I would like to like this book, but as with most publications on the ‘alarming titles’ list, Beyond Right and Left: New politics and the culture wars does not live up to its implicit promise. It makes some useful observations about the current state of play before pretty quickly losing its way.

McKnight begins with an account of what he calls ‘the new capitalism’: the mode of life in which contemporary market forces have reached into areas of social life that until the 1970s had a measure of independent existence to them, such as childhood, family and sport. He sketches out the intellectual victory of neo-liberalism as a dominant mode of thinking in the last twenty years, and the central role of Friedrich von Hayek in all this, followed by a consideration of different forms of conservatism, and the split between neo-conservatives and classical conservatives. Then there is an examination of arguments around the failure of socialism and central planning in the twentieth century, which leads into a consideration of the rise of the ‘culture wars’ and the manner in which a ‘cultural left’ developed in distinction to the older economic left.

The section on the cultural left is the setting for a long argument with sections of that latter group in regard to an uncritical acceptance of the notion of rights as organising social justice campaigns (and hence an inability to see that Indigenous people required a new moral politics, such as that advanced by Noel Pearson), and an unexamined bias against the notion of periodic full-time motherhood and a traditional family.

McKnight is also critical of the unthinking ‘social constructionist’ bias of the cultural left, which has not been able to come to grips with new ideas about human nature, and that part of us which may be substantially ‘hard-wired’. The cultural left – you may be getting an idea of the book’s central focus by now – is also criticised for having weakened the universal humanism of an older left due to its emphasis on difference over identity, hampering it from speaking clearly on issues such as multiculturalism. Finally, drawing on these arguments, McKnight argues for a ‘new politics of values’ based on all three political traditions.

Leaving aside a host of disagreements, large and small, with McKnight’s map of the last twenty years, we can pinpoint the book’s fatal flaw in that last chapter, which is a mini-manifesto for new movements, new emphases, new principles and so on – the usual grand scheme sketched out on the back of an envelope, leaning heavily to exhortation and thus to immediate exhaustion. Here are some examples: ‘sketch a way forward for a new kind of progressive politics’; ‘I prefer to call such an outlook “a vision”’; ‘I prefer to call this vision “the new humanism”’; ‘the new moral framework which I advocate has four different dimensions’; ‘It is a challenge to the left fundamentally to rethink its values and reconfigure them.’

At this point, you may feel, like Queen Victoria before William Gladstone, that you are being addressed as if you were a public meeting. The overwhelming compulsion, after being urged to build a new four-dimensional value system is to order some Chinese food and a DVD for the evening. It is the same feeling of simultaneous unreality and hopeless giganticism that is a symptom of a political impasse, not a solution to it. Arguing a big picture for fundamental transformation is not of itself unworthy or impractical, as the examples of Marx, Lenin, Guevara, Illich, Schumacher and, yes, Hayek show. The trouble is that McKnight doesn’t have anything new to offer. His ‘new value politics’ includes: caring values; conservation values; highlighting the moral consequences of markets and unrestrained competition for society; a moral vision of the nation built around core values; and an important battle to urge business and industry, as well as consumers, to adopt sustainable practices. In vain have I searched for an argument, tactic or policy in McKnight’s final section that is genuinely novel and that would not simply be the verities subscribed to by any Green, Democrat, left-ALP member, doctor’s wife or general-issue nice person.

McKnight is a good and committed man, and his analyses of some contemporary prejudices – that, for example, against a notion of human nature, or against any critique of industrialised child care – are well founded and useful. Where has he gone so wrong? I would suggest there are several things missing in this book.

There is no attempt to sort out the particular political wins and losses of the left from the broader movements of social and intellectual change. Media ownership should never become an excuse for not thinking better thoughts, but if you don’t factor in the degree to which the ‘cultural counter-revolution’ has been the product of a close interrelationship between News Ltd and a number of think-tanks, you’ll come up with an exceptionally masochistic result. The failure of left bodies such as the ALP and the ACTU to develop think-tanks of their own in the late 1990s and systematically to produce a new vision of social democracy (or whatever you want to call it) also needs to be taken into account.

