Our Rough Beast.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1921

ALL OVER THE WORLD, devout Christians will be reaching for their bibles, reading and re-reading Revelation 13:16-17. For the benefit of all you non-Christians out there, these are the verses describing the economic power of the beast.

“And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, and that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

Okay, okay, 47 is not 666, and the ergot-induced visions of a First Century hermit, living in a cave on the Greek island of Patmos, are hardly the most reliable guide to what is happening in the Year of Our Lord 2025. But, you have to admit, the spectacle of Donald Trump commanding the whole earth (including the penguins of Australia’s Heard and McDonalds Islands) to bend the knee to his universal tariffs, is pretty evocative of what are beginning to look remarkably like the “end times” – of globalisation.

The question I hear people ask, over and over again, is “How?” How did this happen? How is it that the CEOs of America’s largest corporations have been willing to watch trillions of dollars knocked off the value of their collective stocks – in silence? Why hasn’t Trump been summoned, as Howard Beale, hero of the 1976 movie classic Network, was summoned, to be reminded of the exact nature of the activity in which he is engaged? Why hasn’t Trump been told:

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature ….. and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! ….. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”

Of course the world was very different in the mid-1970s. For a start, the American constitution had just been stress-tested by Watergate – tip of the criminal iceberg that was the Nixon presidency – and it had come through with flying colours. To be sure, the USA of President Jimmy Carter faced numerous challenges, but the American system still worked, it hadn’t fallen apart.

Trump’s political success was predicated on the contrary proposition being true – America was falling apart. As evidence of its disintegration, the USA’s two-party system no longer seemed capable of choosing presidential candidates who could reach out and connect with the crucial clusters of angry voters, living in swing states, who now decided American elections.

The buy-in simply wasn’t there for the traditional country-club Republicans, or the bureaucratic liberals of a Democratic Party which, rather than representing American workers, condescended to and patronised them.

When push had come to shove in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, the “Yes We Can” president, Barack Obama, had saved Wall Street, and allowed Main Street to go to the Devil. As a consequence, the game of politics became increasingly difficult to play.

Highly educated Americans with good jobs couldn’t understand poorly educated Americans with shit jobs. The Republicans drinking at the Country Club had no idea what sort of candidate alienated working-class Democrats getting drunk at their local bar might be willing to vote for.

But Donald Trump did. Like that other great political adventurer, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1808–1873) who made himself President, then Emperor, of France in the 1850s and 60s, Trump forced his way between the wheels and cogs of a political system that had ground to a halt, gave the machinery a hefty whack, and achieved a surprise victory that delighted his friends to roughly the same degree that it confounded his enemies.

By 2025 what used to be true of the USA is fast becoming true of the whole world. Everywhere, the wheels and the cogs are stuck. The global machinery needs a hefty whack. Sadly, the only politicians willing to deliver such blows are openly scornful of democratic pieties.

And so, the hour of Trump, our rough beast, comes round at last.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 11 April 2025.

Adapting To Trump’s Changing Climate.

New World Orders: The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly.

IT IS, SURELY, the ultimate Millennial revenge fantasy. Calling senior Baby-Boomer and Gen-X bureaucrats and asking them to justify their salaries. “Come on, dude, just tell me what it is that you do!” All the time knowing that the hapless federal employee at the other end of the call is fighting for his job, his status, his self-respect.

Except, this scenario is no fantasy. Such conversations have been going on for days: proof that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is every bit as real and scary as its critics predicted. Musk’s twenty-something “tech geek” hires are cutting a swathe through the federal bureaucracy with the implacable determination of the Grim Reaper.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world struggles to make sense of the Trump Administration. What is its ultimate purpose? What is the nature of the political dynamic driving the raging torrent of Executive Orders pouring out of the Trump White House?

It is a testament to the essential mildness of their country’s politics and politicians that New Zealanders struggle to make any kind of sense of Donald Trump. Can he really be serious? Is there the slightest method to policies that strike so many Kiwis as utter madness?

There is – but it’s in the service of an agenda so completely foreign to the thinking of the vast majority of the world’s politicians, administrators and journalists, that even conceptualising it requires considerable effort.

Consider the following self-characterisation, offered-up to a puzzled world by one of Trump’s most hardcore supporters, Steve Bannon:

“I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”

Seriously? How can a MAGA Republican possibly cite the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, as his inspiration? Wasn’t Lenin responsible for establishing one of the most ferocious states in all of human history?

He certainly was, but Bannon’s Leninist sympathies amply confirm the old French aphorism: Les extrèmes se touchent. (The extremes find each other.)

Certainly, that is what the world is currently witnessing in the United States. The deliberate destruction of the 80-year-old state machine arising out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies of the 1930s – by right-wing revolutionaries determined to create a new one?

It’s what Bannon attempted to do in 2017, when he was, briefly, Trump’s White House chief-of-staff. But, he failed.

