People like Paul Kelly might yearn for a better society, but they miss the fact that the modern woes are a by-product of the neoliberal program they champion, writes Tim Dunlop.

Paul Kelly is longing for a simpler time. Kelly is what The Australian newspaper calls its editor-at-large, and in a recent piece he bemoans what he calls the fragmentation of Australian society and its institutions, the whinginess of its public debate, and he warns that we are heading for a fall:

Fragmentation is the story of the times. Labor has lost a large segment of voters to the Greens. Abbott faces the prospect of being undermined by Clive Palmer, Australia's version of a populist Berlusconi. Disillusionment in the community may be matched by deadlock in the Parliament. ... Australia's prosperity is living on borrowed time, courtesy of past reforms and the China boom. There is a silly, contested debate about whether Australia faces an economic crisis. There is no doubt, however, that Australia is undergoing a crisis of its political system.

His comments are not entirely without merit. There is a crisis in our political system and it does relate to the failure of our politicians to speak with any sort of clarity to the concerns of most people.

Kelly is also right to suggest that there is a problem with the national budget that needs to be addressed, and that part of what is driving all these concerns is that as a society we are less focussed on the national interest than the personal pay-off.

As he says, our political system "privileges sectional interests over the national interest, short-term actions and the power of the negative."

What is fascinating about all this, however, is how self-unaware Kelly is, and it is worth picking apart the nature of his self-deception because it tells us something important about the nature of our national predicament.

Kelly has long been a fan and a champion of the economic reforms of the Hawke/Keating government and he name-checks them again here.

Along with the defeat of reforms such as carbon pricing and the mining tax, he is also disappointed about the demise of WorkChoices and the undermining of the Abbott/Hockey budget.

So when Kelly laments our fragmenting political culture and our failure to get behind a national program of reform, the program and reform he implicitly means is a continuation of the neoliberal dogma that has dominated the thinking of the political class -- here and around world -- for the last several decades.

In other words, he is arguing in favour of an economic system that by its nature creates the very social fragmentation that he is lamenting.

When you look at it, the sort of social solidarity that Kelly is longing for is not the bottom-up, grassroots sort that we think of as indicative of a healthy democracy, but rather a Platonic, top-down rule by experts.

The "national interest" he envisions is one enforced by an elite of business leaders, politicians and media types who know what is good for us and who have the power (soft and strong) to enforce their vision. It is fundamentally anti-democratic.

His comments on the media are particularly revealing in this regard. Notice in the quote that follows his concern about the loss of authority of the mainstream media and his clear discomfort with the rise of the audience:

The fragmentation of the media marketplace fits into this process. Technology and campaign techniques mean disaffected voters from any government or opposition policy can be targeted and won. Creating losers is more high risk than before. The decline of mass media and rise of social media weakens the ability of leaders to carry opinion and shifts media power downwards. During the reform age, roughly 1983 to 2003, the media was pivotal in backing national interest policies but that age is passing. It is replaced by new media values that mirror the fashionable narcissism and find national interest debates as quaint and irrelevant.

Again, he is not entirely wrong about this, though his view is very partial. There is a sort of narcissism inherent in the new-media environment, as there is in the broader economic landscape. But again, the narcissism that Kelly abhors is almost entirely a by-product of the neoliberal program he himself champions.

Neoliberalism actively asserts individual identity against a collective one. It not only demands that we be "aspirational" and "entrepreneurial" but that when we fail to achieve our personal "goals", the fault is all ours. It is a philosophy that detaches us from any sort of idea of social determination and pretends instead that achievement (or lack of it) is entirely down to individual ability (or lack of it).

The whole logic of the "lifters" and "leaners" rhetoric so favoured by the current Government is a distillation of the idea of that there is no such thing as society, that we and only we are responsible for our own circumstances.

It is a logic that justifies cutting the dole to young people and demanding that they apply for forty jobs a month, just as much as it justifies kicking people off disability benefits, or demand they join work programs, for fear that they are shirking.

It is a logic that demonises organised labour and advocates individual contracts, and one that redefines social services as "entitlements" and thus demands lower taxes be paid for by cuts to health care and education.

Social fragmentation? There's your social fragmentation right there, Mr Kelly.

The ultimate irony of Kelly's lack of self-awareness is that when social solidarity and a concern for the national interest do actually manifest, he is so wedded to his narrow, neoliberal view of these things that he misses the significance of what is happening.

Thus he cites "the undermining of the Abbott-Hockey budget on the crusade of fairness" as an example of social fragmentation when it is actually the opposite of that. And while he has noticed the narcissistic aspects of social media, he has completely missed that it is also a site of organisation and solidarity.

As I say, Kelly makes some reasonable points in his assessment of our current predicament. But the "national interest" that interests him is not one that bubbles up from below against the neoliberal "reforms" that have underwritten the social fragmentation he describes, but one that is imposed from above by people pretty much like him.

Like so many on the right, he is appalled by what his preferred ideology has wrought, but is too blinded by it to see the disconnect between his stated ends and means.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. You can follow him on Twitter.