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| Is History Repeating Itself? From 5 percent of the popular vote in 1975, the Values Party’s share was more than halved to just 2.41 percent in 1978. Within months, middle-class social-liberalism was back in the saddle. Unimpressed, the voters’ judgement was even harsher. In 1981, and again in 1984, Values received barely 0.2 percent percent of the popular vote. The party was over. Are the Greens about to go the same way in 2023? |
THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY of a centre-left government being formed if the Greens are no longer in Parliament. That’s a sobering thought, and yet the return of the Greens is taken for granted by most political pundits. A party which could survive the self-immolation of Metiria Turei in the weeks leading up to the 2017 general election, it is widely assumed, can survive anything. But can it? Is the Green brand really bullet-proof? Good for 5 percent of the Party Vote – no matter what?
I don’t think so.
What keeps the Green Party in the electoral game is a widespread misapprehension that, at its heart, the Greens are the same rather quirky but highly principled outfit that impressed itself so deeply on the imagination of New Zealanders in the first five years of the twenty-first century. The most obvious historical comparison is with the pre-Rogernomics Labour Party. So great was the political momentum generated by the First Labour Government under Michael Joseph Savage (1935-1940) that the party was able to win four more elections on the strength of it. But, as Labour demonstrated in 1984, parties can change. And the Greens have changed – a lot.
What the Greens are slowly but surely turning into was always there in the political movement they inherited from the Values Party. When push comes to shove, the Greens, like the majority of the Values Party membership before them, will always break in the direction of the middle-class idealism out of which both parties were born. Logically, Greens should be socialists: if this planet’s a corporation, it’s a corpse. In reality, however, the Greens are social-liberals. How else to explain the fact that the party secures the bulk of its support from the well-heeled professionals inhabiting the nation’s leafier suburbs – and their children?
For those history buffs out there, the other exemplars of the social-liberal dynamic at the heart of middle-class progressive movements are the Suffragettes. Like the Greens, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) embraced the cause of social-justice (a necessary indulgence if it was to enlist the support of working-class women) but at the outbreak of World War I its leaders were quick to jettison the WSPU’s socialist wing. A deal was struck with Lloyd George, the firebrand politician poised to become the UK’s next prime minister. The WSPU would back the war effort, and in return, at the war’s end, women (or, at least, women of means over 30 years of age) would be enfranchised. As proof of their patriotism, middle-class Suffragettes took to the streets handing out white feathers (tokens of cowardice) to young men not in uniform.
“Deeds Not Words” – the WSPU’s motto – was always open to multiple interpretations!
The Values Party broke apart over the question of whether or not environmentalism was a cause that could be embraced meaningfully by the working-class. Between 1975 and 1978, the socialist faction of the Values Party did its best to supply a positive answer. Values’ 1978 election manifesto was an unabashedly radical socialist document. The electors, however, had other priorities. From 5 percent of the popular vote in 1975, the Values Party’s share was more than halved to just 2.41 percent. Within months, middle-class social-liberalism was back in the saddle. Unimpressed, the voters’ judgement was even harsher. In 1981, and again in 1984, Values received barely 0.2 percent percent of the popular vote. The party was over.
Values rebirth as The Greens in 1989 represented the conscientized middle-class’ deep distress at Neoliberalism’s ruthless dismantling of the New Zealand welfare state, along with its unwavering promotion of the “free” market. Even more than Values, the Greens “got” that capitalism was killing the planet. As an internationally successful political movement, the Greens’ electability was based on the growing public understanding that the “old parties”, spawned by the exploitative industrial societies capitalism had created, no longer possessed the imagination necessary to rescue life on earth. Their message was encapsulated in the slogan: “The Greens are not of the Left, the Greens are not of the Right, the Greens are in front.”
But, in order to remain “in front” the Green brand had to fulfil two absolutely crucial obligations. It had to base its policies on the findings of science, and, it had to repudiate neoliberal capitalism and all its works. So long as Green parties did this, they went from strength to strength. Consistent failure to honour these obligations, however, rendered them acutely vulnerable to electoral annihilation.
It is becoming increasingly clear to green-oriented voters in 2023 that the Green Party is no longer as faithful to science as it was in the early 2000s, and that it is much more willing to compromise with the neoliberal order. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for these two, critical, failures, the party has embraced a particularly volatile and uncompromising form of social-liberalism. One which a great many green voters find deeply offensive and alienating.
In sharp contrast to the leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, who, respectively, embodied the movement’s fidelity to science and its duty to challenge the economic status quo, the leadership of James Shaw and Marama Davidson seems to embody constant compromise with the Powers That Be, accompanied by a wholesale rejection of rationality itself. As election day approaches, it is becoming increasingly difficult to construct a rationale for remaining loyal to the off-putting political force that the Greens are turning into.
The brute psephological fact, amply demonstrated by the fate of Values, is that no political party has a core vote below which it cannot fall. The moment small-g green voters feel that a vote for the Greens is no longer a meaningful act of faith in the planet’s future, the party will be over. Ultimately, it is not the members who make or break a political party, but the reaction of the voters watching them.
Those engaged in finalising the Greens’ Party List for the 2023 general election would be wise to remember that.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 2 May 2023.
