I am NOT a "Trotterite"!

The Joys of Caricature: I am not now - nor have I ever been - a "Trotterite". Drawing by Murray Webb.

IT’S ALWAYS PUZZLED ME that a man of "Idiot Savant’s" dogmatic certitude should be such a wuss.

With the Comments function of his No Right Turn blog safely switched off, Mr Savant hurls down rhetorical thunderbolts upon the heads of his enemies without the slightest fear of contradiction.

Those of us with a little more respect for the rules of open debate leave our Comments function switched on and are thus required to defend our postings mano a mano.

Clearly, being held accountable for his own words is not something Mr Savant relishes – and that’s a pity, because it forces the people he attacks to come back at him directly (and very publicly) on their own blogs.

Right, now that I've got that off my chest, the first thing I’m going to say about this recent, highly tendentious posting by Mr Savant is that, in the fine tradition of Karl Marx disclaiming the title Marxist: "I am NOT a Trotterite!"

By "Trotterite" Mr Savant appears to mean any person who opposes "social engineering" – which he defines as "any moves to ensure equality for anyone who isn’t a white male".

This is, of course, very far from the more usual definition of social engineering as: "The practical application of sociological principles to particular social problems." Or, less benignly: "The manipulation of the social position and function of individuals in order to manage change in a society." (The Free Online Dictionary).

The other defining characteristic of the Trotterite, according to Mr Savant, is that he or she is passionately of the view that the NZ Labour Party should "throw women, Maori, children and gays under a bus in a quest for the votes of its traditional base" which he supposes to be "racist, sexist and bigoted" working-class males.

Obviously, we would be very foolish to take Mr Savant’s definition literally. No one I know (or have ever known) in the Labour Party has ever advocated the murder of women, Maori, children or gays. And I suspect any Labour politician who bowled up to a canteen-full of working-class males and told them how glad he was to meet so many racist, sexist, bigots, would very soon be departing in an ambulance!

So, what is it about the ideas of these so-called Trotterites that Mr Savant really finds so objectionable? Essentially, it is their refusal to regard identity politics as an unequivocally progressive and unproblematic phenomenon.

For Mr Savant the goals of identity politics are indistinguishable from those of classical liberalism.

In his own words: "[W]hen you get down to it, the core idea running through the heart of the left … is a demand for equality for all. That equality has never just been economic, but also political and social … to be who we are, not what some stuck-up ‘lord’ wants us to be … Either you stand for the equality of all, or you’re supporting lords and peasants again. There is no middle ground on fundamental rights."

The first and most obvious riposte I would offer to this curiously naïve statement is that Mr Savant fundamentally misunderstands what the Left is all about.

For the Left, the quest for equality is not an end in itself but the means to achieving its ultimate objective – a just distribution of social and economic power.

Since Mr Savant mentions the Peasants Revolt of 1381 in his posting, let's take a look at its celebrated slogan: "When Adam delved and Eve span – who was then the gentleman?" In this revolutionary challenge to the social relations of the English countryside the rebel priest, John Ball, is asking (in the language of the Bible): How did we get from a world in which men and women worked for themselves, to a world in which they work for a master?

Why is the question revolutionary? Because it implicitly calls for the creation of a new social order in England. Not a social order in which the serf is equal to the lord, but an order in which there are no lords – or peasants.

This is what Mr Savant doesn’t "get" about the Left. That it is not simply about "the equality of all", but about transforming society to the point where power and wealth are so justly distributed that the word "equality" merely describes the way human-beings interact with one another.

What Mr Savant is doing is what the Marxists (whom he also profoundly misunderstands) call "fetishising" equality. It’s why he reacts so vituperatively when the claims of his beloved identity politicians are challenged.

He simply cannot see that it matters not one whit whether the person sacking you is male, female, Maori or gay: what matters is that they are wielding power over you – power which the social and economic system has vested in them in spite of not because of their gender, ethnicity or sexuality.

Mr Savant wrongly believes "identity" to be an entirely unproblematic concept and that anyone who attempts to clarify its relationships with the distribution of social and economic power is some sort of feudal throwback.

What he’s forgetting, of course, is that the over-riding importance assigned to one’s identity - whether you were a "lord" or a "peasant" - pretty much defined the medieval mindset.

Identity and Equality – far from being indistinguishable – are antithetical.

What the Left seeks is justice.