Rebels, here’s a cause

Trumpism is not a purely American phenomenon, any more than Bolshevism was purely Russian. It’s an interventionist universalist ideology attempting to change the entire world decisively within the lifetime of a very old, stale man.

Trump wants to return America to the nation it was in his youth, before the civil rights revolution, and he demands that every other nation follow him down.

Australian universities have already revealed that they’ve been served with demands to defund any program mentioning climate change or diversity. Australian companies with American connections have presumably also received these notices – French companies certainly have – but have decided it’s better to shut up about them, at least till after the election.

American companies, faced with a threat to their government contracts, have folded like origami cranes. I’m not saying that I think Australian companies have greater integrity or more intellectual consistency, but at least on diversity their lack of principle has been complicated by new rules about gender equality targets the government has just brought in for larger companies.

Left to itself, I don’t think the Australian business sector would have a real problem with diversity programs, if only because up till now the rules been pretty timid and easily gamed. Large corporations have been able to get away with well-groomed online policies that stop short of any fundamental changes at the boardroom level. Every one of Australia’s top 20 companies still has a male chair, and the vast majority have a male CEO.

This is a good thing for me as the CEO of Our Community, because it means there’s less competition for strong female executives, but it does make life harder for me as the parent of two boys. If there’s one thing that young men can grasp instinctively it’s the weak points of their parents’ generation’s ideology, and hypocrisy over acceptance of gender equality is a whopping great target.

Youth is magnetically drawn to transgression, outrage and shock. In my generation that meant we were rebelling against the values of our conservative and religious parents into the wilder shores of gender, anti-racism, and the general slate of beliefs that are now stigmatised as ‘woke’.

We were able to push that barrow quite a way. We are about to find out whether we were able to get it over the crest of the hill far enough to make it impossible to push back. And in this uncertain time I have to cope with the Andrew Tates of this world.

Myself, I regard the backlash against ‘wokeness’ as a reactionary outgassing of old white men, but that may be overlooking its secondary significance as (a) a way of pissing off parents and (b) the adolescent fantasy of imagining a form of society in which it would be easier to get laid.

The problem is that to reach young men it’s not enough to show that respect for women is good, or right, or worthy. You have to show that it’s cool, and that’s quite an ask. The whole concept of cool is built on individualism and the antisocial – on rebellion against what’s conventionally seen as good and worthy.

Social media provides the wind behind Tate’s sails, but the fascination with bad boys has a long history.

No, to impress young men you need to find an appropriate daydream, something that has them fighting for a cause, defending respect from its uncool enemies. I don’t think any government can invent such a cause, still less find one in its existing manifesto.

We have to take on board the causes rising generations have already shown strength in. Unfortunately for these same governments, the cause that carries most clout has been schoolchildren protesting government inaction on climate change, a movement that no major party has any wish to encourage.

It's possible that here, as elsewhere, Trumpism will provide its own remedy. When America is going to the length of binning comics about women astronauts, wokeism can easily become an arena where a gladiator might enlist under the feminist banner without seeming soft.

The much harder problem is getting into the operating system to shift the weighting given to terms like ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, but that’s a task for another day.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600000 not-for-profits.