Nor is there enough of an attempt to look at the social changes that have occurred, and how they relate to these ideas. In particular, this concerns the rise of a ‘cultural left’, which is better seen less as an abstract philosophical force than as an ideology of a social subclass of knowledge/culture producers – part of the ‘intellectually related groupings’, as writers in Arena Magazine have it. People whose life and work practices are flexible, cosmopolitan and globally oriented aren’t drawn to libertarian cultural politics by the force of the ideas – they express them as a deeply held world view arising from their own lives. Hence the increasing political division between groups hitherto seen as allies on the left. The fragmentation of the working class into a relatively well-paid group, with increasing access to capital (homes with a high resale value, super, investment properties), and a second, casualised, underemployed group, each with divergent interests on matters such as taxation, must also be factored in.

The book is too parochial and thus leaves out too much. There are many other places to look for ideas with content. The Blair government has an authoritarian dimension, and an excessive faith in markets, but over the last decade it has put in place an enormous number of socially innovative micro and macro programmes. Most of us, for years now, have been debating these programmes under the catch-all heading of ‘social capital’ and the ways in which they give a concrete form to the ideas McKnight leaves as abstract values, yet the concept and the movement goes largely unremarked upon.

Finally, the view of history is too static. The foreseeable future is read off the last couple of decades. I would have thought that both local crunches (from a credit-card economy) and global crunches (after the China–India boom) would produce fundamental realignments, to say nothing of the potential disruptions of climate change, oil, war and other factors. Who knows if these are years away, or decades? But they will certainly create fundamentally transformed political terrains. Even a period of long boom will itself create a changed terrain as the surplus pile-up creates the problems of a surplus culture, by means of the thousand little social problems such as depression, élitism, obesity, stress, social exclusion and myriad other dilemmas whose social essence the left should be able to make clear beneath their individual appearance.

This view is exceptionally static because there is no argument as to the core dynamic of the global market – merely a description of its works. Is it something that can be held within bounds, tamed and limited by existing political institutions? If so, why not simply call yourself an advocate of German social-market policies, declare the political question over, and spend your life proposing piecemeal reforms? But if you believe that the global market is a factory for the production of unrealisable desires and crisis-ridden at its core, then one needs to engage with the substantive questions posed by Marxism, retain its spirit, and come up with a better picture – one that will steer political action, and the relationship between social groups and ideas. McKnight leans on Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation (1994) but the message – that we’re in the machine – has been received endlessly. You now need a theory of what the machine is turning us into – what new classes, social forms and psychologies are being made – in order to develop a new politics.

Because there is no such analysis, the proposed programme is empty of content. Thus it is suggested that the language of morality could be used in economic matters: ‘strong feelings rightly exist over exorbitant salaries for top executives. Wealth inequalities should be made matters of public morality in the interests of the poor and lowly paid.’

Excuse me, this is the new politics? They already are moral issues – the challenge that has to be confronted is the neo-liberal argument that inequality is not immoral if it increases everyone’s share. Many people may now accept that argument who previously would not have, not because pointy-heads use technical language but because they’ve got part of the children’s university fees invested in T2 shares and they don’t mind paying a few cents extra on the phone bill to get a better CEO than the last wacker.

At other times, McKnight’s new moral politics misses what’s actually happening. He argues for a left that attacks a ‘culture of cheating’ on moral grounds: ‘plagiarism by students, tax evasion, workplace theft, music piracy.’ I would suggest that campaigning against free stationery and the iPod is not a vote winner. McKnight hasn’t realised that ‘open source’ software such as Linux, and music (and soon film) file sharing, are genuinely revolutionary developments, ones that erode the fiction of intellectual property and create a level of exchange that is more dynamic than capitalism. As such, it throws up enormous problems, but I don’t think defending Sir Elton John’s royalty stream is a vital task of the left.

Such an oversight shows the dangers of trying to create a new politics (and morality and humanism) in your own shed, while the world marches past (the anti-globalisation movement receives almost no mention). McKnight would have been much better advised to ditch all that and to expand the section on ‘the cultural left’ to book length, which would have given him the room to analyse its social and class roots (and thus avoid his oversimplified picture of it as a reaction to nationalism) and to point the way ahead. Regrettably, as it is, Beyond Right and Left takes us nowhere much at all.