Promiscuous Empathy: Chris Trotter Replies To His Critics.

Inspirational: The Family of Man is a glorious hymn to human equality, but, more than that, it is a clarion call to human freedom. Because equality, unleavened by liberty, is a broken piano, an unstrung harp; upon which the songs of fraternity will never be played. 

“Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” – Franz Kafka. The Trial. 1925.

THOSE who object to Chris Trotter comparing his troubles to Joseph K’s undoubtedly have a point. The Police aren’t knocking on my door – not yet. Nevertheless, there is something just a little bit Kafkaesque about finding yourself being misrepresented all over the Internet by people you have never met. Especially when their misrepresentation consists of disputing the veracity of Chris Trotter’s long-standing identification as a person of the Left.

There will be plenty of people who, having read that last sentence, will demand to know why being drummed-out of the ranks of the Left is being presented as a bad thing. Given the truly awful place where the Left of the 2020s has ended up, they would argue that my expulsion from its ranks could only be taken as proof that I still possess a respectable intellect and a functioning moral compass. Their advice would be: “Crack open a bottle of Champagne! Celebrate! You’ve had a lucky escape!”

But, no matter how tempting that sounds, I’m not quite ready to say “good-bye to all that”. Principally because my online critics are not only challenging my bona fides as a person of the Left, but are also insisting that I have become a person of the Right. While no longer bearing the imprimatur of the Left may not be all that grim a prospect, I’m not quite ready – not yet – to be branded a “crypto-fascist”.

My secret fascist mission, apparently, is to do all within my power to secure two objectives. First, to prevent the establishment of a bi-cultural, Tiriti-centric Aotearoa. Second, to assist the Zionist entity in its genocidal war against the Palestinians.

These charges reveal a great deal about the individuals levelling them. Clearly, their expectation is that a leftist-in-good-standing will refrain from interrogating the propositions put forward by … well, that’s one of the most serious problems with the contemporary Left, isn’t it? One is never entirely sure who is setting the Party Line.

In the case of Te Tiriti, exactly who are the leftists-in-good-standing supposed to follow? The late Moana Jackson? The very much alive Margaret Mutu? The team who drafted the He Puapua report? Linda Tuhiwai Smith – author of Decolonising Methodologies? The Greens? Labour? Willie Jackson? All of the above?

The answer, of course, is that, as an ageing Cis Pakeha Male, it is deeply racist of me to suppose that I have any say at all in matters pertaining to Te Tiriti, or the final shape of any society which might emerge from its fulfilment. My only role is to back te iwi Māori unreservedly and without question. My personal opinions are irrelevant. So, check your privilege, Mr Trotter, and shut the fuck up.

But, what sort of leftist could possibly surrender their right to question, challenge, and join any and every attempt to revolutionise their society? The idea that some people, on account of their ancestry, age, ethnicity, gender – or any other criterion beyond their personal control – should be denied the right to participate intellectually, culturally and/or politically in their nation’s affairs owes nothing whatsoever to the traditions of the Left.

Neither does the threat to unleash violence against anyone who proposes a thorough re-examination of the principles of Te Tiriti. Not unless one’s idea of the Left is drawn from the rigid orthodoxies of the Stalinist and Maoist communist parties, and the murderous totalitarian regimes they constructed to enforce them.

But that has never been my Left. As a democratic, dammit, as a libertarian socialist, my unwavering conviction has always been that it is only when people are free to receive and communicate information; free to discuss and debate all manner of ideas and policies; free to participate; that there can be any enduring hope for the human emancipation which has always been the true leftist’s desideratum.

All very fine, Mr Trotter, but what about your support for Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza?

That’s easy – there is no such support.

This is what I wrote, just weeks after the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023, about the best possible response Israel could make to the horror. This was the picture I painted:

Drones and reconnaissance aircraft would be sent aloft, circling like eagles above the jackals’ lair. But not one bullet would be fired at, and not one bomb would be dropped upon, the crowded streets of Gaza. Across that whole benighted enclave only the whoosh of Hamas’s missiles and the pop of Israel’s interceptors would break the pregnant silence […..] Only then would the Hamas commanders realise what had happened. Rather than the global media focusing upon Israel’s hideous retaliation, and nightly displaying the broken bodies of women and children. Rather than the streets of the world’s capitals being filled with pro-Palestinian demonstrators calling for the death of the Jews. Rather than remaining safely hidden behind a curtain of civilian blood, Hamas would realise, with a deathly chill, that the whole world was staring in horror and disgust, not at Israel – but at them.

My curse as a political writer – if curse it be – is an ability to view the constantly unfolding human drama from multiple perspectives; to be able to stand, as it were, on both sides of the wire. Where did it come from, this dangerous faculty for promiscuous empathy? I’ve thought long and hard about this and decided, predictably, that it came from a book.

No, not the Bible, but from a book of extraordinary photographs and wonderful quotations from writers and peoples from all over the world. Published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, The Family of Man made me a leftist. Not by persuading me of the correctness of an ideology or religion, but by revealing to me the sad and beautiful continuities of the human species – the human family. The book also made me the enemy of all those who would smash those continuities by setting one part of the human family against another. An addiction to which the extreme Left has fallen prey with a fervour more than equal to that of the extreme Right. Indeed, political extremism, like the mythical serpent, Ouroboros, seems driven, ineluctably, to devour itself.

The Family of Man is a glorious hymn to human equality, but, more than that, it is a clarion call to human freedom. Because equality, unleavened by liberty, is a broken piano, an unstrung harp; upon which the songs of fraternity will never be played.

And that’s it. The best I can offer to those who have been telling lies about Christopher T.

I very much doubt that it will be sufficient to get the people’s commissars off my case.

If it is a crime to want to build the nation of Aotearoa-New Zealand out of the dreams of all its people, then I must plead guilty. Likewise, if it was wrong to recoil from the horrors of 7 October as forcefully as we daily recoil from the crucifixion of Gaza, then I was wrong. If it is a crime to understand the Jews’ need to build a home of their own since, as History has amply demonstrated, they are not safe in anybody else’s, then convict me. Convict me, too, if it is “antisemitic” to understand the longing of the Palestinian to, at last, insert the key in the lock of his family’s bullet-scarred front door, and return home.

To my faceless, Kafkaesque judges, I offer these words. They were written by the English jurist, writer, and radical politician, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, and are to be found among the many other wise words included in The Family of Man:

Fill the seats of justice

With good men, not so absolute in goodness

As to forget what human frailty is.

This essay is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blog.

Time To Reign.

Reigning But Not Ruling: Republics are generally a people’s political response to a sovereign who has ruled them badly. Oliver Cromwell famously “cut off the King’s head with the crown on it” because Charles Stuart had plunged Britain into a bloody civil war. King Louis XVI lost his head because the French people were no longer willing to starve while Versailles glittered. Once a monarchy has been tamed by its people, however, it becomes an invaluable instrument for isolating the role of head of state from the vicissitudes of politics.

