Political identity isn't always about ideology

I don't know anything about Australian politics, but I thought the conclusion of this piece was quite interesting:

Modern conservatives don’t fear technology, they oppose new technologies that harm their friends. Put simply: renewable energy is a threat to the mining industry, but robot trucks and trains will boost the profits of the mining industry. Modern conservatives don’t fear social change. They oppose social change that undermines the power of institutions that they like, such as the church, and they embrace social change like the gig economy because it undermines the power of institutions they fear, like the unions. 

It’s no longer ideologies that defines and divides Australian politics, but interests. While the philosophical positions adopted by political parties might be all over the shop, the interests they support remain remarkably stable. The right tend to line up behind wealth, power and the establishment, and the left fire up to support new industries that solve new problems, and to protect marginalised groups from established institutions. There’s nothing wrong with such demarcations, but they have less and less to do with ideology.

Growing up in the UK, it's hard to imagine political parties being formed on the basis of anything other than ideology. For instance, Aneurian Bevan, founder of the NHS, had this to say about the Conservative Party in 1948 :

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

It's tough to imagine such vitriol arising from a dislike of their shiny shoes or baffling penchant for making model busses, or even for their ludicrously out-of-touch lifestyles. So the Venn diagram of political tribe and political ideology looks to have been something close to a single circle in the UK for many decades. Well, maybe.

In contrast, I'm reminded of an earlier (more thoughtful) article on the differences between political identity and worldview, which noted that US political parties were once defined on the issue of the size of government. And whether you think government should be big or small has very little direct connection to what you think about abortion or gay rights or the minimum wage. This setup, the theory goes, makes it harder to polarise people since you really do have a very broad political church. A further and more extreme example of this can be found in modern Puerto Rico, where political parties are divided solely and explicitly on how they want the island to relate to the United States. Thus the equivalent of diehard Republicans can be found in the same parties as extreme Democrats.

Whether this actually makes for a better system or not I don't know. From what little I know about Australian politics, it doesn't sound especially nice, even coming from the Land of Brexit. Still, aligning by political parties by something other than ideology sounds like a plausible political reform that wouldn't mean tearing up the entire system root and branch.

But I would also question the extent to which interests and ideology are really separated (though this certainly is possible in principle). We might define tribalism as supporting a cause because it helps a particular group, whereas idealism might be supporting a group in order to advance a particular cause. But these are not necessarily opposite or mutually exclusive positions. When the group and the cause are genuinely aligned, it's only natural to support the group. For example if your goal is to improve the local library system, supporting the rights of librarians makes good sense : it would only be tribalism if you supported them on some other basis, e.g. because you liked their annual bake sale.

So that Conservatives and Leftists support different groups could simply be an inevitable consequence of ideology rather than evidence against it (though that's not at all to say that pure tribalism isn't a factor). Though in the Australian case, the author makes a good argument that the causes supported by political tribes are variable whereas the interest groups are stable, which is a good argument in favour of an interest-driven system.

Another difficulty is that it seems like a very natural, inevitable desire to form groups based on moral values, often resulting in a tragedy-of-the-commons driven polarisation. Leaders often speak of their parties being a broad church, but just how broad this church can really be is extremely variable. It's an interesting question as to why many societies fall into this whereas others don't.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that some associations we take for granted are surprisingly fluid. In the West, to be on the left is generally to be a liberal, whereas to be on the right is generally to be conservative. In the Czech Republic, however, which escaped from Communism not that long ago, to be on the left is to be conservative and to be on the right is to be a liberal. So it's worth being extremely careful about what we mean by political labels.

Modern conservatives don't fear social change, they just oppose it when it undermines their friends | Richard Denniss

As the right line up behind power and the establishment, it's no longer ideologies that divides Australian politics