The Accents Of Power.

Not What Simon Says, But How He Says It: From those who decried the Greens' attack ad ridiculing Opposition Leader Simon Bridges' accent, the challenge was as brutal as it was simple: Would the Greens’ campaign team have produced an attack ad making fun of a National Party MP from China or India who spoke English with a pronounced accent?

“CLASSIST BULLSHIT!”, was the tweeted response of one Green Party supporter. It was a sentiment shared by enough of the Greens electoral base to convince James Shaw to act. Within hours of the Green Party’s anti-National attack ad going up, it was taken down. Mocking the Leader of the Opposition’s broad Kiwi accent was unacceptable – even in the cause of fighting Climate Change.

On the face of it, the reaction of the Greens’ support base is a welcome confirmation that it still believes the Greens should keep well away from “dirty politics”. Attack advertising, according to these principled folk, is a foul form of political communication, best left to the hack parties of the centre-left and right.

From those who decried the ad, the challenge is as brutal as it is simple: Would the Greens’ campaign team have produced an attack ad making fun of a National Party MP from China or India who spoke English with a pronounced accent?

We all know the answer to that. To even suggest releasing an ad built around such an obvious racial slur would be a sacking offence in the 2019 Green Party apparatus. But, if using race in your party’s propaganda is utterly verboten, why is it permissible to use class? What does it say about the people who produced and approved the offending Green Party ad, that the decision to satirise Simon Bridges’ working-class accent set off no alarm-bells?

Is it because making fun of the cultural markers of working-class people is still not seen as an act of unforgiveable prejudice? And, if that is true, then why is it true? Drawing attention to the cultural markers of non-white ethnicity – especially for the purposes of ridicule – was long ago, and quite correctly, deemed racist. Why aren’t the injuries of class similarly condemned?

Answering that question leads us straight down a very deep, and very strange, rabbit-hole.

Twenty-first century New Zealanders are constantly reassuring themselves that their society is a meritocracy. If they apply themselves and acquire the right skills, then there is nothing to prevent them from rising to the very top of the social totem pole. By the same token: if they refuse to work hard and improve themselves, then they cannot expect to rise very high at all. Indeed, laziness and a lack of self-discipline can cause a person to fall deeper and deeper into material and moral poverty. The logic of meritocracy is unforgiving. If you have risen high in society, it’s because you have merit. If you have failed to rise, or, worse still, fallen, it’s because you lack merit. In a meritocracy, success and failure are both self-inflicted conditions.

Small wonder that meritocracy and neoliberalism have become inseparable. If people’s misfortunes are self-inflicted, then the state’s only responsibility towards the poor and marginalised is to provide them with the minimum sustenance required to prevent them from disturbing the peace (and/or threatening the property) of their more diligent neighbours. That word “minimum” is important. If the state were to become excessively generous, then meritorious behaviour would cease to be its own reward, and meritocracy, as a system for rewarding human striving, would collapse.

Accent, as the playwright George Bernard Shaw pointed out, plays a crucial role in identifying merit. In the words of Professor Higgins in Pygmalion:

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

In twenty-first century politics accent has become an indispensable marker of merit. Far more than was the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, how we speak confers upon us the right to speak. In the early decades of the democratic age, the humbug of meritocracy was not yet in evidence. (Although its religious progenitor, Protestantism, certainly played an analogous role in justifying the ways of the rich to the poor.) The poor, themselves, were in no doubt as to why they lived such harsh lives. It was because the rich forced them to. In the heroic phase of democracy, it was certainly no disgrace for a working-class politician to address his followers in the accents of their common condition.

In democracy’s decadent phase, however, these class markers serve a less positive function. A working-class person who has succeeded in the fields of entertainment, sport and (certain types of) business may retain his or her accent without incurring too much social disdain. But a politician who refuses to speak in the accents of someone deserving of respect, should not expect to get very much of it. It is no accident that the two most successful populists of the English-speaking world, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, both speak in the accents of the ruling-class. How they speak to their followers tells them as much about their heroes as what they say – perhaps more.

In the crudest possible terms: losers do not want to be wooed by losers; they want to be seduced by someone in the accents of a winner.

That’s why so many middle-class people are happy to make fun of Simon Bridges accent. His failure to teach himself how to speak “properly” is seen as a failure to appreciate what is required of someone aspiring to the office of prime minister. Someone born in China or India who has, nevertheless, mastered the language of their adopted country is, by contrast, seen as a person to be admired. Making fun of their accent represents a failure to recognise their true merit. It is the behaviour of someone who does not understand how twenty-first century meritocracy works; someone still mired in the nineteenth and twentieth century fallacy that ethnicity, in and of itself, confers merit. Yesterday’s ideology, for yesterday’s failures.