WHAT WOULD MY YOUNGER SELF have said to the person he had become on Saturday night (6/5/23) as the Coronation unfolded? Would he have upbraided the old man seated in front of the television, watching another old man being crowned king? Certainly, he would have reminded him of the day long ago, in the Student Union of Otago University, just days before Prince Charles was due to visit Dunedin, during a debate on the monarchy, when someone (it might have been Michael Laws) shouted “Long live the King!”, and Chris Trotter leapt to his feet and shouted “Long live Oliver Cromwell!” How did that radical young republican turn into a sentimental old monarchist?

A large part of the answer to that question is bound up with the fact that the event recalled was so long ago. Because, at the heart of the monarchical principle lies the brutal reality of time. The span of a human life and all of the experiences that are crammed into it is what a reign is all about. It is not what a presidential term is all about.

The difference between a reign and a term is of no small importance. In a constitutional monarchy such as ours the identity of the head of state is known years in advance. A king or queen accedes to the throne immediately upon the death of their predecessor. Barring some awful catastrophe, the next monarch will already be a known quantity and the succession will be seamless.

The contrast between a royal accession and a presidential election could hardly be starker. Inevitably, the elected head of state will be the product of political choices. Either, he or she will be nominated and confirmed by Parliament – as our Governors-General are now – or, the head of state will be the product of a vote. In the latter case, a number approaching half of the electorate (more if there are multiple contenders) cannot help feeling bitterly disappointed that their candidate failed to attract the requisite support.

If the republic is a healthy one, the losers of the presidential contest will look forward to the next opportunity to assert their will. If it is not, then the losers may refuse to concede defeat – throwing the legitimacy of the head of state into doubt. Presidential terms are, therefore, necessarily short – four to five years – if only to keep the losing sides’ spirits up. Any longer and the president’s opponents might be tempted to shorten his or her term … by other means.

With these potential problems in mind, some republics limit their heads of state to a single term. Providing the president’s role is largely ceremonial, as in the Republic of Ireland, such limitations are generally accepted without objection. In those republics where a president exercises executive power, however, as in the USA and France, the incumbent is generally given the opportunity to win a second term.

Time is as important to the constitution of republican leadership as it is to the subject’s experience of monarchy. In a republic, time becomes the ally of those who see the orderly rotation of political elites – and their chosen leaders – as vital to the health of the state. Republicans regard political permanence as tantamount to tyranny. From their perspective, power is best served up in relatively short periods of time.

As we New Zealanders say: “Three years is too short for a good government, and too long for a bad one.”

Everything changes, however, when the head of state is not only ceremonial, but hereditary. Historically-speaking, republics are an angry people’s political response to a sovereign who has ruled them badly. Oliver Cromwell famously “cut off the King’s head with the crown on it” because Charles Stuart had plunged Britain into a bloody civil war. King Louis XVI lost his head because the French people were no longer willing to starve while Versailles glittered. Once a monarchy has been tamed by its people, however, it becomes an invaluable instrument for isolating the role of head of state from the vicissitudes of politics.

More than that, a constitutional hereditary monarchy, being the enterprise of a single family, mirrors the experiences of the people over whom it reigns. My father was the subject of three kings and a queen. But, for most of my life, I have been the subject of just one monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. As such, I grew up contemporaneously with the sovereign’s children. Like them, I married and began a family. Like them I got older and, hopefully, wiser.

All the ups and downs of the Windsors have been tolerated by their subjects because they, too, have had their ups and downs. Charles is not the only man who married the wrong woman. Harry is not the only grandson to give his grandmother grief. Certainly, the Windsors’ wealth is immeasurably greater than all but a handful of their subjects, but that has never appeared to bother the vast majority of those who, for 70 years, referred to Elizabeth Windsor as, simply, “The Queen”. Monarchs are supposed to live in palaces and ride in golden carriages – that’s what it means to be “royal”. In all the life transitions that truly matter, however, their subjects saw the Windsors as people like themselves.

Crucial to this identification is the very strong sense that the Windsors’ subjects know them. People of my generation recall the Queen’s “royal visits”. We remember Charles and Diana and baby William playing with a Buzzy-Bee on the lawn of Government House. We all felt the shock of Diana’s tragic death. Younger Kiwis watched the marriage of William and Kate and counted-off their offspring. All of us have watched Charles grow older and older, and wondered how he endured his seemingly endless apprenticeship.

No elected president can possibly provide a nation with this sort of story, for that length of time. Nor can an elected head of state offer a backstory stretching back centuries, or an historical drama peopled with such a compelling cast of characters.

That’s why the older Chris Trotter could be found seated in front of the television on Saturday night, watching the man he had always known finally coming into his inheritance. Oliver Cromwell had no option but to behead Charles I. I am glad his revolution, and the French, and the Russian, drove home the lesson that, ultimately, kings and emperors, like presidents, are only entitled to rule with the consent of the governed.

“I come not to be served, but to serve”, said Charles Windsor.

And I said: “God save the King!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 May 2023.

The Void.

FROM THE SAME box of old papers I wrote about last week comes another set of lyrics. This time for The Void – a song composed in 1974 when I was 18.

Strangely, since I hadn’t attended a service since my early teens, I have a vivid memory of singing The Void to the Minister of our local Presbyterian church in Trentham, Upper Hutt, who had dropped by to sort out the Sunday hymns with my mother, the church organist. He was interested to know what I was trying to say in the song. “It’s my vision of the future”, I told him. “It’s about the loss of the things that really matter to New Zealanders: their quarter-acre sections, their family homes, their faith in the future.”

He frowned. “That’s a pretty bleak vision. Can you tell me why everyone in the song drinks to the unemployed? Why are they so glad to see them?”

My answer reflected the dark predictions contained in Socialist Action – the Trotskyist newspaper I purchased regularly from the young comrades positioned outside Wellington Railway Station. As the Keynesian golden weather turned dark and stormy, mass unemployment was seen as the harbinger of Capitalism’s doom. In drinking to the unemployed, the characters in the song are, subconsciously, drinking to ‘The Revolution’.

Not that I explained it to the puzzled clergyman in quite those terms. Even so, he gave me a long level look – and shuddered.

The Void.     

     As the shadows trickled down,

     The dusty gutters of the town,

     I found a bar, some DB Brown,

     Raised my glass
     And looked around.

I saw the scholar and his book.
Caught his very worried look.
He took the bait from his master’s hook,
And now he understands
That he’s caught.

     He cried: “Here’s to living in the Void!

     “Here’s to dwelling multi-storied!

     “Here’s to all you unemployed!

     I’m overjoyed
     To see you here.

I saw the woman fully grown,
Sitting there all on her own,
Tired of living like a drone,
She wore her boredom
Like a precious stone.

     She cried: “Here’s to living in the Void!

     “Here’s to dwelling multi-storied!

     “Here’s to all you unemployed!

      I’m overjoyed
     To see you here.

I saw the children at their play
Tell the Sun to go away.
“We much prefer the night today!”
That’s what I heard
The future say.

      And I cried: “Here’s to living in the Void!

      “Here’s to dwelling multi-storied!

     “Here’s to all you unemployed!

     I’m overjoyed
     To see you here.


Chris Trotter 1974

This poem was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 8 July 2022.

Look For The Light.