The strength and resilience of the old state machine was simply beyond the First Trump Administration’s powers. The “Country-Club Republicans” had yet to be purged from the Republican Party. The Supreme Court was not yet fully harnessed to the Right’s agenda. Most importantly, Trump and his MAGA court had seriously underestimated the obstructive capabilities of the ancien regime. Transformative regime-change clearly required an “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” battle-plan – and Trump 45 didn’t have one.

The crucial difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47 is that the forty-seventh president of the United States does have a battle-plan, Project 2025, and one of its principal authors, Russell Vought, has been safely installed as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. If the American ship-of-state has a bridge, then the OMB is it.

Trump’s greatest challenge, over the next four years, will be working out how to smash the status quo without, simultaneously, smashing the working-class Americans whose votes carried him to a comprehensive (if narrow) electoral victory. That Trump’s MAGA movement expects him to unleash holy vengeance upon the “Deep State” (aka the old state machinery) is indisputable. Less certain, however, is whether those same working-class voters appreciate how effectively the old state machinery has protected them and their families for the past 80 years.

If Elon Musk is to keep his promise to carve one trillion dollars off the Federal Budget, then the health, education and welfare services currently available to working-class Americans cannot avoid taking a massive hit.

Trump’s Democratic Party opponents simply cannot understand why American workers don’t get this. But, the very fact that the Democrats don’t “get it” is the very reason so many of those workers gave their votes to Trump. The extraordinary cluelessness of Democratic Party politicians when it comes to communicating effectively with ordinary Americans, let alone understanding their grievances, explains entirely the latter’s indifference to the plight of those federal bureaucrats on the receiving end of Musk’s tech geek interrogators.

Revolutions happen when, at roughly the same time, both the elites and the struggling masses arrive at the same conclusion: things cannot go on as they are. That the respective solutions advanced by these two groups are likely to diverge spectacularly only begins to matter after they have, between them, brought the failing system to its knees.

New Zealanders who shake their heads in disbelief at the speed and breadth of the Trump Administration’s changes are either too young to remember “Rogernomics”, or too embarrassed to acknowledge how fulsomely they embraced its breakneck “reforms”. If the machinations of Elon Musk seem sinister today, then so, too, should the machinations of Bob Jones and all the other ideologically-driven members of New Zealand’s elites back in 1984.

Those who argue that the “quiet revolution” of the 1980s simply represented New Zealand’s rather belated recognition that the world had changed, can hardly now object that the USA has collectively made the same determination. The economic and geopolitical doctrines that have dominated the policy-making of the last 40 years have been recognised, by billionaires and “deplorables” alike, as no longer fit for purpose.

Globalisation. Free Trade. The International Rules-Based Order. Donald Trump’s black felt pen has confirmed the death sentences of all three. Likewise the entrenched institutional power of the professional and managerial classes which emerged out of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly. Faster and better than anybody else, Trump has grasped the possibilities of a world which is more in tune with the nationalist and imperialist marching songs of the Nineteenth Century, than the Kumbaya globalist singalongs of President George H. W. Bush’s and President Bill Clinton’s “New World Order”.

A President who openly canvasses the annexation of Greenland, Canada, Panama and the Gaza Strip, to the applause of an admirer of Lenin who once, rather incautiously, confessed: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power”; should alert us to the fact that, like Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard of Oz, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 February 2025.

DeepSeek, And Ye Shall Find.

 The East Is Red: Journalists and commentators are referring to the sudden and disruptive arrival of DeepSeek as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

“DEEPSEEK” is a pretty good name for an artificially intelligent Chinese chatbot. Not as good as Douglas Adams’ “Deep Thought”, which, as all readers of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know, was the name of the super-computer tasked with answering the Ultimate Question – i.e. the meaning of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” – and which came back, 7.5 million years later, with the less-than-helpful, “42”.

That said, the numbers associated with the arrival of DeepSeek are nothing if not compelling. One trillion, for example, is the number of US dollars knocked-off the collective value of the companies listed on the “tech-heavy” Nasdaq index. $US600 billion of that trillion is attributable to the plummeting value of America’s leading AI chip manufacturer, Nvidia – the greatest single one-day loss ever recorded by a US listed company.

To rub salt in the American tech-lords’ financial wounds, the Chinese creators of DeepSeek claim to have spent just $US6 million on perfecting their chatbot, which they are generously offering to the world free, gratis, and for nothing.

No wonder journalists and commentators are referring to all this as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

The success of DeepSeek, like the success of Sputnik, throws into serious doubt a whole host of American assumptions. Not the least of these being the typically brash and overconfident American assumption that the United States enjoys an unassailable lead in AI and is, therefore, destined to be the prime beneficiary of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” this crucial innovation will, inevitably, usher-in.

The future is, thus, an American “lock”. Too far ahead of its rivals to be overtaken technologically, the economic and military hegemony of the USA will remain incontestable – a “golden future” indeed!

“Meh!”, says China, “We shall see.”

Viewed from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the future of the USA does not seem so golden. Yes, America’s big, powerful, and well-protected – but so was Goliath.