Neoliberalism cares nothing for the markers of ethnicity, gender or sexuality. What it values is the individual who understands not only the importance of rising up the socio-economic ladder, but also the importance of “making it” in the right way. The meritocratic winners can be black or white, male or female, gay or straight: no one cares. But, those aspiring to membership of the global elite who fail to grasp the importance of thinking in the right way, dressing in the right way, and yes, speaking in the right way, will soon discover that being laughed at and ridiculed are the least of their worries.

While capitalism endures, it will always be open season on the working class – even its accent. “Classist bullshit” it may be – but it works.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 25 July 2019.

Protecting The Winning Ticket

Life's Lottery: How far would you go to protect the ticket that guaranteed you vast amounts of wealth and power? What wouldn't you do to protect your winning position?

IT’S TIME FOR THE RICH to come clean. We’ve given them the benefit of the doubt for far too long. We’ve assumed that, fundamentally, they’re not really all that different from the rest of us – just wealthier. We’ve taken at face value their protestations that the policies they promote are for everybody’s benefit.

None of it is true. Never has been. Never will be.

You’re sceptical, I understand that. And it’s good that you are, because it proves you’re a decent person. It shows that you’re uncomfortable with attributing evil motives to people you don’t know; and that, generally speaking, you prefer to look for the good in people.

Fair enough, you need to be convinced.

Okay, here’s a little story from the news. It’s about a couple, living in the Red Zone in Christchurch, who won Lotto. The prize was $5 million, and they had the winning ticket. But, they were living in Christchurch. At any time there could be another big earthquake. The ticket could get lost. What did they do? Well, according to the news reports, they put the winning ticket in a Ziploc bag and they tacked it to their bedpost – just in case.

It’s a charming story, and we all congratulate the lucky couple (especially since they’ve been doing it hard since the big quakes struck). But it is also a very illustrative story. It shows to what lengths people will go to make sure they do not lose their winning ticket.

Most of us protect our tickets by working hard, paying our taxes, paying the mortgage, paying our insurance premiums, obeying the law, and trying to be good friends and neighbours. But, that’s about it, because, given the size of our prize, our ticket just isn’t worth any extra protection.

But, just imagine your ticket is worth not five million, but fifty million dollars. What would you do to protect that winning ticket? Hell, what wouldn’t you do!

You certainly wouldn’t be in favour of a capital gains tax, or death duties, or a highly progressive income tax. And you certainly wouldn’t support any political party, or social movement, that promised to impose them. To be truthful, you’d probably have a pretty jaundiced view of the entire democratic process. After all, there are a great many more voters who don’t have $50 million than there are voters who do. What’s to stop them from simply using their votes to accomplish the transfer of your wealth to their pockets?

And speaking of transferring wealth: what about trade unions? Obviously, they’d be for the chop. Nobody stays wealthy for very long by sharing the profits of their enterprises with the people who actually work in them. These are, after all, businesses they running - not charities!

Let’s recap. You’re rich, and you want to stay that way. So, to protect your ticket; to safeguard your $50 million prize; you need to find a way to eliminate, or at least minimise, the threats posed by taxes, unions, and democracy. What’s your strategy?

Essentially, there’s only one winning strategy. It requires you to convince all those who are not wealthy that whatever status and security they do enjoy is the result of your own superior imagination, risk-taking and skill. You have to paint yourself and your fellow millionaires and billionaires as a “wealth creators” and, more importantly, “job creators”. You have to convince your fellow citizens that any attempt to restrict or redistribute your wealth will not only put their jobs at risk, but that society as a whole will become poorer.

If you can convince people of these things, then they will, perfectly democratically, eliminate wealth taxes, truncate workers’ rights, and reconfigure their entire political system to favour the tiny minority fortunate enough to hold the multi-million-dollar winning tickets.

But wait, there’s more. Because, as The Spirit Level shows, grossly unequal societies are beset with all manner of social pathologies. And, because these pathologies encourage political debate about the fairness and sustainability of economic inequality, there’s one more thing the wealthy must do. They must convince us that, if we’re losers, it’s our own fault. We’re just too stupid and/or lazy to be winners.

It’s what the Rich will never come clean and admit: that they’ve turned us into the Ziploc bags that keep their winning tickets safe.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 April 2012.

Gut Feelings

George Clooney meets Vin Diesel: For ten years Mark Ames (above) entertained Muscovites with The eXile - a magazine in the anarchic and outrageously brutal satirical tradition of Hunter S. Thompson. Forced to flee the Russian Federation in 2008, Ames returned to the United States with an even sharper satirical eye and a much heavier journalistic heart.

MARK AMES is an unusual man. When he decided to set up a satirical magazine in Moscow, in the late 1990s, most of his American compatriots regarded him as more than a little eccentric. But using his magazine to publish withering satirical attacks on the Russian Government? Most of his Moscow readers regarded that as certifiably insane.