Metropolis  George Grosz  1918

A FEW HOURS AGO, I was sorting through a box of old papers when I came across these lyrics to a song I’d composed nearly fifty years ago, at the tender age of seventeen! I have decided to share it with the readers of Bowalley Road as proof that no matter what historical era one is born into, there is always, in the eyes of the young, considerable room for improvement.

Look For The Light.

Beneath the towering concrete thrones
The people creep and crawl,
You watch them through the oozing black
That’s seeping through your wall.
The darkness slithers like a snake
Between the halls of stone,
Your voice in echoes stabs the night:
“My God, am I alone!”

That’s when you look for the light,
Hope for the light,
Have faith in the light to come.

The stench of corpses chokes the air
And hangs the senses high,
While in their red-brick coffins
The split-level heroes lie.
You’re groping through an endless day
Towards an endless night,
While armies of well-oiled machines
March onward out of sight.

That’s when you look for the light,
Hope for the light,
Have faith in the light to come.

The bold blue warriors ignite
The fires they love to hate,
And crying “Law and Order!”,
Take another for the State.
The members of the Parliament
Are eating paper pies,
As sweat soaks through their collars,
They all doze as Justice dies.

That’s when you look for the light,
Hope for the light,
Have faith in the light to come.

You’re running faster every day
To catch the same old train,
With icy faces staring out
Of every window pane.
The streets are growing metal bars
To keep us in our place,
And every night the sirens wail,
Quickening the pace.

That’s when you look for the light,
Hope for the light,
Have faith in the light to come.


Chris Trotter 1973

This poem was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 July 2022.

Daily Blog Branded Upper-Middle-Class, Pseudo-Left, Imperialists! Who Knew?

Pythonesque: No more than the wokest of the Woke, is the Marxist Left happy to join their efforts with those of other leftists in a spirit of solidarity and comradeship. Nor are they content to let their classic interpretation of the socialist project speak for itself – winning followers by the sheer strength of its arguments and insights. Nope. Just like the Woke, they insist that their way is the only way. Dissenters aren’t just wrong, they’re bad. Exactly how bad? How much time have you got?

THERE’S A LOT TO LIKE about the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Anyone anxious to refresh their understanding of the tone and style of unreconstructed Trotskyism is only ever a mouse-click away from the revolutionary rhetoric of the Fourth International.

That sounds catty, I know, so let me hasten to add that Trotskyism stands at the terminus of the great red river that has its beginnings in the highlands of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, flows down through the productive fields of Luxemburg and Lenin, and ends with the brilliant strategic and tactical reconsiderations of that best of Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky.

What Trotsky would have made of the post-war world, and the Soviet Union’s emergence as a global superpower, we shall never know. A Stalinist ice-pick split open his skull in Mexico City in 1940. Undaunted, Trotsky’s disciples continue to preach the one true socialist faith. Not for them the heretical meanderings of the Frankfurt School and its incomprehensible French disciples. There’s absolutely nothing “woke” about the WSWS. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Before you get too excited, however, I feel it’s only fair to warn you that the members of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) – which runs the WSWS – are afflicted to a truly remarkable degree by the besetting sin of the Marxist Left – sectarianism. No more than the wokest of the Woke, is the SEP and its stable of WSWS writers happy to join their efforts with those of other leftists in a spirit of solidarity and comradeship. Nor are they content to let their Trotskyist interpretation of the socialist project speak for itself – winning followers by the sheer strength of its arguments and insights. Nope. Just like the Woke, they insist that their way is the only way. Dissenters aren’t just wrong, they’re bad. Exactly how bad? How much time have you got?

Based in the United States, but with correspondents all over the world, the WSWS’s ability to sniff out heresy is impressive. Their man in Wellington, Tom Peters, has certainly never shied away from putting the boot into myself, The Daily Blog, and its editor, Martyn Bradbury – we’re heretics from way back! 

Returning to the question of tone and style, I have to say, Peters is a true pro. Reading his stately invective I was transported – positively transported – all the way back to the Soviet Show Trials of 1937!

Despite the militarist record of all parties in parliament, and Ardern’s statement welcoming AUKUS, Labour’s pseudo-left supporters are promoting the illusion that the government will stay out of the escalating preparations for war. Writing on the trade union-backed Daily Blog, columnist Chris Trotter said the government ‘will happily stay as far away from this lunacy [AUKUS] as possible.”

Pseudo-left? Pseudo-left! Honestly, Tom, I really don’t think the boys and girls down at Labour Party HQ in Wellington would accept the term “left” in relation to myself – not even with the “pseudo” prefix. They’d dismiss me as a treacherous, patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacist, who knows nothing of what it means to be a leftist in the twenty-first century.

Oh, and unless I’m very much mistaken, Tom, The Daily Blog’s trade union “backers” pulled their dollars out a very long time ago. The site was just too spicy for their unadventurous political palettes! So, you know, consider yourself fact-checked.

But wait – there’s more. Pseudo-left was nothing. Tom was just getting warmed-up. Try this judgement from the Revolutionary Tribunal on for size:

Notwithstanding its anti-American demagogy, the Daily Blog has repeatedly echoed US propaganda against China—including the lie that the coronavirus pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The blog also depicts China as a threat to both New Zealand and the Pacific region.

“No one should be fooled by Bradbury’s claim that he wants a purely “defensive” military “independent” of the US alliance. The blog represents a layer of the upper middle class that has embraced New Zealand imperialism in the Pacific; and maintaining these neo-colonial interests depends on support from the United States and Australia.

Damn! I had no idea TDB was a front for United States propaganda! That sneaky Bradbury has obviously been squirreling away the CIA’s Bitcoin down the back of his computer! I guess that’s why Tom includes TDB’s Editor in the upper-middle-class. All Martyn’s talk about being a member of the propertyless generation – nothing but a cover-story! In reality, he owns a five-bedroom, two-bathroom villa in Remuera and a tidy little holiday home in Taupo. (That’s where he keeps his deep-laid plans for the expansion of New Zealand imperialism. En garde Samoa! En garde Tonga!)

You get the picture. It’s always the same with WSWS stories. Excellent analysis right up until the last few paragraphs, where the writers are presumably instructed by their editors to go and spoil it all by spewing needless (if unintentionally hilarious) invective all over their ideological foes.

To be fair, at least the WSWS writers keep their critiques political – I’m thinking of getting a T-shirt that says: “Genuine Pseudo-Leftist”. It’s definitely a step-up from the relentless Woke vituperation found on Twitter. Even so, I always come away from the WSWS wishing that the defenders of Leon Trotsky’s legacy would finally dispense with the self-destructive self-indulgence of sectarianism.

Just imagine how far the revolution could be advanced if the Marxist Left confined itself to spreading the word that there are still chains to be lost – still a world to win.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 24 September 2021.

Should The Left Have Left The Labour Party?

Comrades In Arms: Counterfactual history is nothing if not entertaining. Matt McCarten and I have often wondered what would have happened if Jim Anderton and his left-wing comrades had stayed in the Labour Party instead of leaving it to form the NewLabour Party and the Alliance? Forced to crush its own left-wing, rather than simply wave it goodbye, how could the New Zealand Labour Party have avoided the fate of the British Labour Party under Tony Blair?