Beijing observes a blustering bully in the White House, throwing his weight around, and expecting the rest of the world to be intimidated. But the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is not afraid of Donald Trump’s tariffs, seeing them as proof, not of America’s economic strength, but of its weakness.

Beggar-thy-neighbour economics will not keep America at the top of the global heap. A superpower that raises its drawbridge and hides behind its walls is no longer a superpower.

It is now more than two decades since the USA, in full control of the UN Security Council, thanks to the support of both the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China, was able to unleash shock and awe upon any nation that dared to challenge, or simply got in the way of the “New World Order” Washington was fashioning out of its total Cold War victory.

But, the hyper-globalised world that American neoliberalism produced succeeded only in enriching China and hollowing-out the United States as a coherent social and political entity. Trump, far from being the apotheosis of American success is the tawdry emblem of American failure.

The only redeeming feature of the 47th president’s wrecking-ball administration is its determination to implement Trump’s populist agenda. In doing so, however, it will not make America great: “Promises made, promises kept” will only make America bankrupt.

Trump’s long and lurid career has left him supremely indifferent to the perils of debt. But, there is a big difference between a media-savvy paper billionaire shrugging off his financial failures and striking out in a new direction; and the world’s largest economy, fast approaching the limits of its ability to print its way out of irredeemable insolvency.

The timing of DeepSeek, like most Chinese moves, shows every sign of being carefully thought through. It speaks of a regime that is happy to demonstrate, rather than brag about, its technological prowess. Such seemingly effortless (and cost-effective!) competence is likely to play better than America’s punitive tariffs and sanctions, especially on those continents where Chinese capital and expertise are, increasingly, on display.

Perhaps the Americans should ask DeepSeek to predict the future of their once “indispensable” nation. The answer is, almost certainly, not 42 – or 47!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 January 2025.

Which Sort of People? Liberal versus Populist Democracy.

With The Stroke Of A Pen: Populism, especially right-wing populism, invests all the power of an electoral/parliamentary majority in a single political leader because it no longer trusts the bona fides of the sprawling political class among whom power is traditionally dispersed. Populism eschews traditional politics, because, among populists, traditional politics is perceived as the problem – not the solution.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER is worried about democracy. In his Newsroom website post of 27 January 2025 he asserts that “the future of democracy across the world now seems to be in question.” Following a year of important electoral contests across the world, culminating in Donald Trump’s emphatic recapture of the United States presidency on 5 November 2024, Palmer’s assertion is, on its face, a curious one.

Ordinary citizens around the world celebrated – and continue to celebrate – Trump’s victory, interpreting it as a political, economic, and cultural triumph for men and women like themselves: the poorly housed, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly treated people of the planet. In their eyes, at least, 2024 ended on a high democratic note, and 2025 has begun with their billionaire champion making it plain, through scores of Executive Orders, that his “promises made, promises kept” commitment was more than Election Night rhetoric.

Palmer’s personal and political distaste for Trump emerges unmistakably in his post. Certainly, the list of the 47th US President’s faults and flaws is a long one. It is, however, difficult to see how Trump could have succeeded without them. A candidate who conformed to the accepted rules of the political game, and comported himself as a reasonable and responsible member of the political class, would never have placed himself at the head of an angry populist revolt.

Trump’s faults and flaws, his dishonesty and bombast, signalled to those whose votes he was soliciting that although he was richer than they were, he wasn’t better than they were. For Palmer, such ethical insouciance is an affront to what the former prime minister and law professor is pleased to call “liberal democracy”.

Liberal democrats (not to be confused with liberal Democrats!) do not expect those elected to represent the people, to be representative of the people. If that was the case, then elections would not be needed to fill the legislature. One-hundred-and-twenty citizens could simply be chosen at random – like jurors – to make the nation’s laws. Except, without the guidance and discipline imposed by political parties, such a random collection of citizens – most of them strangers to higher education – would, according to liberal democrats, be wholly unequal to the challenges of governing a modern state.

To fill the House of Representatives with MPs capable of dealing with the complexities of contemporary government a properly functioning party system is deemed to be essential. Without one, the task of identifying those with the qualifications and temperament necessary to keep the economic and social system functioning smoothly would be much more difficult. By acculturating their members to the generally agreed principles and processes of good governance[1], liberal-democratic political parties are able to reduce dramatically the chances of the ‘wrong sort of people’ finding themselves in a position to write the nation’s laws.

Unsurprisingly, liberal democracy produces Members of Parliament who are, in large measure, temperamentally and ideologically interchangeable. The overwhelming majority of MPs adhere to the conventional economic wisdom, limiting policy differences between the dominant political parties to matters of emphasis and degree – mostly by avoiding any policy requiring fundamental changes to the status quo.