But "that" is exactly what Mr Ames did. For ten outrageous years his dangerously provocative publication The eXile gave Muscovites a glimpse of what a genuinely free press might look like. The eXile featured the sort of fearless journalism that only a citizen of the United States, believing in the efficacy of his First Amendment rights, knows how to produce.

But not even Mr Ames could withstand the sort of pressures brought to bear on The eXile by Russia’s authoritarian President/Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin. Since 2008, when he and his colleagues were forced to flee the Russian Federation, The eXile has become an online-only media phenomenon.

Russia’s loss has been the USA’s (and everybody else’s) gain. The same searing honesty and excoriating wit which once skewered Moscow’s vicious and vapid kleptocracy has now been turned on America’s own dysfunctional society – and its even more dysfunctional political system.

Just last week, Mr Ames’ s lashed the liberal establishment – represented in this case by the eminent American economist, Paul Krugman – for its apparent inability to understand the true nature of the Republican Right.

"In just a few short paragraphs," he wrote, "Krugman unintentionally reveals why liberals are still getting their asses handed to them in every serious battle with the Republican Right: the liberal establishment is still convinced it’s competing in a middle-school civics class debate."

The liberals’ fatal mistake, according to Mr Ames, is that they refuse to let go of the myth that all the American people want from their politicians is the Truth.

"But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance—and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? ….. If I’m an obese 40-something white male living in Ohio or Nevada, locked into a permanent struggle with foreclosure, child support payments and outsourcing threats, then I’m going to vote for the guy who delivers a big greasy portion of misery to the [liberal elite’s] dining room table, then brags about it on FoxNews. Even if it means hurting myself in the process."

It’s the last line that stings the most. Because, as Mr Ames so rightly puts it: "The left’s wires short circuit when confronted with this awful possibility."

Indeed they do, because, for all its faults, the socialist left, remains a child of the 18th Century European Enlightenment. Just like neoliberals, socialists are convinced that people are not only hard-wired to recognise their own interests, but also to pursue them rationally. Socialism and neoliberalism, as coherent ideological systems, depend upon this being true.

But what if Mr Ames is right? What if most people don’t think with their brain but with their gut?

In other words, what if most people are emotional, rather than analytical thinkers: responding to issues not on the basis of fact and logical thought, but according to the feelings those issues arouse? What if, far from being convinced by individuals with the facts at their fingertips, most people react in the same way as the American fundamentalist preacher who, in the midst of his church’s campaign to supplant Darwinism with "creation science" at the local high school, uttered this oft-quoted cri de coeur : "We feel as if we’re under attack from the educated and intelligent sector of our culture."

Wouldn’t that explain why it’s proving so difficult for Labour and the Greens to get any political traction on issues like National Standards, Climate Change, Tax Reform and Crime & Punishment?

Certainly, the Russia Mark Ames spent ten years satirising offers scant encouragement to those who put their faith in rational self-interest. For ten years Russians sampled the wares of liberal democracy – Mr Ames’ magazine among them. In the end, however, they preferred Vladimir Putin’s version of democracy: one party rule, a state-controlled media, and the ruthless repression of dissent.

When asked to nominate Russia’s greatest hero, they invariably vote for Joseph Stalin.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 5 March 2010.

More on the Bain Case

Challenging the "official" version: Joe Karam, David Bain, and the Defence Team exposed the the State's failures - a sin not easily forgiven by bourgeois New Zealand.

An anonymous commentator responded to my "David Bain and the class divide" posting by dismissing it – along with my focus on class issues generally – as both nonsensical and overly simplistic. This is my response.

Nonsense Anonymous? Simplistic? I don’t think so.

You claim that the national division of opinion over Bain’s innocence/guilt breaks along intelligence rather than class lines. Well, forgive me, but it is difficult to conceive of a more forthright assertion of class prejudice.

The association of intelligence with class advantage is well established historically. This is because the modern middle-class, until relatively recently, was limited in the degree to which it could transfer the social advantages it enjoyed to its offspring. High progressive taxation and death duties militated against the straightforward transfer of physical capital from one generation to the next, and so most middle-class effort was directed at securing, and passing on, its cultural capital.

Obviously, the key to securing cultural capital, along with all the advantages it brings in terms of access to the professions, and hence higher social status and income, lay in gaining control of the education system. Educational institutions, along with familial example, are the prime conveyor-belts of cultural capital. Making sure that their children had access to the best teachers, the most lavish educational infrastructure, and the most appropriate (i.e. professionally oriented) curriculum has been, and remains, one of the most important "jobs" of the middle-class as a distinct social formation.

