The Labor party has no hope of winning the election unless something extraordinary happens in the next few days. Is a Syrian war extraordinary enough? Kevin Rudd leapt on it as a means of exhibiting himself as a world figure, including some dodgy publicity stunts; but it was also his proper role as Prime Minister to try to give national leadership in a crisis, which could involve Australia in a military commitment, possibly within days. In his address to the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney on 27 August, the obviously tired and sometimes testy PM said that  he had spoken to President Obama that morning and that ‘in all probability’ the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical attacks in Damascus. He did not say what action should be taken or what should replace the Assad regime. But he did not beat a war drum beyond declaring, ‘I will not be a party to turning a blind eye.’ This vagueness and caution may pass as statesmanlike. It will not win the election, but it may help save ‘some of the furniture’.

Mitt Romney said it last year during the US presidential election campaign. He didn’t proclaim it in public because he knew it would be a vote-loser. It was in his speech to a private gathering of friends and supporters. But someone taped and circulated it. His critics deemed it one of the biggest gaffes of the campaign, although no one denied the truth of what he said. It opened up one of the great unspeakables of contemporary democracy.

He had simply observed that almost half of the population relied on government for at least part of their income, not just on pensions but on the whole range of ‘entitlements’ from health care to housing. He put it at 47 per cent of people. ‘I’ll never convince them,’ Romney said, ‘that they should take personal responsibility and care of their lives.’ They are going to vote for more or less socialist governments. Every politician in the world knows this is true but very few say so. On those rare occasions when they do say so, they do it privately to trusted friends, as Romney thought he was doing. It is not a new idea. It has been around since the beginning of the welfare state over 100 years ago. In broad principle, people still favour small government, low taxes and balanced budgets, yet only a few will refuse hand-outs when offered. But in an era of debt, over-taxation, overspending and GFCs,  the day of reckoning may be upon us. One thing is sure: the middle class which for generations has been the motor of liberal democracy is now making it clear that it prefers security and stability to democracy and riots.

This was a major theme of the annual ‘Retreat’ last weekend at the Centre for Independent Studies. Each year it brings together leading public figures and intellectuals from Australia and abroad for a weekend of debate and reflection on the great questions of the day. This year the foreigners included Francis Fukuyama (author of The End of History) and Daniel Pipes, the authority on the Middle East. Borrowing a word from Thomas Aquinas, they call it a Consilium. The participants  then reassembled during the week at Sydney’s Wesley Centre for an interim summing-up.

As Fukuyama reads the signs, there are no models to follow. The Chinese model of economic growth under undemocratic authoritarian government is faltering. It is still creating a massive middle class, defined not by income but by education, occupation and wealth. (It turns out six million graduates a year.) But China’s rate of growth is beginning to fall and its authoritarianism will be under increasing internal attack. At the same time the western democratic model is also collapsing as the middle class, undermined by unstoppable technology, submits to a world of vast inequality between the disadvantaged and the super-rich. Each morning, Fukuyama says, the computer geniuses in Silicon Valley wake up wondering what middle class jobs they can destroy today. ‘I do not have the answer.’

But Bernard Salt still exalts the Australian middle class. He sees it as the basis of Australian prosperity and stability (and one might add: the mateship and democracy which carried us through the Depression and  the war). There are, he says, about 18 million of them in tax brackets between $37,000 and $180,000. They are hard-working PAYE taxpayers, they pay off mortgages, live in long-term relationships, have families in suburbs, are devout and dutiful. They are Australia’s ‘forgotten people’, as forgotten today as in Menzies’ day.

Salt contrasts them with the inner-city’s godless super-rich, dinks, singles, gays, expats and PUMCINS (professionally upward middle class in nice suburbs) with goat’s cheese in the fridge. Increasingly we honour vapid celebrities and promote questionable minorities. We should celebrate the ordinary Australians of the despised middle class in their ‘boring’ suburbs. Salt’s views were clearly popular with his audience. But what happens when we ‘catch up’ with the US or China?

Peter Costello added a reservation about Mitt Romney’s pessimism. There is one cohort, he said, that does not vote entirely out of self-interest: the aged. Pensioners dependent on welfare, for example, will support and vote for a program that is not in their self-interest because they worry about their children and grandchildren. It is one demographic to add to Bernard Salt’s dutiful middle class.