Their reforms have ensured that differences in outcomes, in most walks of life, are not the result of discrimination but the exercise of free choice.

In the past decade, however, feminism has taken a harder form, turning men and women into class enemies. Women, along with gays, are the victims of “toxic masculinity”, a term coined by psychiatrist Terry Kupers in 2005 to describe “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia and wanton violence”.

Toxic, or hegemonic, masculinity has become the dominant frame of reference in Australian popular feminism. Male violence — physical, sexual and verbal — is no longer merely socially unacceptable or criminal behaviour for which individuals are responsible. It is a trait common to all men that serves to reinforce the patriarchy, denying women their just position in society.

This poisonous opinion is no longer confined to the radical corners of the academy. It is the unchallengeable assumption of most graduates entering the workplace, reinforced by HR departments and government bureaucracies that take the theory as read. Fair-minded Australians are entitled to feel dismayed. Aggressive behaviour towards women by men has never been acceptable or even excusable in our liberal democracy. Until recently, swearing in the presence of women was considered an offence in middle-class Australia. The most obvious determinants of physical violence in crime statistics are not gender, but employment status and socio-economic disadvantage.

Hard evidence, however, is not enough to overturn postmodern theory. Gender studies, like post-colonial theory, queer theory, disability and fat studies, has become hostage to standpoint theory, the argument that only those who are members of an oppressed group possess the insight that allows them to contribute to the debate. The Prime Minister could give a thousand press conferences, all word-perfect, and still not assuage his critics, simply because he is male. This divisive narrative has infused almost all media commentary, right down to the questioning of the PM by Tracy Grimshaw on A Current Affair.

The allegation of rape by a parliamentary staffer that the PM correctly described as a catalyst for debate on the treatment of women “hasn’t been a wakeup call to 52 per cent of Australians”, declared Grimshaw. “It was critical and a lightning rod for me when 10s of thousands of women took to the streets around Australia, including here, to protest, to say, ‘enough is enough’, to protest against rape and sexual assault and discrimination and marginalisation and the patriarchy and underpayment and all of those things … perhaps you’d be better off starting to actively discriminate against Neanderthal men like the so-called Big Swinging Dicks Club”.

When standpoint theory has taken hold on prime-time commercial television, obliging the holder of the highest elected office in the land to sit back and take it like a man as Grimshaw says her piece, egalitarianism has been overturned. Grimshaw is to be accorded respect as a woman, the Prime Minister deserves none.

We are touching only the edge of the intersectional web woven by critical theory that radicalises marginalised groups and sets one against the other. Biological and transgender women find themselves at odds over the right to compete in women’s sport. White men and women alike are guilty of bearing invisible knapsacks of white privilege. Boys as young as 12 must stand in shame at Brauer College for complicity in misogyny, domination, and violence.

Woke, in other words, is no joke. It represents the biggest threat to liberalism, Australia’s riding philosophy since European settlement, since the rise of totalitarian ideology a century ago. For liberals, there can be no leave passes from the culture war until this alien ideology is defeated.