Equating the ability to negotiate this complex pedagogical system successfully with "intelligence" has always been crucial to the middle-class’s claim that society operates on "meritocratic" principles. If people "fail", it is vitally important that they are seen to do so simply because they fall on the wrong side of life’s great bell curve. It certainly has nothing to do with a system quite consciously designed to advantage one class over another.

If you’re really interested in this stuff, I strongly recommend the writings of Barbara Ehrenreich and Prof. James Flynn.

Now, let’s return to the "class struggle" aspects of the Bain case.

The case has always been problematic for the middle-class because of the extremely confused and conflicting signals it has transmitted over the past 15 years.

The default position of the middle-class on practically every issue – economic, social, political and legal – is to remain safely within the boundaries of the "official view". In the Bain case that meant trusting the police evidence, the original trial judge’s exclusion of critical evidence, and accepting the first jury’s verdict. The "safety" of this position was further reinforced by the Court of Appeal’s upholding of the original verdict.

Karam’s refusal to accept the "official" verdict against Bain marked him out as a threat to all "right-thinking" and "intelligent" citizens. The growing body of evidence that Bain had been the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice – much of it from professionals like themselves – could, therefore, be swept under their mental carpet and ignored. The emotional energy required to repress the logical consequences of Karam’s new evidence was, however, bound to multiply the irrational elements in the bourgeois mindset.

The mentally dislocating effect of the Privy Council’s rejection of the "official" result must, therefore, have been devastating. Karam’s new evidence was deemed to be compelling, and that meant that there was now a new, much more "pro-Bain" official position on the case. However, because this new official position came from outside the ambit of the New Zealand bourgeoisie, it could be dismissed as in some way illegitimate. In a very important sense, the Law Lords – by challenging the competence of the local ruling class – had "let the side down".

Which is why it was so important to secure a second conviction of Bain. Only by persuading the new jury to reaffirm his guilt could the legitimacy of the original official judgment (and hence the competence of the ruling-class and its middle-class backers) be reinstated.

The dissonant effect of seeing so many expert witnesses confront and contradict the Crown’s (i.e. the Police’s) evidence must have grown increasingly pronounced in middle-class minds as the trial progressed. The official narrative of the Bain family murders was unraveling before their eyes, and that part of their being not bound up with the "politics" of the trial, would, almost certainly, have been warning them that the Crown’s case could not possibly pass the test of "beyond reasonable doubt".

And so it proved. In just 5.5 hours the Jury acquitted Bain on all five murder charges.

The middle-class’s subsequent and quite astonishingly vicious response to Bain’s acquittal has nothing whatsoever to do with "intelligence" and everything to do with its profound resentment toward, first and foremost, the Jury, and secondly, towards Bain, Karam and the Defence team, for overturning the original official view in such a public and final fashion.

Bain has moved beyond their reach – at least in a legal sense – and it rankles.

He has not, however, moved beyond their ability to cause him grief and harm. The bourgeoisie’s control of the news media allows it to harass Bain with impunity, and prevent him from leading the quiet and unmolested existence he now has the right to expect.

And, it is here that the irrational and atavistic impulses which lie so very close to the surface in the bourgeoisie make their most frightening appearances.

In their fury at being gainsaid, middle-class opinion-formers are openly calling for the abolition of trial by jury, and promoting Europe’s inquisitorial justice system. Also under attack is the right of accused persons to remain silent, along with their entitlement to proper protection against the admission of evidence highly prejudicial to receiving a fair trial.

That the New Zealand middle-class is willing to sacrifice the protections of the common law for the inquisitorial methods of the absolutist state, testifies to the highly tenuous nature of its commitment to the democratic state.

"If juries cannot be relied upon to deliver the right verdict, then we should do away with them altogether, and leave the adjudication of guilt and innocence to middle-class professionals – like ourselves. After all, people like us don’t have the time to sit on juries, and – clearly – justice can no longer be left to the sort of dummies who do."

For the bourgeoisie, retaining control is everything.

But why?

Because, in the middle-class mind Bain represents much more than a convicted murderer. As the sole survivor of the Bain family, he has always been expected to carry the guilt – and bear the punishment – for its terrible failure to uphold core bourgeois values.

The dilapidated, squalid, stinking family dwelling: a fine (and valuable) old house allowed to go to wrack and ruin. The parent’s failed marriage: followed by their mental and moral disintegration. The waywardness of the children: with one of the daughters regularly prostituting herself. The dark hints of rape and incest. The whole, tragic picture of an attractive and talented middle-class family descending into a pit of self-neglect and social demotion. It is this, the truly terrifying spectacle of family failure and downward social mobility, that gnaws away at the middle-class psyche whenever the Bain case is contemplated.

That is the real, unspoken crime for which the entire Bain family stands condemned in the court of bourgeois opinion. For acting out the middle-class’s most fearful nightmares, it was psychologically vital that nobody emerged from 65 Every Street – "not guilty".