Culture gulf

[erudito]

A friend of mine spent three years of his youth being active in the ALP. He now has become very active in the Liberal Party. This gives him a basis on which to compare the very different internal cultures of the two

Comments

[anthraxia]

I think you also need to look to working class culture, and to the idea that one must fight to make those in power pay attention. There is a culture of bullying in the ALP that is distressing and hard to cope with, but it comes from the same place that peasant uprisings came from: if the educated and/or wealthy elite in power do not listen to reason, because on their terms and from their position of prestige, your reason is not theirs, then you need to find another way to make them listen, and the easiest way is to use some form of physical or verbal violence - be that bullying, strike action, destruction of property, or at the most extreme, revolution or terrorism.
It's unfortunate that the ALP can't move forward from the culture of its past, but I don't think you can blame that on its left wing views.

Pathetic excuse

[erudito]

First, implying that working class folk lacks courtesy is very dubious. Second, the ALP stopped being a working class organisation quite a while ago. Third, you are dealing with a milieu that is the dominant group in major institutions. (The Left generally massively outspends the Right in advocacy, for example.) Fourth, the middle class left is often extremely rude and bullying towards dissent. Fifth, there is the issue of not only what starts a culture, but what keeps it going.