There are political moments, however, when, as Palmer knows well, conventional economic wisdom is stood on its head and fundamental changes are deemed unavoidable. In 1984, as Prime Minister David Lange’s deputy, Palmer played a crucial role in ensuring that the Labour Party’s sudden abandonment of the Keynesian economic policies that had guided its own, and the National Party’s, management of New Zealand’s economy since the end of the Second World War, was accepted and endorsed by Labour’s parliamentary caucus.

That the impetus for the policy revolution known as “Rogernomics” came from the Reserve Bank and Treasury, and had been stoutly resisted for many years by the National Party Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, who had just been voted out of office, undoubtedly made Palmer’s job easier. This is simply the way the world is going, he reassured his colleagues, and there is no viable alternative. National’s conversion to the new economic wisdom took a little longer, but by 1990 all but a handful of members of the House of Representatives were singing obediently from the same neoliberal song-sheet.

Liberal democracy, while hostile to popular political pressures bubbling-up from below, will countenance all kinds of fundamental changes without demur – providing they are initiated from above, and can count on the active support of the business community and the mainstream news media. Palmer’s hostility towards Trump, and his obvious fear of Trumpism, stems from his conviction that the fundamental changes Trump is promoting are the wrong sort of changes, and that they are being pursued on behalf of the wrong sort of people.

This is the crux of the matter: that liberal democracy, far from enacting the will of the people, is dedicated instead to enacting the will of the right sort of people. The populist impulse, which Trump embodies, arises when the wrong sort of people are finally convinced that their urgent concerns and fundamental interests form no part of the liberal-democratic agenda – and never will.

This is why successful populist politicians, like Trump, care so little about the rules of the political game. It is why they are so willing to break them. With every lie, with every affront to the ‘proper’ way of conducting politics, the populist leader proves to his supporters that he is one of them, not one of “them” – the despised “elites”.

Populism, especially right-wing populism, invests all the power of an electoral/parliamentary majority in a single political leader because it no longer trusts the bona fides of the sprawling political class among whom power is traditionally dispersed. Populism eschews traditional politics, because, among populists, traditional politics is perceived as the problem – not the solution.

A populist political party does not exist to facilitate the smooth functioning of the system, or to manage carefully the inevitable debates concerning the system’s character and purpose, it exists solely to execute the will of its leader. Only the leader has divined and won the people’s will and confidence. Only the leader can be trusted to give them what they want – which is, usually, to blow the system up. Accordingly, in a populist party, the supreme virtue is loyalty. Without loyalty, unity is unachievable. Without unity, the leader lacks the strength to blow anything up, and traditional politics reasserts itself.

Liberal democrats hostility towards the populist form of democracy arises from their visceral fear of any determined majority that has achieved even a small measure of self-awareness. They are terrified that, like the cyborg in The Terminator, a politically mobilised majority can’t be bargained with, or reasoned with; that it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear; and that it absolutely will not stop – until the system has been purged of its poisons and, to borrow the Trumpists’ favourite tagline, made great again.

Such a majority will, indeed, act tyrannically. If it behaves in any other way, its goals are unlikely to be achieved. In fine Hobbesian style, the successful populist movement seeks to infuse its collective strength into the sinews of an irresistible political Leviathan, point him in the direction of its foes – and let him go to work.

Obviously, it’s a great deal safer to be behind him than in front of him.


[1] The use of the word governance – as opposed to “government” – by liberal democrats is deliberate. It denotes not decisive power, but rational administrative process. Governance is what happens when the possibility of radical – i.e. system-threatening – change has been taken off the table.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Thursday, 30 January 2025.

Trump’s Adopted Son.

Waiting In The Wings: For truly, if Trump is America’s un-assassinated Caesar, then J.D. Vance is America’s Octavian, the Republic’s youthful undertaker – and its first Emperor.

DONALD TRUMP’S SELECTION of James D. Vance as his running-mate bodes ill for the American republic. A fervent supporter of Viktor Orban, the “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, Vance’s respect for the United States Constitution should be considered pro-forma – at best.

A vocal critic of Trump when the reality TV-show maestro’s wholesale derangement of the American party system first became apparent in 2016, Vance has since reconciled himself, to the point of sycophancy, with Trump’s more-or-less complete takeover of the Republican Party.

Trump, himself, gleefully acknowledged his former critic’s transformation by informing his followers that “J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad”. Vance’s osculatory efforts proved sufficiently energetic, however, to secure him Trump’s endorsement in the race to become the Republican Party’s candidate for Ohio’s second Senate seat in 2022. At the age of just 38, he had joined the highest ranks of the American political system.

Which, given Vance’s humble origins, was extraordinary. He’d been raised in Appalachia, that mountainous region of the United States whose exploited and poverty-stricken inhabitants are still called “hillbillies”. The victim of violent and dysfunctional parenting, Vance (then called Bowman) was mostly raised by his hillbilly grandparents.

As is so often the case with individuals reared in such dangerous environments, Vance developed an acute sensitivity to who possessed the power to hurt him, and who might be persuaded to do him good. It was the rawest sort of political education, but it has undoubtedly served him well.

