The Populist Elements of Australian Political Satire and the Debt to the Americans and the Augustans

Abstract

Contemporary satire and cartooning in Australia and the USA share a populist strain of discourse that encourages a stereotypical view of politicians as participants in a dirty, slippery game involving spin and dubious language. This rhetoric is often mistaken for speaking truth to power (parrhesia), but it is an historic legacy of anti-politics. Populism is not an aberration of democracy but a result of tensions inherent in representative democracy from its beginnings. The anti-political rhetoric is traced to early eighteenth-century Britain and the Augustan polemical writers who established what became common attitudes towards politicians. The literature passed to America as standard reading for the Founding Fathers and for many educated Americans before the 1830s. It became the basis of not only US populism but a permanent dissatisfaction with politicians actively cultivated by the political system itself and the media. From the 1820s to the 1830s, the strain passed to Australia.

This rhetorical tradition is entwined with political satire and cartooning, posing disparities between the purported ideals of democracy and the supposedly dismal realities of politics. It persuades because it plays to widely held beliefs about politics in the Anglosphere which are referenced in well-known shows like the British Yes Minister and Australian TV series The Hollowmen. The common political rhetoric between the UK, the USA and Australia has been replenished by a continuous tradition of journalists and commentators weaving satire into their critiques of politics. Current examples demonstrate continuity of purpose and of form with this established pattern.