I’M NOT QUITE SURE that I agree with Matt McCarten. He takes the view that, with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better if the left of the Labour Party – the people who departed to form “NewLabour” with Jim Anderton in 1989 – had remained where they were. If they’d stayed put, he argues, Labour would have retained a solid core of democratic socialists who could, in time, have led the party out of its Neoliberal Babylonian Captivity and restored it to its rightful (or leftful) place on the political spectrum. Rather than the political cyphers currently holding ministerial warrants, says Matt, Labour would now have a Cabinet to match the nation-builders of yesteryear: politicians who could make things happen and get things done.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. When confronted with moral choices, it would, I’m sure, be very humbling to see with crystal clarity all the consequences of our decisions. That such foresight is not given to human-beings is probably just as well. How many great deeds would ever have been attempted if the doers had been allowed to glimpse their inevitable denouements? Would Lincoln have signed the Emancipation Proclamation if he had seen the Jim Crow South in all its white-sheeted horror? Would Mickey Savage have bothered with the Social Security Act, if he had been shown Ruth Richardson gleefully reducing his welfare state to rubble?

Forced to crush its own left-wing, how could the New Zealand Labour Party have avoided the fate of the British Labour Party under Tony Blair?

Personally, I don’t think a Blairite lurch to the right could have been avoided. Large though Labour’s left-wing faction was, it was never big enough to outvote the rest of the membership’s loyalty to their Members of Parliament. There was – and there remains – a deeply ingrained intolerance among Labour’s rank-and-file of anyone who purports to know more, or know better, than their elected representatives. Such people are only grudgingly tolerated in good times. In bad times they are treated like traitors.

This was true even in Labour’s glory days when the party’s membership hovered around 100,000. In the early 1980s it was not uncommon to encounter party branches with 400-500 members. Regional conferences of the party attracted hundreds of delegates, and policy debates could be fierce.

Open dissent, however, was never encouraged. When the Otago/Southland Region’s little newspaper, Caucus, published an article critical of David Lange’s economic competence, the Port Chalmers’ Branch of the party ceremonially burned all the copies it had been sent. Just a few weeks later, pleading lack of funds, the Regional Council shut Caucus down. “Your big mistake,” Richard Prebble told the crestfallen young editors of the paper, “was to assume that the New Zealand Labour Party is a democracy.”

Prebble was right. After Labour came to power in July 1984, and the long sad journey away from democratic socialism began, branch members (and even some trade union affiliates) became increasingly intolerant of criticism. By 1989, the year in which both Matt McCarten and I helped Jim Anderton split the Labour Party, this intolerance of dissent had morphed into a palpable ideological shift to the right.

Party members who, nine years before, had proudly voted for avowedly left-wing policy remits, were loyally supporting the Fourth Labour Government’s increasingly harsh neoliberal policies. Fewer and fewer members who were not already in Jim Anderton’s camp wanted to hear “their” MPs criticised. When the party finally split, those who opted to stay breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief. Now, at last, there could be unity!

And that is pretty much the way things have been since 1990. For the first 75 years of its life Labour had operated as both an ideological and an electoral force. People joined to promote left-wing policies and debate the issues of the day from a left-wing perspective. But, during that whole time, Labour was also a vehicle for carrying Labour candidates into Parliament.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these Labour MPs did not want anyone but themselves making party policy. They had no time for an independent, ideologically-driven and activist-led party organisation – and worked tirelessly to ensure that the tight little bands of supporters they gathered around themselves felt the same way. Following the 1989 split, it was these loyalists who inherited the Labour Party. In the years since, this loyalty-before-all-else attitude has only become more pronounced. Labour has become a party of helpers – not hecklers.

Hence, Matt’s second thoughts. But my own view is that, had we stayed, the latent hostility towards and intolerance of “disloyalty” that was already there in the party – the inevitable outgrowth of its role as an organisation for electing and re-electing Members of Parliament – would have been whipped-up into a poisonous lather of hatred and smeared all over the “traitors”.

By 1989, tens-of-thousands of members had already drifted away from the party in reaction to Rogernomics. Had those who stayed to fight neoliberalism not left with Anderton, I believe they would have been driven out. Some would have left because the hostility directed at them had become unbearable. Others would have quit because they could no longer stomach the party’s right-wing policies.

Matt, himself, knows the lengths to which the Labour caucus was prepared to go to protect itself from a party determined to force it to keep its promises to the electorate. He organised the successful ouster of Prebble’s supporters in the Auckland Central electorate committee, only to see the Labour Party injuncted by one of its own MPs, and threatened by a sizeable chunk of the rest with imminent mass defections to a new party. Matt counselled defiance, but the leaders of the party caved-in to the Rogernomes’ pressure.

Ironically, it was the creation of Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party and, in 1991, the Alliance of NewLabour, the Greens, Mana Motuhake and the Democrats, that forced the Labour Party caucus to keep itself electable by refusing to embrace Neoliberalism as fulsomely as the British and Australian Labour Parties, or the US Democratic Party. In the guise of the Alliance, Labour’s left not only paved the way for Anderton’s onetime protégé, Helen Clark, but cleared the path for MMP. Neoliberalism may not have been rolled back, but it ceased to roll forward. Practically all of the genuinely progressive reforms of the Labour-led Government of 1999-2008 were Alliance initiatives.

It is also true that while Matt McCarten refused to stay with Labour in 1989, he did agree to return to the party to become Leader of the Opposition David Cunliffe’s Chief-of-Staff in 2014. Without Matt’s wheeling and dealing in the aftermath of Cunliffe’s disastrous performance, Andrew Little could not have defeated Grant Robertson for the party leadership, nor been given three years to pull the bitterly divided Labour caucus back together. Without Andrew, of course, there would have been no Jacinda.

History has a quirky sense of humour. If I could have predicted her jokes before she hit me with her punchlines, I’d never have got out of bed – let alone the Labour Party.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 6 July 2021.

Community Or Chaos: Chris Trotter Talks To Marvin Hubbard.

MARVIN HUBBARD, US citizen by birth, New Zealand citizen by choice, Quaker and left-wing activist, has been broadcasting his show, "Community or Chaos", on Otago Access Radio for the best part of 30 years. On 24 November last year, I spoke with him about the outcome of the 2020 General Election. The podcast may be accessed here. (Just scroll down the list until your reach 24/11/20.)

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

The Hollow Persons (With Apologies To T.S. Eliot)

     

     Let’s do this
     Let’s keep moving

     I

We are the hollow persons
Inflated with hot air
Hanging together
For fear of hanging separately. Cut!
Our empty promises, when
First we make them,
Are far from empty.
We are inflamed by the thrill
Of passionate sounds,
Like Boomers watching porn,
Mistaking the image for the deed.

Policy without intention, sincerity without truth,
Activity without consequence, politics without effect.

Those who have moved on
From office to retirement, that powerless state,
Understand us best – see us clearly – not as lost
Treacherous souls, but only
As the hollow persons
Inflated with hot air.