Highly intelligent and good with words, Vance finally extricated himself from the poverty, drug addiction and suicidal despair of rural Ohio by joining the United States Marine Corps. Impressed by his writing talents, his superiors sent him to Iraq as a military journalist, and then helped him earn a Batchelor’s degree in Political Science. After that it was Yale Law and a job with the libertarian tech-lord Peter Thiel.

Impressive enough, as CVs go, but what lifted Vance far above the merely self-improving was his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”. Vance’s timing could not have been better. His book appeared at precisely the moment America’s elites were attempting to make sense of Donald Trump’s defeat of Hilary Clinton.

“Hillbilly Elegy” turned Vance into the “deplorable whisperer”. Someone who was able to translate the angst and the anger of White working-class America in ways that enlightened – but did not threaten – ruling-class America. In the process, Vance successfully persuaded a great many extremely powerful people to do him an extraordinary amount of good.

Vance had once referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler”. But, as the now Republican Vice-Presidential nominee has spent the last eighteen months demonstrating, that disturbing characterisation should be interpreted as a description – not a condemnation.

If, as now seems certain, Trump wins the presidency in November, then Vance will find himself just a heartbeat away from becoming something even more alarming than America’s Hitler. Because, as the rest of the world needs to get its head around, urgently, the Republican candidate for Vice-President stands much further to the right than his master. Yes, Vance, like Trump, is an economic nationalist and a right-wing populist, but he also draws his inspiration from the aforesaid Orban, as well as, crucially, from the planet’s most powerful authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s unwavering purpose is to protect Mother Russia from what he sees as the degenerate culture of the West. Vance and his ilk are equally determined to purge American society of the rampant degeneracy to which, in their minds, it has already succumbed.

Ronald Reagan described the USA as “a shining city upon a hill”. For the American far-right, however, the only shining city capable of inspiring today’s corrupted world is Moscow. If Trump becomes President, and Vance’s diplomatic advice is heeded, then the Ukrainian nation is doomed.

Students of Imperial Rome should have little difficulty in recognising the forces at play in this ruthless political drama. The ambitious aristocrat who executes an end-run around his political rivals by playing upon the fears and resentments of the impoverished masses. The demagogue’s enemies who bend every sinew to securing his downfall. The hero’s precautionary adoption of a brilliant but cynical young politician as his successor.

For truly, if Trump is America’s un-assassinated Caesar, then J.D. Vance is America’s Octavian, the Republic’s youthful undertaker – and its first Emperor.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 July 2024.

Dodging Bullets.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Had the assassin’s bullet found its mark and killed Donald Trump, America’s descent into widespread and murderous violence – possibly spiralling-down into civil war – would have been immediate and quite possibly irreparable. The American Republic, upon whose survival liberty and democracy continue to depend, is certainly not out of danger, not yet. But, in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 13 July 2024, the USA also dodged a bullet.

HE’S UNSTOPPABLE NOW. The photographic images transmitted across the planet mere minutes after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, are already icons. The former President, blood on his face, raises his clenched fist above his head in a gesture of fierce defiance, as the stars-and-stripes billows theatrically behind him. Together, these elements constitute a tableau that leaves absolutely no room for doubt. Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

In a nation that still believes in a God that blesses America, the message taken from this deadly incident is easily intuited. Had the path of the assassin’s bullet deviated by even an inch, the Republican candidate’s head would have exploded, live, on national television. Instead, the bullet nicked his ear. Another rally-goer was not so fortunate, fatally struck by the shooter who had so very nearly killed the former President, and who, just seconds later, was shot to death by Secret Service snipers. Half of America will now be firmly convinced that the Almighty’s plans for Donald J. Trump are beyond the power of mere mortals to alter.

In the hours and days following the attempted assassination, the merest of these mortals will be the incumbent President of the United States, Joe Biden. Impressively fired-up before a hugely responsive rally of Democratic supporters in Detroit, Michigan, just 24 hours before the shooting, Biden had called Trump a “loser”. But losers do not dodge bullets. Losers do not create instant and iconic campaign posters a minute after being shot. Losers do not have the presence of mind to gesture defiantly to the crowd even as their Secret Service detail is bundling them into an armoured people-carrier. No, Donald Trump may be the person who was fired-at on 13 July 2024, but it was Joe Biden who got fired.

This shocking event has made the Democratic Party’s dilemma even more acute. The contrast between the two candidates, already skewed dangerously in Trump’s favour, is now untenable. Biden looks old. He has the tentative shuffle of the frail elderly. Deprived of his teleprompter, the look of incipient panic in his eyes is painful to observe. Overwhelmingly, politically engaged “progressive” Americans have come to the same conclusion: “We love you, Joe, but it’s time to go.” Now, they have no choice.

In the years following the American Civil War, the triumphant Republican Party won election after election by waving “the bloody flag” that flew over that unparallelled American tragedy. Over the next four months, the Republicans have only to re-play “the bloody footage” of 13 July.

