Decoding "social cohesion"

Australian politicians and media seem focused on "social cohesion". What do they mean by it?

While “social cohesion” can convey the benign sense of societies working to include rather than marginalise, to develop wholesome “collective political actions aiming at creating a coherent society”, that is not how the concept is used on the Right. It ought to worry Australians that the Labor Prime Minister is echoing this rightwing trope, particularly when it comes to the topic of Israel.

As this UN investigation noted, “mutual trust” in societies is undermined by increasing wealth inequality. The neoliberal project has, since it gained dominant status in the Thatcher-Reagan era, worked to isolate and fragment us. Thatcher’s famous observation that society does not exist, rather “There are individual men and women and there are families”, is emblematic.

The nuclear family was intended to do, at no cost, what society had begun providing: child and aged care, nursing and more. (The tycoons denied that they benefited from the outlay with a healthy and educated workforce that was available for salaried work.) Thus onerous “family values” are inculcated for the masses, while libertine libertarian social mores are acceptable for the rich. With only his family as buffer, in this ideology, the individual must compete against everyone else to survive.

As neoliberal policies worked to funnel massive wealth up to the donors who hothoused them, and to their enablers, the same architecture of influence that normalised these policies has functioned to turn us against each other.

Social cohesion is destroyed by policy that provides endless welfare to the rich while treating the masses as a drain on communal resources. Austerity policies have led to bitterness and resentment. That grievance is redirected at vulnerable groups who have not hurt the public. Sadopopulism provides a well of energy to fuel rightwing politics.

The fact that many of the donors behind the neoliberal architecture of influence are reactionary, racist and/or Christofascist, means that monumental sums of money have been poured into ethnostate, anti-multicultural and bigoted influence operations. The project can be both a pragmatic distraction for the voter population whose standard of living has been constantly undermined since the 1970s, as well as being a reflection of genuine ugly prejudices amongst the rich.

It is worth noting also that the past era envisaged as more cohesive in these rightwing myths tends to come with silent caveats:

“We had a unified national identity in the 1950s.”*

* If one was white, Christian and submissive to the dominant narratives.

It happens on the left too.

“The labor movement’s peak was a time of strength and coherence, building better living standards for the workers.”*

* If one was white, male and not radical enough to undermine the cooperative relationship between capital and labor. In the American example, workforces of Color and women were both used as surge capacity to be exploited, largely with the agreement of the white labor movement.

Australian academic Alex Carey’s account of the US history of “business propaganda” illustrates that the public was easily turned against grievously exploited workers, who had gained public sympathy, by painting them as foreign and radical. This First World War information game provided a tool far safer for brand reputation than machine gunning workers.

Calls for unity, community, coherence and cohesion are used to paper over the injustices and violence that mark our nations’ stories. The myth that these cohesive states existed in the past is only maintained by erasing the narratives of those excluded from the myth. For that reason, the Right is dedicating to controlling education.

Social media, with its rampant amplification of mis- and disinformation, is fracturing our societies faster than ever, but it is a partisan tool used by tech authoritarians who share the “libertarian” fantasies of the old neoliberal donors. The tech billionaires’ games only build on the old mission to divide and break public obstruction to wealth and power acquisition.

The combined treasury of reactionary plutocrats is being dedicated to creating a perverse campaign for unity against LGBTQIA+ people, against non-white people (including those indigenous to a country), against migrants. The unified identity is the white, “conservative”, (Judeo)Christian, cishet male. Trans people are a target. Muslims are another key target, and Palestinians in particular.

I place “Judeo” in brackets there because it is clear that the Right is no ally to Jews, even while it feigns being an ally to Israel. Genuine and vitriolic antisemitism is always close by these circles.

Multiculturalism has long been a target of this rightwing campaigning, depicted as a threat to a unified national identity. Now the Right is using the broad concept of “social cohesion” to demand an end to immigration. Even worse are those promoting “remigration” - the brutal involuntary deportation of any category that doesn’t match the faction’s desired identity. The Right argues that we cannot live together, erasing the fact that it is often their information games creating the new nationalist identity and division.

One Australian commentator claims that Australian and UK governments’
”white population replacement” through immigration is “treachery”. In fact, he asserts, it is “the greatest act of treachery against the people in these nations' histories”. The man is a “senior lecturer in history” at Catholic Campion College. He also appears regularly on Sky News (Australia’s Fox News outlet) and lectures at Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) events. This lecture, for example, explains his conception of the dangers of multiculturalism.

One of the key US partner organisations in the architecture of influence, the Heritage Foundation, has long deployed this spurious argument for “social cohesion”. Allies in Australian “conservative” politics echo and reinforce the narrative. Heritage’s co-founder, Ed Feulner, instructed Australian neoliberals in how to inculcate business’s goals in Sydney in 1985. Local employees of partner organisations like the IPA have been crucial to importing the American plutocrat playbook into Australia for decades. (Much of that messaging has been filtered through British partners to the project.)

For “social cohesion” to be possible, the community is expected to abandon the safety, equality and rights of the target groups. That is not just a rightwing demand, but one made by reactionary leftists too. When a reactionary commentator of any political bent harps on about supposedly harmful “identity politics”, this is what they mean. (Note that it is far more often the Right depicting the rest as “obsessed” with vulnerable “identities” than it is the rest actively defending them. Defence largely occurs when rightwing attacks endanger vulnerable groups. “Identity politics” captures a rightwing characterisation of the liberal/left rather than a fair representation. That feeds sadopopulist grievance.)

Currently in Australia, the Right repeats the talking point that any action to prevent the continuing genocide of Palestinians and accompanying land theft is divisive and antisemitic. It is using the supposed good of “social cohesion” to discredit as “divisive” people who oppose genocide. Our Labor government is complicit, or too intimidated, to oppose the framing. No nation is protected against criticism, particularly when it commits crimes against humanity. This is not antisemitism, and it is dangerous for Jewish people to elide Jewish identity with the violence of the Israeli state.

While promoting the demand to end a genocide that is being live-streamed ought to be sufficient in its own right, it is worth noting that any movement can be depicted as a “divisive” threat to “social cohesion”, including climate protests.

Divisive is breaking the habitability of the planet. Divisive is driving ever more people into precarity for one’s own wealth. Divisive is fomenting war or ethnic cleansing for gain. Divisive is using the riches gained in a plutocrats’ tax strike to spread their own bigotries. Divisive is breaking society into potentially violent fragments through distorted narratives or outright lies. Divisive is undermining the democratic experiment to prevent obstacles to stripping the country of its resources at everyone’s expense.

It is not promoting “social cohesion” to demand that Australians allow genocide to take place unremarked or to silence protest movements against rampant injustice.

Don’t let this thought-terminating cliche terminate your critical thinking.