Collateral Damage: For the Green Phoenix to be reborn, the funeral pyre so patiently assembled by its identity politicians over the course of many fractious years – but with growing intensity over the past three – first has to be ignited. The terrible probability, of course, is that, in setting themselves on fire, the Greens will end up immolating the hopes and aspirations of the whole progressive movement.
CAN THE GREENS get themselves back on track? Once a
political party has made the decisive turn towards identity politics is there
anything short of electoral disaster capable of inducing a change of direction?
There are two problems here. The first relates to ideology, and is at least
theoretically fixable. The second is about the political praxis of identity
politics – how Greens actually perform politics. Sadly, to fix that you’d need
a neutron bomb. [A particularly nasty kind of nuclear device that kills people,
but leaves structures standing. – C.T.]
Tom Walker is a British comedian whose alter-ego, Johnathan
Pie, has gained a worldwide audience by addressing the follies of – well – just
about the whole cast of characters encompassed by the United Kingdom’s manifold
political catastrophes. One of Walker’s latest offerings depicts the dire
consequences for Pie (supposedly a journalist covering politics for one of the
big television networks) that flow from his innocently allowing a participant
in a pro-Brexit rally to take a selfie with him. It is a chillingly funny piece
of satire – as applicable to the New Zealand Green Party as it is to the
increasingly “woke” workplaces of the UK media.
The toxic culture satirised in Walker’s vignette is the
inevitable result of interpreting events through the severely distorting prism
of identity. Once embarked upon, this journey proceeds towards its inevitable
denouement in utter organisational disintegration and failure.
One of the very first local instances of organisational
collapse brought on by identity politics was the New Zealand University
Students Association (NZUSA). Beginning in the late 1970s, the student
movement’s activist minority persuaded NZUSA to restructure itself to reflect
the growing strength of the so-called “New Social Movements” – especially
Feminism, Anti-Racism and Gay Liberation.
NZUSA “Vice-Presidents” proliferated accordingly, and the
May and August meetings of the organisation became ideological battlegrounds where
the identarians fought to wrest control of the student movement from the
Marxist Left. With every passing year, NZUSA drifted further and further away
from its core functions until, in the early-1990s, the entire “politically
correct” (originally a left-wing term) structure was demolished by the champions
of “ordinary” (i.e. conservative) students.
A very similar fate awaited the highly successful aid
organisation, CORSO, which was taken over by Maori nationalists and transformed
into an instrument for promoting the early-1980s movement for “Maori
Sovereignty”. Unsurprisingly, the tens-of-thousands of Pakeha donors who had
built CORSO weren’t having a bar of it. They voted with the feet – and, more
importantly, with their chequebooks. CORSO’s new managers received these
defections as proof positive of the pervasiveness of Pakeha racism – even on
the political Left. They may well have been right, but being politically
correct wasn’t enough to save CORSO.
Similar challenges assailed the trade union movement, but
the entrenched power of the traditional Left was more than equal to the task of
stopping the identarians in their tracks. It took Bill Birch and the National
Party to destroy what identity politics couldn’t dent. Interestingly, by the
time the Employment Contracts Bill became law in 1991, a great many of those
engaged in identity politics had already made their peace with the hegemonic
ambitions of the neoliberal economic and political order. The latter was only
too happy to see the activist energy formerly devoted to smashing capitalism diverted
into building iwi corporations, placing upper-middle-class women on the boards
of New Zealand’s biggest companies, and seizing the commercial opportunities of
the pink dollar.
What is truly surprising about the Greens is how long a
party more-or-less constructed out of the new social movements of the 1960s and
70s was able to resist the centrifugal forces inherent in identity politics. So
long as the battle to save the global environment remained the central focus of
the party, and so long as in fighting for the environment the Greens were willing
to pit themselves against its deadliest foe – Global Capitalism – then the
other social movements, while important, were unwilling to dilute the political
potency of the party’s prime directive: Save the Planet!
In this respect, they were assisted immensely by the
charismatic leadership of individuals like Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sue
Bradford, Keith Locke, Sue Kedgely and Nandor Tanczos. These individuals could
not, however, hold at bay forever the claims advanced on behalf of Te Tiriti,
gender equality and the rainbow agenda. Neither was it possible to drown out
forever the siren song of parliamentary power, nor the ideological compromises
necessary for its acquisition. If the Tangata Whenua, Third Wave Feminism and
the Rainbow Community could make their peace with the realities of neoliberal
globalism, then why not Green Environmentalism?
Could the Greens be argued out of their present, deeply
compromised, political orientation? Theoretically, yes. Never before in human
history has the need to resist environmental despoliation been more urgent or
self-evident. If Capitalism is not defeated, then the fate of humankind is
sealed. The evidence admits of no other conclusion: uncompromising resistance
to the capitalists’ wilful destruction of the biosphere is the only rational
political choice. A strong leader would have little difficulty in making out
this case in a movement whose prime directive is – Save the Planet!
And, therein, lies the problem. Organisations which have
fallen victim to the self-consuming logic of identity politics become viciously
intolerant of anything even remotely hinting of strong leadership. Nothing
twists together the component strands of identarian culture faster than the
prospect of a single individual taking back control of the political narrative.
And, almost always, those strands end up being twisted around the offending
individual’s neck. What this process fosters is not leadership, but the very
worst sort of “palace politics”. All trust is lost; every back becomes a target;
nothing strong or inspirational is permitted to survive; and the hard-won
wisdom of experience is dismissed with a snappy “Okay, Boomer!”
For the Green Phoenix to be reborn, the funeral pyre so
patiently assembled by its identity politicians over the course of many
fractious years – but with growing intensity over the past three – first has to
be ignited. The terrible probability, of course, is that, in setting themselves
on fire, the Greens will end up immolating the hopes and aspirations of the
whole progressive movement.
And with the time remaining to save the planet so very short,
that would be a crime.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 18 February 2020.