     II

Eyes I dare not meet in studios
Or the Green Room
Thankfully do not appear:
There, all eyes blaze
Like television lights
There, lips curl cruelly,
And nostrils flare
In eager anticipation of
A broken political career.

I will not go again
To that dream factory
I’ll wear no more
The deliberate disguises of
Commentator, pundit, expert
In my field
Holding up a finger to discover
The prevailing political wind.

No more fulsome greetings
In the shallow money trench.


     III

It is a wavering realm
Guided by autocues
Raising statues of flesh
To receive each morning
The offering of last night’s ratings
Restoring a twinkle to fading stars.

   It is not like this
Outside the make-up room
Abiding alone
In those hours when
The camera’s tenderness
Is removed
And all earpieces fall silent.


     IV

There are no eyes here
No prying eyes
In this valley of abandoned dreams
This valley of hollow victories
Strewn with the broken bones of promises

   In this place of suspended hope
We cling to one another
Avoid commitment
Try to swallow the crumbs of official praise.

Paralysed, unless,
From somewhere,
A choir of cast-off heroes,
Voices from history,
Sing solidarity songs
To gather-in our lost flock
Of empty persons.

     V

This is the way we wash our hands
Wash our hands, wash our hands,
This is the way we wash our hands
Of everything left in the morning

  Between the Caucus
And the Treasury
Between the promise
And the press-release
Falls the shadow

               For this is the Empire of Neo-liberalism

  Between the Mosque Massacre
And KiwiBuild
Between the stamping out of Covid-19
And the ending of child poverty
Falls the shadow

               It’s only a three year term

  Between the Politics of Kindness
And the MSD counter
Between the promise of transformation
And maintaining business confidence
Between the loyal working-class
And the fickle middle-class
Falls the shadow

               For this is the Empire of Neo-Liberalism

For this is
Only a three year term
For

This is the way Jacinda ends
This is the way Jacinda ends
This is the way Jacinda ends
Not with a pang but a simper.


Chris Trotter
2020

This poetic parody was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 November 2020.

The Crowd That Booed.

Social Distancing: Student protesters make their way carefully around the working class. Dunedin 1994. Photo Otago Daily Times.

IT WAS THE LARGEST CROWD I had ever addressed – and it booed me. In 1990 the Labour Government of Geoffrey Palmer (look him up!) announced that university tuition fees would rise from $129.00 to $1,250.00 per year – an eye-watering 969% increase! Unsurprisingly, the news was not well-received by New Zealand’s 100,000 university students. When Labour's policy was first floated the year before, the then Education Minister, Phil Goff, was mobbed by hundreds of angry students at Victoria University who followed him all the way down Wellington's Terrace hurling abuse. In Dunedin, students from the University of Otago turned out to protest Labour’s fee increase in unprecedented numbers. I was one of a large number of people invited to address them.

Why? Because only a matter of months before Goff's announcement the Labour Party had split. Jim Anderton, followed by thousands of others, had abandoned the party of Rogernomics to form the NewLabour Party. The students’ association wanted to know NewLabour’s policy on user-pays education – and I – naïve fool that I was – told them.

It started well. There were cheers when I told them that the NewLabour Party was committed to providing a free tertiary education to every young New Zealander who wanted one: that Goff’s hated $1,250.00 fee would be scrapped. A more sensible aspiring politician would have stopped right there. For better or for worse, however, I did not fall into that category. Promising to abolish tuition fees was only part of the story, I told the assembled thousands. In order to fund free tertiary education for all, New Zealand would have to re-introduce the sharply progressive income tax which the Fourth Labour Government had dismantled. To make the first promise without making voters aware of the second would be dishonest. Zero student fees could only be paid for by higher taxes.

That’s when the booing started. I quit while I was behind – a sadder but a wiser man.

I was 34 years-old in 1990 – roughly fifteen years senior to the crowd in front of me. People were just beginning to refer to these youngsters as “Generation X” – Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s generation. Many of these kids would fight the good fight against user-pays education with energy and dedication right through the 1990s. Grant, himself, was elected President of the Otago University Students Association in 1993 and would go on to co-lead the national student organisation three years later. That said, I couldn’t forget those Gen-Xers’ cheers for free education, nor their boos for higher taxes. Neither, it would appear, could Grant.

Few economists and even fewer political journalists are predicting that Thursday’s Budget will feature a sharp rise in taxes. Envisaged instead is a massive increase in Government borrowing. Some younger commentators have worked out that the burden of repaying the enormous foreign debt this government is racking-up will be borne by them and their children – and they’re not happy about it. There is talk about extracting at least some of the repayment from older New Zealanders. After all, they argue, all of this uniting against Covid-19 has been for their benefit. The least they can do is give something up for the generations who will bear the brunt of the economic crisis which combatting the virus has precipitated. One of the Aussie bank economists has even, in the finest Shock Doctrine style, called for drastic action on superannuation, the retirement age, and untaxed capital gains.

Not wanting to provoke the election-compromising boos that such measures would elicit – not least from New Zealand’s most assiduous voters, the Over-60s – Grant is most unlikely to do any of those things. He, at least, is not so naïve as to waste all the election-victory-enhancing cheers which his Thursday promises to spend whatever it takes to get New Zealand out of trouble are certain to produce, by idiotically going on to explain how he intends to pay for them! Instead, he will reassure us of just how much scope for borrowing his prudent fiscal management of the New Zealand economy has provided. And there’s plenty of money on offer! In the immortal words of John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg) “If we stand in the queue with our hats on, we can borrow a few million more.” Verily, we don’t know how lucky we are to have such a government.

Few New Zealanders see as clearly as John Minto what will be sacrificed to pay the vastly expanded mortgage that Grant is negotiating with overseas lenders. All the fine ideas about overcoming child poverty, humanising the welfare system, building state houses, tackling mental illness and doing something real about global warming will, to use Grant’s own words: “be put on ice”. If politics is the language of priorities, then almost without exception it speaks with a middle-class accent.

Because, in the subsequent hours and days – and years – in which I relived the humiliation of that booing crowd, I was finally blessed with the consoling insight that, big as it was, it represented only a very narrow slice of the New Zealand population. Moreover, it was not a slice that was ever going to welcome the news that its parents and, eventually, itself, would be called upon to pay, and pay handsomely, for the maintenance of the sort of society that offered all its young people a free tertiary education. That consolation came when I remembered that I was not the only speaker to be booed that day. The young Maori woman who spoke of the needs of her people, and of their just historical claims upon the resources of the Pakeha nation – they booed her, too.

The bourgeoisie, you see, has always been extremely keen on getting into heaven; but it’s damned if it’s ever been willing to die to get there. Always, that’s been somebody else’s job – somebody poor.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 May 2020.

Separating The Singer From The Song.

The Singer And His Song: Is it possible to judge a work of art purely on its own merits? Can we truly set aside what we know about the artist and focus exclusively on what he or she has created? Can the singer ever be separated from the song?

BACK IN THE DAYS when I boasted much more hair and carried far fewer kilos, I was right into (as we said back then) writing songs. One of those songs, The Other Side of Town, opened like this:

Well, the street has been my teacher

And poverty my nurse

Oh dear, how my family and friends chortled. “You wouldn’t know how to live out on the street if your life depended on it!”, snorted one.