At the time of writing, the full identity of the shooter and his political affiliations – if any – remain unknown. But, if the profiles of previous presidential assassins are anything to go by, then he is likely to be an embittered individual, in the play of whose life Fate has repeatedly refused to assign him a meaningful role. By killing the President, the assassin seeks to become the hero of a new and deadly drama of his own devising.

Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, unable to win genuine renown on the battlefield, fighting for his beloved Confederacy, and, perhaps, sensing that the hated leader of the Union had already won admittance to the company of the immortals, sought vengeance, and a darkly kindred immortality, by shooting Lincoln dead with a Derringer in Ford’s theatre.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a left-wing extremist who, like so many American leftists, found his fellow citizens’ indifference to the political causes that moved him so reprehensible that he determined to punish them by taking the life of the young President so much of the nation admired and loved. Marksmanship was one of Oswald’s few personal accomplishments, and unlike Trump’s would-be assassin, he didn’t miss.

There will be many Americans who received the news of Trump’s attempted assassination without surprise. For many years now the polarisation of American society has been growing increasingly perilous. Inevitably, if enough people at the margins of political discourse become convinced that there is nothing to be gained by communicating conventionally with opponents they have come to regard as irredeemably evil, then the prospect of communicating with one’s enemies “by other means” acquires an ever-greater salience.

This is what makes the identity of the sniper seen scrabbling up the roof of the building overlooking Trump’s enclosure at the Butler agricultural showgrounds so potentially explosive. If the man shot dead by Secret Service counter-snipers turns out to be an “Antifa” (anti-fascist) extremist with an online history of violent anti-Trump rhetoric, then the baying of the Right’s attack-dogs will be deafening. Fox News will declare the entire American Left guilty by association.

In response, the Democratic Party will likely tack aggressively to starboard, leaving its “progressive” wing alone and unprotected. One-time darling of the Democratic Socialists of America, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, might find her re-election chances in free-fall. It is unlikely that political aspirants proudly asserting their radical left-wing credentials would continue to attract the same level of enthusiastic journalistic support.

But, if the assassin turns out to be a right-wing extremist, then it’s the conspiracy theorists of the Left who will go hog-wild. (What even the extreme Right would have to gain by eliminating conservative America’s most effective champion since Ronald Reagan is not exactly clear – but then, if extremists acted rationally they wouldn’t be extremists, would they?)

Certainly, it is easy to picture the nuttier sort of leftist arguing that the shooter was a fanatical anti-abortionist who believed that Trump had “gone soft” on the rights of the unborn child. Handed a rifle with defective sights by the conspirators, and told that he would be permitted to flee the scene by “God’s people”, who would then spirit him out of the country, the “patsy” assassin, having missed his target, would instantly be shot to pieces by the Secret Service. The political consequences would be pure gold for these MAGA conspirators. Trump, bloodied but unbowed, would roll on implacably to a landslide victory.

The only aspect of the assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania, that lends even the tiniest skerrick of credibility to this sort of wild speculation is the undeniable fact that somebody, hauling an AR-15 automatic rifle, was able to get on the roof of a building offering a clear shot at the former President of the United States without being confronted by a heavily-armed and body-armoured “Hawkeye” from the USSS’s tactical squad. It is Close Protection 101 that all potential “sniper’s perches” must be reconnoitred, located, and neutralised. The assassin, clearly visible to multiple witnesses on the ground, should never have made it as far as the building, let alone onto the roof. The deadly attack at Butler must, therefore, constitute the most egregious failure of the US Secret Service since Dallas.

Whatever the true story turns out to be regarding the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, its most crucial element is that it was just that, an attempt. Had the assassin’s bullet found its mark and killed the “deplorables’” champion, America’s descent into widespread and murderous violence – possibly spiralling-down into civil war – would have been immediate and quite possibly irreparable. The American Republic, upon whose survival liberty and democracy continue to depend, is certainly not out of danger, not yet. But, in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 13 July 2024, the USA also dodged a bullet.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 July 2024.

Harsh Truths.

The Way We Were: An indelible mark was left upon a whole generation of New Zealanders by the Great Depression and World War II; an impression that not only permitted men and women of all classes and races to perceive the need to work together for the common good, but also to know – thanks to the bonding experiences arising out of existential danger – that such co-operation was possible.

THERE ARE LESSONS to be learned from the Biden-Trump debate/debacle. Important lessons, which New Zealanders would be most unwise to ignore. The first and most important of these is the need to face some harsh truths.

The American people have been running from the truth for decades. Electing an actor to govern them in 1980 merely confirmed their allergy to reality. Now they are readying themselves to elect Donald Trump for the second time. And, having witnessed Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, who can blame them? That the American Republic will struggle to survive such a final and decisive refusal to correct the consequences of its own corruption is unlikely to dissuade the American people from embracing its liquidator.

New Zealanders should, however, resist the temptation to sneer at the USA’s self-inflicted wounds. A dispassionate survey of New Zealand’s present predicament reveals a nation whose First World status can no longer be considered secure, and lacking a political class of sufficient calibre to retain it.

