"We are entering a period of neo-conservative ideological hubris that must not go un-challenged," it began. "The academic left, whose thinking has become muddied by two decades of toadying to the fashions of postmodern theory, is largely irrelevant to the resistance. The challenge must come from a vigorous and pragmatic mainstream left. And here lies the rub: such an entity does not in any meaningful way exist. The opinion pages of the metropolitan dailies are clotted by neo-cons who discharge expensive verbiage - most are exceedingly well paid - on a sectarian war against a largely chimerical enemy: the so-called left establishment."

Damn well put. That essentially sums up everything that is wrong with the politics of left and right in Australia.
I would also argue, that the extremists on both sides of the argument have a way of monopolising the debate, which quite frankly, isn't particularly constructive.

This is good stuff and is so, so right. Post-modernism and so on is dressed up as “critical theory” so if you are against it, according to them, then you are necessarily conservative. I would include in all this not just pomo but also Habermas and all that. In fact, I am more extreme. A debate with a pomo-ist is like a debate between theists and atheists; like, what’s the point? You can’t argue with people who wear self-conscious irrationality as a badge of honour. Ignore them, they are essentially a cult, albeit a publicly funded cult. A fact, or is it “fact”, that the Government is cynically using to attack higher education much to everybody else’s loss.

Thanks Luke. No arguments from me. Now that that's all cleared up, can somebody explain how come the notion of communist postmodernists remains intact?

After that we can toss these recently invented political/cultural, left/right schemas back into the swamp and hopefully engage in something a bit more constructive.

As a nobody I challenged the type of intellectual dishonesty Mr Slattery discusses when i was the editor of a uni student newspaper.
My challenge for the left to have the courage to be honest, even when it didn't fit their agenda, led to me being hounded out of the university by an orchestrated campaign of 'whispering poison' despite the fact that i was basically saying that they were destroying the credibility of the left by sticking to their contradictory behavior. Since then i have remained neither on the left or right but trying to put forward arguments based on reality.
The trouble I think is that lefties value shared ideas much as 'capitalists' value possessions. A type of ideological materialism that has left the right with the high moral ground, to the detriment of most.

Markob,
I must disagree with you!
Pomo is simply an ill-formed repudiation of all forms of formlessness on the basis of the formedness of the formlessness so formed.
Now... how could you argue with that! Are you so ill-informed!

In my opinion Modernism is a world-view created in the image of scientific materialism. As such it is a "profoundly" reductionist.
It reduces every human being to fear based mortal meat bodies only. Meat bodies that are thoroughly convicted by ALL the media of our "culture" that they are inherently separate from all other meat bodies (including the non-humans),the world process altogether, and the Radiant Conscious Light of Real God.
There is a saying in one of the Upanishads: Where there is another fear instantaneously arises. Hence Fear & Trembling is at the root of our normal everyday dreadful sanity. The "culture" of modernism is a "culture" of fear---the avant-guard of this "culture" of fear is the Pentagon death machine.
Put in another way we are all TOTALLY trapped in Weber's Deadly Iron Cage.
It seems to me then that many of most sensitive artists,theologians and academic philosophers, especially those who belong to the broad school of postmodernism (for example the European Graduate School),have been to one degree or another sensitive to the inherent darkness of this trap. Hence their work has been an attempt to break through the walls of Deadly Iron Cage.But it cant be done especially using philosophy because the "mind" that tries to do so has been thoroughly propagandized by the world dominant paradigm of scientific materialism.This dreadfully sane "mind" is itself the primary problem.

By contrast the analytic philosophers that Slattery promotes are all thoroughly convicted of the "normality" and "reality" of the Deadly Iron Cage.