“Raised in poverty?”, laughed another, “you must be writing about somebody else!”

Which, of course, I was. Though the song is written in the first person, it is not in the least autobiographical. The “hero” of the song: a young man from the wrong side of the tracks, who has fallen hard for a young woman from the right side; is entirely fictional.

In fine romantic style, he contrasts his sufficient-unto-the-day approach to life with the complicated mix of expectations and aspirations of his middle-class girlfriend:

But you have built a puzzle

And I’m the piece that just don’t fit

You fret about tomorrow

Whereas I don’t care a bit

Aware of the sheer unlikelihood of two people so dissimilar enjoying a long relationship, the hero anticipates his lover’s decision to break it off and forgives her in advance. All he asks is that he not be forgotten:

I don’t mind that you refuse me

I don’t want to tie you down

Just remember me as someone from

The other side of town.

Banal and adolescent? I’m afraid so. But my family and friends reaction to The Other Side of Town provided me with a very early introduction to a problem that is still very much with us. Is it possible to judge a work of art purely on its own merits? Can we truly set aside what we know about the artist and focus exclusively on what he or she has created? Can the singer ever be separated from the song?

Quite a few of my friends just couldn’t manage it. They simply couldn’t reconcile the rather innocent lad who had written and was singing the song, with the worldly, Luke Perry-type character who was its subject.

“What do you know about any of this stuff? Where do you get off pretending to be a kid from the wrong side of the tracks?”

Forty-five years after the song was written, I suspect a younger generation of listeners would recoil with additional disdain from the lofty condescension and “mansplaining” contained in the lyrics. “Bloody hell!”, they’d guffaw, “the poor girl’s well rid of him! What an obnoxious macho prick!”

To which, in my own defence, I would offer up L. P. Hartley’s famous observation: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

If we are to admire, or condemn, artists – as artists – we should do so solely on the basis of whether or not their creations move us towards a deeper understanding of the drama and the mystery of human experience. As individuals, they may be deeply flawed beings. Indeed, deeply flawed individuals and great art have a curious way of feeding off one another. But does that mean that we should burn all of James K. Baxter’s magnificent poetry, because in a private letter to a friend he admits to raping his wife?  Should Beat It and Billie Jean never be played again, because Michael Jackson stands accused of being a pedophile?

That great beauty, and profound insights into what it means to be human, can emerge from such broken vessels surely only makes the miracle of artistic creation all the more extraordinary. The Italian painter, Caravaggio, was a murderer. Does that require us to turn his dark and deeply disturbing paintings to the wall? Or, does knowing that he killed a man allow us to see just that little bit further into the darkness that dwells in us all?

Because the truth of the matter is that no human-being is entirely guiltless. We are all flawed in ways we hope that none of those who know us and love us will ever discover. Artists allow us to expiate our guilt by making visible in words, paintings, drama and music the hidden sources of human distemper. They are society’s antibodies: the ones who make sure that we possess the strength to resist the sins that devoured them.

As I wrote all those years ago:

The road you walked was steady

While the trail I blazed seemed rough

But, girl, the alley always threatens those

Who will not call its bluff.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 8 March 2019.

Melting Into Air.

The When And The How: Chris Trotter reads Marx in the Art Room of Heretaunga College, Upper Hutt, circa 1973.

IN A RADIO INTERVIEW, earlier this week, I was asked how I became interested in politics. The question threw me for a minute, and I’m afraid the answer I gave was more about when – rather than how – politics first grabbed me.

Truth to tell, it wasn’t really politics that grabbed me, but Bob Harvey. The young advertising executive’s astonishingly effective campaign ad for Norman Kirk’s Labour Party in the weeks leading up to the 1969 general election transfixed my 13-year-old self. That state-of-the-art split-screen montage of Kirk running up the steps of Parliament, while Labour’s chart-topping campaign song enjoined New Zealanders to “make things happen this year” left an indelible impression. Nearly fifty years later, I can still sing that song!

That was the “when”. The “how” was different.

The three years between the 1969 and 1972 general elections saw the flowering of the New Zealand counter-culture. There was something in the air – and it wasn’t just the smoke from cannabis reefers. The universities were where most of the action was, but even in the nation’s high schools, the whiff of revolution was unmistakable.

I say “whiff” – but that is just a metaphor. The real vector for revolutionary ideas was the printed word. My art teacher was enrolled part-time at university and would bring copies of the student newspaper back to the art room. There, her senior pupils would devour them from cover to cover.

It was the first time that I had ever encountered the possibility that there might me more ways of looking at the world than from the very limited perspectives of the daily press. Was the Vietnam War a noble struggle against communist aggression? Or, just the latest manifestation of western imperialism? Should politics be kept out of sport? If so, then why was the South African government politicising rugby? Was atmospheric nuclear testing safe? Or, were the French recklessly contaminating the pristine environment of the South Pacific?

When, in November 1972, the New Zealand electorate threw out the only government I’d ever known, and the incoming Labour Party took bold action on all of the issues debated in the student press, it really did feel to me like a revolution.

Perhaps that’s why, in the early months of 1973, I could be found on the mezzanine floor of the school library reading The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Recalling that moment, I find myself amazed that a New Zealand secondary school library actually possessed a copy of The Communist Manifesto! Most of all, though, I recall the sense of the world suddenly being made intelligible.

Don’t get me wrong, reading Karl Marx – the 200^th anniversary of whose birth, on 5 May 1818, is being celebrated across the world next weekend – didn’t make me want to rush out and join the Communist Party of New Zealand. What it did help me do, however, was understand capitalism. Not in the way a professional economist understands capitalism (which is hardly at all) but as a dynamic historical process that is constantly shaping and reshaping our world.

I may only have been a callow youth of 17, but I knew great writing when I pulled it off the shelves:

“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air”.

“All that is solid melts into air”: nothing I have read about capitalism in the ensuing 45 years (and I’ve read a lot!) comes anywhere close to capturing the essence of the system’s power to disrupt and transform as that spine-tingling phrase. As we plunge, headlong, into the age of robotics, artificial intelligence and catastrophic job-loss, only a fool would argue that Marx and Engels called it wrong.

So, now you know the “when” and the “how” of my becoming both a student of, and a participant in, the art of politics. For nearly half-a-century, I have watched with a mixture of pity and awe as history has proved the authors of The Communist Manifesto correct.

So much that I believed solid has melted into air.

I’m still thinking about the “why”.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of 27 April 2018.

Conversation In The Public Square.

“And those conversations continued in the newspapers, on the local radio and television stations, on the stage of the playhouse, in the cinemas. It all merged into one grand public conversation: loud, uncoordinated and gloriously democratic!”

IT WAS A BRIGHT mid-autumn day and I was waiting for an important call. Turning a corner, I found myself in the city’s broad public square. Given the time of day, it was surprisingly empty. There were fewer trees than I remembered and the tall corporate towers that reared up on every side restricted the amount of sunlight. There was one patch of it, however, a few metres distant, and a bench upon which I could sit and soak it up.