At virtually every level of the New Zealand state, from the lowliest public servant to the Justices of the Supreme Court, there is an alarming absence of evidence that the nation’s predicament is understood. Distractions there are in great number, but a clear-headed grasp of what it takes to hold a country together is not in evidence among those responsible for New Zealand’s administration.

This lack of clarity also pervades the ranks of New Zealand’s elected representatives. These are, with only a handful of exceptions, inadequately educated, lacking in relevant experience, and unadventurous to the point of actual cowardice. New Zealand’s current crop of politicians are place-holders not nation-builders. Unable to rise above the crude calculation of partisan advantage, an understanding of the broader national interest and of the needs of citizens yet to be born is beyond their capabilities.

Accounting for these alarming deficiencies is not easy. No matter how precariously positioned, New Zealand remains a First World country. Its people are educated, and their health preserved, by public institutions that easily bear comparison with those of much larger and richer nations. That being the case, the administration and government of New Zealand should be more than equal to the challenges faced. Likewise, its entrepreneurs and business leaders should be equal to the task of maintaining a productive and profitable economy.

And yet, when it comes to maintaining and extending the nation’s infrastructure, New Zealand’s leaders – private as well as public – are failing dismally. The political unanimity required to recognise, plan, and pay for the projects required to preserve social cohesion, while enhancing economic competitiveness and growth, is no longer a feature of New Zealand’s national life.

An indelible mark was left upon a whole generation of New Zealanders by the Great Depression and World War II; an impression that not only permitted men and women of all classes and races to perceive the need to work together for the common good, but also to know – thanks to the bonding experiences arising out of existential danger – that such co-operation was possible.

Depression and war (but especially war) made brothers out of farmers and freezing-workers, professionals and tradespeople. Bullets and bombs were no respecters of who one’s ancestors were, or which particular sailing vessels they arrived in, but incoming ordnance did make clear who was keeping who alive. Such lessons are not easily forgotten.

But, neither are they easily learnt. In the absence of the near universal experiences of economic hardship, the threat of invasion, and the intense comradeship born of armed conflict, the influences of class, race and gender soon recover their power to separate and divide human-beings. Without the common memories born of working, fighting, and sacrificing together, it becomes easier and easier to believe that “some animals are more equal than others”. And the longer that heresy goes unreproved, the harder it becomes to see the point of building anything that benefits anybody beyond one’s own kind.

There was a time when New Zealand politics was a reflection of the efforts of its two largest political parties to both represent and advance the interests of their “own kind”. Labour stood for the working-class. National for farmers, businessmen and (most) professionals. Thanks in large part to the Cold War, however, both parties understood the importance of keeping political sectionalism on a short leash. The beliefs that held New Zealanders together were accorded much greater importance than political ideologies with the potential to tear them apart.

But those beliefs, absent the experiences which informed them, could not escape the challenges of a generation that had not known privation or war. The ideas that kept New Zealand society tight: white supremacy, male supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, capitalism and Christianity; were deemed oppressive and unjust by the most outspoken of the first generation of New Zealanders for whom tertiary education was something more than an elite privilege.

But if these young intellectuals were successful in loosening New Zealand’s tightly wound society, they had also made it easier for the separate strands of that society to be pulled apart. It would become increasingly practical for New Zealand’s now less-connected citizens to look after their own kind – at the expense of all the other kinds.

Inevitably, it was the wealthiest and most powerful New Zealanders who had most to gain, and gained most, from the post-war generations’ great loosening of New Zealand society. In just two generations the nation reverted to the class-ridden, race-divided, sexually-exploitative society it had been before the election of the First Labour Government in 1935. The country’s politics, likewise, reverted to a competitive struggle between the elite defenders of the nation’s farmers and importers, and the elite protectors of its professionals and industrialists.

The single most important difference between that earlier, elite-dominated, New Zealand society, and the elite-dominated society of today, was the arrival of a gate-crashing new elite comprised of Te Iwi Māori whose children had taken advantage of the expansion of tertiary education in the 1970s to carve out a niche for themselves in the new political power structure. Revisionist history notwithstanding, the key role of this new Māori elite was to distract the urban Māori working-class from its poverty and exploitation – mostly by aggressively promoting the twinned illusions of tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake.

These elements of New Zealand’s story run parallel to those that gave us the political bankruptcy of the Biden-Trump debate. The USA underwent its own great loosening which, like New Zealand’s, unravelled the social solidarity responsible for uplifting so many ordinary Americans between 1945 and 1980.

It is a process from which the wealthiest Americans have benefited hugely – primarily by disconnecting themselves fiscally from the rest of America. With a much-reduced tax base, the USA, like New Zealand, is undergoing its own slow infrastructural collapse.

New Zealand’s tragedy may lack the compelling duo of Biden and Trump – each in their own way illustrating the moral exhaustion of the American political system – but that is no excuse for Kiwi complacency. Both countries need to face the harsh truths of national decline.

