Right Back At You: There is a fond assumption among a great many progressive activists that, having seen their cherished social reforms enacted, they can relax – confident that they will remain in place indefinitely. History’s clock moves only forwards, they reassure themselves, never backwards. Unfortunately, that isn’t true.
SEPTEMBER-ELEVEN was a day of disaster long before 2001.
Twenty-eight years earlier, another day, 11 September 1973, was seared into the
memory of every Chilean as indelibly and irrevocably as 11 September 2001
burned itself into the retinas of every American.
Skyhawk jets streaked over the Presidential Palace in
Santiago and battle tanks rumbled through the capital’s streets. Salvador
Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist leader, died in his palace.
The Chilean people would have to wait seventeen years for the opportunity to
choose another.
There were countless tales of violence and oppression on 11
September 1973, but the report which stuck in my memory involved a young woman
stopped on the street by a squad of young, keyed-up, soldiers.
“What do you think you’re wearing?” One of the soldiers
demanded.
The young woman was at a loss. It was 1973 and she was
dressed fashionably in a T-shirt and flared trousers.
“Go home and change into something more befitting a decent
young woman.” The oldest of the soldiers gestured with his rifle at the young
woman’s trousers. “The days of women dressing like communist whores are over.”
The overthrow of Allende was about a great deal more than
his Popular Unity government nationalising Chile’s American-owned copper mines.
His democratic socialist policies had generated social changes every bit as
radical as the changes unleashed upon the country’s capitalist economy. Women
swapping their skirts for trousers was but one of the many challenges to the
cultural hegemony of Chile’s profoundly conservative social and religious
institutions.
Allende’s government had fatally underestimated the
political impact of its cultural challenges. He and his followers had no idea
how lightly their changes rested on the popular masses they fondly believed to
have been convinced and converted by their policies.
They would find out soon enough. What happened in Chile in
the months and years that followed General Augusto Pinochet’s military coup of
11 September 1973 wasn’t quite on the scale of The Handmaid’s Tale, but the conservative cultural backlash it
unleashed left the Popular Unity government’s emancipatory social programmes in
ruins.
There is a fond assumption among a great many progressive
activists that, having seen their cherished social reforms enacted, they can
relax – confident that they will remain in place indefinitely. History’s clock
moves only forwards, they reassure themselves, never backwards.
Unfortunately, that isn’t true.
The economic hierarchies of capitalist society are the least
of progressivism’s worries. Older, and much more difficult to eradicate, are
the hierarchies of race and gender. Not all Whites can be rich, but on the
ladder of racial privilege they have long celebrated their “superiority” to
people of colour. A black man’s path to equality may be blocked by the racial
prejudices of his white brothers, but that in no way guarantees he will
acknowledge the rights of his sisters.
At a post-SNCC Conference party in 1964, the black activist
leader, Stokely Carmichael, infamously described the position of black women in
the American civil rights movement as “prone.”
Many progressives do not appreciate how deeply these racial
and gender prejudices are embedded in the minds of their fellow citizens. With
the power to legislate in their hands, and a like-minded news media happy to
promote their causes, progressive political parties are often tempted to
overestimate the transformational power of their reforms. The embittered
silence of those who feel that their most cherished beliefs have been
overridden and ignored is all-too-easily mistaken for consent and approbation
by progressive campaigners. It is neither.
To date, New Zealanders have been extremely fortunate in the
generally benign character of their country’s dominant populist party – NZ
First. Winston Peters is no Viktor Orban; no Rodrigo Duterte; no Jair
Bolsonaro. And for that we should all be extremely thankful.
It is by no means certain, however, that this country will
be spared the malign effects of vicious right-wing populism forever. A
significant downturn in the New Zealand economy; one jarring social reform too
many; and, who knows, a frightened, angry and culturally displaced mass of New
Zealanders may find their “drummer”.
Nowhere is it written that such politicians are bound to
observe the democratic niceties. Indeed, in circumstances where large numbers
of New Zealanders believe themselves to be the victims of an arrogant and uncaring
“political class”, democracy may be perceived as the problem.
Yellow Vests anyone?
This essay was
originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of
Friday, 14 December 2018.