So intent was I upon the screen of my cell-phone that I did not notice the old man’s arrival.

“Put it away, son,” he chided, “and take in the world of three dimensions.”

I laughed rather self-consciously and explained that I was waiting for an important call.

“It won’t come any quicker, for all of your rapt attention.”

“That’s true,” I said, slipping the phone into my pocket. “Not that there’s much to see in the square today.”

“Not compared to some of the days I’ve seen”, he sighed.

“I bet you’ve seen some sights in your time,” I replied. “Could tell some stories?”

“That, I could, son, that I could. This was such a vital place once – the centre of the whole city. Everybody came through here, one way or the other. And around the four sides of the square, were all the important buildings. The cathedral, the council chambers, the university – they were all here. Along with the playhouse, three or four cinemas, the public library and art gallery. I remember the newspaper offices – both of them – and the television studios.

“At lunchtime, and at the end of the working day, all the people who worked in those buildings would pour out into this public square. They would mix and mingle, argue and fight, fall in – and out – of love. This square was where the city came alive. It’s future shape and purpose were forged in a thousand – ten thousand – passionate conversations.”

I looked around. None of the buildings he’d described remained. In their place rose the headquarters of banks, insurance companies and accounting firms: glass and steel towers rising up, up, up above the public square. Some had preserved the facades of the older structures they’d replaced. They looked forlorn and out-of-place. As foreign to their new function as the corporations who had, so public spiritedly, preserved them.

“And those conversations continued in the newspapers, on the local radio and television stations, on the stage of the playhouse, in the cinemas. It all merged into one grand public conversation: loud, uncoordinated and gloriously democratic!”

“It makes me wonder how the city could afford it all”, I responded.

“It’s a question I ask myself, son. We were so much smaller then, and yet we were able to sustain so much more than we do today. Look at those buildings, son. Thousands of people work in them – many more than in the past. And yet, at lunchtime and at the end of the day they scurry across the square, eyes glued to their cellphones, talking to no one. The passion’s gone, son. It breaks my heart.”

“No, no, it hasn’t gone”, I replied hastily. “It’s just gone on-line. Checkout Facebook and Twitter – you find plenty of passion there!”

“Facebook! Twitter!” The old man practically spat out the words. “They’re eating the younger generation’s soul! And making Mark Zuckerberg millions of dollars every second! Listen, son, I remember standing in this square when it was full-to-bursting with young men and women. They carried banners and waved placards and shouted slogans. They came here to end a war; to sever all ties with Apartheid sport; to abolish nuclear weapons. And they weren’t brought here by Facebook or Twitter. They were brought here by pamphlets and posters; articles and columns; documentaries and current affairs shows on radio and television. Dear God, son! It’s what the public square is for!

From my pocket, my cellphone trilled insistently.

“Excuse me for a moment,” I said apologetically, “But I have to take this.”

I turned away, clamping the phone tight to my ear to hear more clearly what the person at the other end of the call was saying.

“Good news!”, I cried.

But the old man had gone.

The column you have just read is my last for The Press. I sign-off with an immense sense of gratitude at having been afforded the privilege of addressing its readers for the past eight years. Cantabrians have lived through a great many tragic and tumultuous events since 2010 and I wish to thank most sincerely all those who, in the midst of stress and strife, still found the time to read and respond to my words. In taking my leave, may I wish the brave and resilient citizens of Christchurch the very best of futures.

This short story was originally published in The Press of Tuesday 24 April 2018.

Playing Sergeant Pepper.

“It was twenty years ago today,” according to the famous Beatles’ track, that “Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play”. Unfortunately, the files on my computer don’t go back quite that far. What I can show you, however, is how “the one and only” Helen Clark taught Labour’s band to play exactly fifteen years ago today. Read this excerpt from my “Politics” column, published in the weekly business newspaper, The Independent, on 19 December 2001, and you’ll be amazed at just how dramatically Labour has gone “in and out of style” between then and now.

 

“WITH FIFTY-ONE PERCENT SUPPORT in the latest CM Research poll, the Labour Party is cruising towards the Year’s end on an enormous wave of public support. What is the secret behind Labour’s winning political formula – a formula which has so far eluded all of its competitors? To hear Helen Clark, or Michael Cullen, or Steve Maharey tell it, the story of Labour’s success is a simple one: “Under-promise and over-deliver”.

 

According to this theory, New Zealanders no longer believe in big promises – so don’t make any. Nor do they expect “the gummint” to do very much of anything to help them out. So, keeping those small promises, and, even more astonishing, actually doing a little bit more than you promised, leaves the voters feeling pathetically grateful.

 

More cynical observers point to Labour’s utter infatuation with opinion polling and focus groups. Its apparatus for taking the public pulse is state-of-the-art, and provides the political leadership with more-or-less instant feedback. Knowing how the electorate is responding to Government policy allows Clark and her ministers to remain in lock-step with public opinion. As the French revolutionary, Danton, is supposed to have remarked, seeing a throng of Parisians passing below his host’s window: “Excuse me, I am their leader – I must follow them.”

 

But these explanations are simply not sufficient to explain Labour’s almost effortless domination of New Zealand politics. Somehow, Clark and her colleagues have plugged themselves – or perhaps that should read “found themselves plugged” – into the zeitgeist of the early 21^st Century.

 

Nothing else can really explain Labour’s apparent imperviousness to 2001’s political disasters – and there have been a few: the Hobbs and Bunkle allowances scandal; the Peter Davis brouhaha; the scrapping of the Skyhawks; the fiscal implications of Michael Cullen’s Super Fund; the underwhelming impact of the Knowledge Wave Conference; the Colonel’s letter and the General’s shredder; Air New Zealand; the war in Afghanistan; Bathgate-gate. It’s a pretty long list, but in spite of them all Labour remains 21 percentage points ahead of its nearest rival. Clearly something else is going on here.

 

The French would call it ennui. Throughout 2001 a feeling of enervation has pervaded New Zealand society, a listlessness that renders outrage and anger altogether too exhausting. It’s almost as if the past fifteen years have left the population feeling numb, shagged-out, too tired to care. Political life is seen as being vaguely ridiculous – filled with people who very badly need to get out more. Political emotion – in particular – is almost universally seen as ersatz, fake, phoney, and too transparently manipulative to be taken seriously.

 

This is where Helen Clark comes to the fore. Her dry - bordering on bored - approach to the business of government perfectly matches the public mood. Politics is a bloody silly business, the Prime Minister seems to be saying, but since somebody has to do it, it might as well be somebody intelligent, experienced and unflappable - like me. To which nearly four out of ten New Zealanders consistently respond “Amen.”

 

Clark’s ministers take their cue from “The Boss” – presenting a public face of stolid competence almost totally devoid of colour. Like the rest of New Zealand, they seem resigned to just getting on with it, and as far as most of the electorate is concerned, that’s just fine.

 

The whole essence of this style of government was summed up by one of the Prime Ministers spin doctors at the recent Labour Party Conference: “Sure it’s dull”, he said, “but that’s okay. Dull is good.”

 

Fifty-one percent of the country seems to agree.”

