Greetings, and welcome to the website for “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder”, a new book from Hybrid Publishers in Melbourne, available in Australian bookstore now and online soon. I’m the author, Anthony Skews, and I’ll be using this site to communicate with readers, answer your questions, respond to reviews, offer new insights and further elaborations, as well as offer my thoughts and commentary on current events and popular culture.
Who am I? I’m a ten-year veteran of the Australian foreign service, a Labor Party member and proud trade unionist. Needless to say, the views expressed in my book and on this website are my own and do not reflect the views or positions of the Commonwealth Government or its agencies. Currently, I’m on sabbatical in Europe, writing a dissertation which will eventually form the basis of a more technical follow-up to this current book. Written over the course of 2015 & 2016, Politics distills my observations of contemporary Australian political discourse. It responds to a clear gap I saw on the political left around the world: the failure to tie our activist instincts with the latest social and economic research into a coherent and, more importantly, persuasive left-wing philosophy for our chaotic times.
The end of the Cold War has long been blamed for the decline in the left’s ideological potency, but from the perspective of 2017, we have also been notably slow in adapting to the mood of the times. Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 US presidential election, which took place after the book’s text was finalised, is emblematic of the strategic failure of a certain model of technocratic centrism that has dominated progressive politics for too long. In 2017, we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that more equality makes society better off. But we need to sell that vision to a voting public that doesn’t care about economic models and painstaking research.
Although written largely before the Age of Trump, Politics is a book suited for the times we live in. It anticipates the need for transformative leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. It combines a realist view of human nature with a strongly idealist political programme. Drawing on evolutionary political science and sociology, policy-making is re-conceived not as the search for rational ‘truth’ or maximal utility, but rather an arena of perpetual conflict in which rational optimisation is impossible and political power, or influence over outcomes, is what matters. Within that framework it suggests that a venerable political philosophy, the socialist strand of liberalism, remains best suited for progressives to advocate for today.