Australian Whine

Or, How Not to React if Your Candidate Loses in November.

The shocked and betrayed keening coming out of the Australian left these last days is at once a joy to behold and an annoyance. It is a joy, for me, due to its sheer schadenfreude-inspiring goodness. I wanted Labour to lose, and so it is pleasing to hear the lamentations of their women after their devastating loss. But it is also annoying because it anticipates the reaction of the losing side here in the US (and around the world) on 3 November, regardless of which side that turns out to be.

There's a meme developing on the left concerning "our precious democracy", and it's present in both Australia and in the US. It's a rather unctuous appeal to the wisdom of the electorate, should they be allowed to vote as they're supposed to, while subtly insinuating that a defeat for their guy would be a defeat for democracy. Apparently democracy is too delicate to survive a victory by the right.

[Link] This government is threatening our vibrant, precious democracy. We can’t let the Coalition win a fifth term.

[Link] I am putting every ounce of trust I have in my fellow Americans that a majority of them get this, get the injustice of it all, and get the sad, sick twisted irony of how it relates very, very much to our precious Election 2004.

Yet democracy is not so precious that they'd lend any respect to the democractic process when they lose.

[Link] Democracy is an illusion! This election confirms it.

The purpose of democracy, you see, is to empower the left. If the left loses, then democracy isn't working correctly- or it's just an illusion, the election a vast pantomime with levers and chads and touchscreens.

Another couple of threads running through the Australian post-defeat commentary are that the right won due to voter greed and that the left would have delivered more collective bounty to the people:

[Link] In the end it was fear and greed that won it. People have more shiny trinkets than ever before and did not want to take any chaces that might stop them getting MORE.

[Link] Well, it's time for me to bid farewell to a few things that I liked...

Cheap reliable education - gone, user-pays system for all schools. Public schools will be run down.
Cheap universal health - see you later medicare. Hallo private insurance that only some people may afford!
Unions - well after the short-sightedness of the CFMEU, I'll be glad to see them get their own back. I won't be happy, however, that hard working Australians are unlikely to be represented properly. I know about the AWAs, but I still think a real union is the way to do it.
Public hospitals - Hallo to private hospitals!
The ABC - Unless of course, it becomes heavily pro-Liberal biased!
Welfare - everything will be replaced with work for the dole or people's poor parents will be forced to help their children through tertiary education, even if they can't afford it.

Promising all sorts of "free" stuff isn't an appeal to greed, but promising to reduce interest rates (or taxes) is. When the left loses, you often hear about the people "voting against their interests". The left knows what these interests are better than the people themselves do.

But the losers in the Australian election are still in the anger phase and are spouting off all sorts of nonsense.

[Link] I think I will go and get drunk now.

Tomorrow, it's www.monster.co.nz for me.

Denial and bargaining at once! Maybe things will improve if I move to New Zealand, Australia's Canada. But I'm sure most of the left will move to some degree of acceptance relatively quickly. Many have of course.

[Link] If this election result says anything, it says that the Labor party has well and truly lost touch with the Australian people. Put simply, we have failed horribly in coming to terms with the reasons behind why we lost in 2001, and as a result, that defeat was revisited last night.

This latest result shows that the majority of Australians currently don't trust Labor to manage the economy. Interest rates, unemployment, whatever the focus of the scare campaign the Liberals might have chosen to use, they tapped into a rich vein of distrust on economic management and we failed to address those concerns.

If Kerry should win next month, I hope that I'll react better to that defeat than much of the Australian left has so far. Sadly, I'm not confident that the American left will react reasonably to a Bush victory.