 

I’m just not sure whether all of that is “guaranteed to raise a smile” … or a tear.

 

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 19 December 2016.

In Defence Of Conservative Leftism.

Standing Up For Democratic Socialism: In the present political climate, speaking up for the Left’s core principles and the protection of the constitutional framework that makes such expression possible, should be the progressive movement’s top priorities.

 

“CONSERVATIVE LEFTISTS” espousing “conservative leftism” have become a thing. The term is applied (neither generously nor kindly) to those ageing members of the broader New Zealand Left whose understanding of progressive ideals was forged in the 1960s and 70s. Generally speaking, conservative leftists are depicted as political has-beens whose only continuing contribution to the progressive cause involves standing in its way.

 

Conservative leftists (among whom I proudly count myself) naturally dispute this extremely negative characterisation of their contribution. They would argue that, in the present political climate, speaking up for the Left’s core principles and the protection of the constitutional framework that makes such expression possible, should be the progressive movement’s top priorities.

 

Balancing individual rights against collective need has always been the Left’s most daunting challenge. Err too far in advancing the former and we end up like the New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) in the 1980s. Advance too energetically the claims of the latter and we rehearse all the worst aspects of Soviet-style socialism and the Bolivarian populism of present-day Venezuela.

 

The political system which makes possible the simultaneous advancement of both individual rights and collective needs is representative democracy. Which is why the NZLP, in its post-war search for a term to distinguish its own political philosophy from the totalitarian Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the Soviets, hit upon the term “Democratic Socialism” (the promotion of which still constitutes one of Labour’s key objectives). That political parties are required to seek a popular mandate for their policies – and then have that mandate reaffirmed – militates against the sort of revolutionary extremism that, for nearly a century, has led so many people to associate socialism with regimentation and repression.

 

Conservative leftism’s unwavering commitment to democracy (and to all the patient political persuasion that goes with it) not only earns it the scorn of the revolutionary left, but also the enmity of the neoliberal right. This mutual loathing has, on occasion, given rise to some pretty unholy political alliances. Confronted with the unwillingness of the Pakeha majority to elect Maori to public office, for example, radical leftists have cheered on the Executive’s use of special appointments to by-pass the electoral process altogether.

 

This “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” approach to politics is deeply offensive to conservative leftists. If the history of the last forty years has taught us anything, it is that neoliberalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. The “governance” we hear so much about from neoliberal bureaucrats is a very different beast from the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” that defines representative democracy. Neoliberals understand as well as conservative leftists the power of the democratic process to enforce an equitable balance between the demands of the market and the needs of the population – and they will go to almost any lengths to undermine it. Just ask the people of Canterbury.

 

Allowing the ruling class to pull off an end-run around democracy may work to the short-term advantage of the radical left on a limited number of highly contentious issues – like affirmative action – but in the long run such tactics can only weaken the institutions that make it possible for ordinary people to challenge their rulers. Conservative leftists would further argue that by offering no serious opposition to the radical left’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic and pro-immigration agenda, neoliberalism has shown the politics of identity to be entirely compatible with extreme individualism and unfettered market freedom.

 

It should go without saying, but in the febrile atmosphere of contemporary leftism I suppose it must be stated explicitly, that the conservative left in no way resiles from its long and proud history of battling racism, sexism and homophobia. The dismantling of all legislative barriers to the full and equal participation of all citizens in the life of their communities is fundamental to the Left’s emancipatory narrative. Where conservative leftists part company with their more radical comrades, however, is over the degree to which the coercive powers of the state should be deployed to curb the expression of personal prejudice. State sanctions against hate speech may silence hateful expression, but they do not extinguish hatred itself. Hate is a patient and depressingly resilient human emotion. Just ask Donald Trump.

 

The conservative left’s wariness of asking the state to fight the progressive movement’s battles for it also extends to the foreign policy arena. Some of the most vituperative critics of conservative leftists are to be found among those radical left-wing “humanitarian interventionists” who, on the vexed issue of the Syrian Civil War, have argued themselves onto the side of western imperialism. They rail against the alleged hypocrisy of leftists who criticised the US invasion of Iraq, but have maintained an immoral silence over Russia’s support for the government of Bashar al-Assad.

 

Conservative leftism’s response is simple. Wars are such appalling things that the best foreign policy course is almost always to avoid getting into them. If war rages on nonetheless, then the next best course of action is to bring the fighting to an end. If this can be done by negotiation, then negotiate. If negotiation fails, then the next next best way to stop a war is to win it. This is exactly what Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies are doing.

 

It is a regrettable but undeniable fact that those who cry: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” are seldom to be found living in the rubble. It is equally true that over the course of the last three unnecessarily bloody decades, western imperialism’s “humanitarian interventions” have created a great deal of rubble.

 

The conservative left’s unwavering purpose is to preserve progressivism as a movement with mass appeal. That means articulating and adapting the Left’s 250-year-old narrative about freedom, equality and solidarity to a post-modern age in which there is little patience for the grand narratives of the past. If Frederic Jameson is right, and post-modernism is indeed the “cultural logic of late capitalism”, then the system’s impatience with metanarratives is unsurprising. Stories are powerful things. Big stories show us how to live, and how to die. Even bigger stories teach us about the values that are worth living – and dying – for.

 

For the very good reason that it has freed and fed more people than any other grand narrative in human history, we conservative leftists will continue to guard closely the story of the Left.

 

A version of this essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 18 December 2016.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO READERS: Moderating Comments On "Bowalley Road".

A Simple Message: All I am asking from those who wish to participate in this blog is a modicum of self-discipline and a generous helping of courtesy.

READERS’ COMMENTS to the postings on Bowalley Road constitute an integral part of the blog. That is why I do not intend to follow the example of Radio New Zealand and The Spinoff by switching-off the comments function.

 

I do, however, understand why those two sites chose to do so. The viciousness and crudity of anonymous commentators is extremely wearying to the spirit. Though the worst examples are swiftly deleted, they must first be read – and that is not a pleasant duty. Also vexatious are the tangential conversations and ideological disputations that ramble on between commentators. Though obviously engaging for their participants, they contribute very little to the overall enjoyment of the blog.

 

With these issues in mind, I have decided to tighten-up the moderation of comments to Bowalley Road.

 

The first and most important change relates to anonymous commentators. From now on all anonymous comments will be deleted without being read. My strong preference is for commentators to use their real names. I do, however, understand why some people feel very uneasy about doing so – especially on such an overtly political blog as Bowalley Road. Accordingly, I will continue to accept pseudonyms, but only with the proviso that commentators, having chosen a name, stick with it. The use of multiple pseudonyms, if detected, will result in the offender being permanently banned from commenting on Bowalley Road.

 

The second change in moderation policy will be to shut down all tangential conversations and/or slanging matches between commentators. Those deemed to be straying from the issues raised in the posting will be warned once to stay on-topic. Persistent off-topic commentary will be deleted.

 

With these changes, I hope to restore Bowalley Road’s commentary threads to their former high standard of tone and content. In essence, all I am asking from those who wish to participate in this blog is a modicum of self-discipline and a generous helping of courtesy.

 

Chris Trotter.

 This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.