IRONY IS A HARD form of humour to appreciate. Senator Ralph Babet (of the Clive Palmer franchise team United Australia Party) went on twitter to post a bunch of slurs. At one level, that's just twitter these days; and his content is no different to the garden variety of hate that everyone still on there stews in, but on the other hand, it is a notable thing for an Australian Senator to do. And what's ironic about it is that it shows a gigantic and secular shift in the way we culture war about values.
It’s a cliché that modern political Right parties appeal to ‘traditional values’, yet have members who fail to display those actual values in behaviour. That's just hypocrisy; the sexual mores campaigner who has affairs, the drinking, smoking, anti-drugs activist, and so on. But actually displayed disinhibition like Babet's is at a different order of behaviour: the irony is people like Babet behave the way they do precisely because of a lack of shame—the result of valuelessness.
It was always the political Right's critique of the sexual revolution of the 1960s onward, and of feminism, and of modern life generally, that it led to disinhibition and a breakdown of traditional structures and hierarchies---and anti-social behaviour. What Senator Babet lacks, because there is so obviously nobody in his life that he respects to say, hey mate, how about just shutting the fuck up, is in fact the traditional male role models who display ‘traditional virtues’, of inhibition and dignity, and his puerile, obscene, hatefulness is a symptom. It's anomie! It's precisely what the moral majority who swept the 1980s were fixated on!
If it were me, I’d consider it a shameful thing in its own right to have nobody in my life to who I could look up to model my behaviour or police it, and call out my social breaches. I've often used the example of the Beastie Boys, who made perhaps the 20th century's most cartoonishly sexist rap record, were indeed called out by their peers, and who did indeed clean up their act, of the power of social norms to improve people. But hey that’s just me, out here on the political Left, with my odd ideas about social norms!
The irony to appreciate is that we've had a secular shift in our culture war. It's the political Left which is the defender of institutions, of the inheritances of the past, of strict mores of behaviour (especially those to do with sex), of the value and importance of family, and of marriage, while it's the political Right that has embraced chaos and impulsivity. Or as Fintan O'Toole observes:
“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.
And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses.
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