Because, in Bob Dylan’s words:

It’s not dark yet 

But it’s getting there.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Monday, 1 July 2024.

Unintended Consequences.

The Basilisk’s Glare: From his eyrie in the Kremlin, Putin’s eyes remain fixed upon the United States. Not in fear does he gaze upon the world’s unconquerable continental Goliath, but with rising hope. In President Biden’s palsied hand, the sword of freedom is loosely held. Meanwhile, from the heartland of the continent, the people America has left behind are steadily pushing their comb-over Moses towards Washington.

TWO YEARS AGO, when Vladimir Putin sent his armed forces across Ukraine’s borders, he was expecting a quick war. His generals had reassured him that the Ukrainians wouldn’t fight, Nato would sit on its hands, and his soldiers would be welcomed with kisses and flowers. Kyiv, they told him, would be his within three weeks – tops.

Putin’s advice was ill-founded in every respect. The Ukrainians did fight – and are still fighting. Nato, far from sitting on its hands, has backed the Ukrainian war effort with massive quantities of munitions and economic aid.

Everything short of unleashing Nato’s own forces against the Russian invaders has been thrown into this war in Eastern Europe. More important, at least from Putin’s perspective, Nato has expanded.

Daunted by Russia’s naked aggression, and its disdain for international law, Sweden has abandoned 200 years of neutrality for Nato membership, Finland has done the same. Nato navies now control the Baltic from Copenhagen to Helsinki. And Russia has given itself an additional 1,200 kilometres of “hostile” borders to patrol. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: From the Gulf of Riga to the Black Sea, all the ancient nations of Europe are gathered behind Nato’s security guarantee – its tripwire for Armageddon.

And yet, from his eyrie in the Kremlin, Putin’s eyes remain fixed upon the United States. Not in fear does he gaze upon the world’s unconquerable continental Goliath, but with rising hope. In President Biden’s palsied hand, the sword of freedom is loosely held. Meanwhile, from the heartland of the continent, the people America has left behind are steadily pushing their comb-over Moses towards Washington.

Donald Trump’s army is distinguished not only by its enormity, but by its indifference to the rest of the world’s troubles. “Beware of foreign entanglements”, warned their first President, George Washington, and Trump’s followers are ill-disposed to gainsay their founding father.

“Why should we defend the borders of Ukraine”, they demand to know, “when Biden refuses to defend his own from hordes of illegal immigrants?” Sufficient unto the day are the troubles of these “deplorable” Americans.

“Make America Great Again” is embroidered on their headgear, but the greatness they invoke is not the greatness of the American military cornucopia that supplied the Red Army with the wherewithal to defeat Hitler’s invasion. With the food that fed them, the boots in which they marched to battle, and the heavy trucks that carried their ordnance across the limitless East-European Plain – all the way to Berlin.

Nor is it the greatness that saw America garrison Europe with its own sons: those young soldiers who stared down their Soviet opposite numbers across the narrow defiles of innumerable Checkpoint Charlies, all along the Iron Curtain, for the four frigid decades of the Cold War.

No, the greatness Trump seeks to restore is the greatness of White America. The America that looks right through Native Americans, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and all the other vibrant elements of the great American melting-pot – as if they don’t exist. The greatness of Christian America which, in spite of invoking “Jesus!” at every turn, conducts itself as though the New Testament does not exist. Trump’s people are seeking the greatness they passionately believe can be theirs only by putting “America First!” – and the rest of the world dead last.

In the hands of these Americans, Putin is placing all his hopes. And yet, even if Trump wins the presidency and, to the cheers of his followers, tells Nato to go to hell, Putin’s dreams of a de-fanged Europe may still not come to pass.

Even without the United States, Europe constitutes an unanswerable challenge to Russia’s imperial dreams. Half-a-billion strong, possessed of a technological and industrial prowess that far exceeds the Russian Federation’s, the nations of Europe have the capacity to become, in very short order, a truly formidable military power. Two of its nations (the UK and France) already possess nuclear weapons, Germany could easily become Europe’s third.

Are these, the unintended consequences of his geopolitical hubris, truly the outcomes Putin was anticipating when, on 24 February 2022, his armies shattered the hard-won peace of Europe? An enlarged Nato, Germany furiously re-arming, and the Poles dreaming of once again rescuing Europe from eastern invaders, just as John III Sobieski did outside the gates of Vienna in 1683.

The West is not beaten yet.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 March 2024.

Conspiracies Against The Truth.

Pure Poison: It is when the fetid atmosphere created by the Right’s toxic accusations and denunciations is at its thickest, that comparisons with the Woke Left spring most easily to mind. If the level of emotion on display, and the strength of the invective used, is inversely related to the truth of the claims being advanced, then the veracity of a great deal of contemporary left-wing discourse must surely be called into question.

THE UNITED STATES OF CONSPIRACY is a Frontline documentary by Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser, Jim Gilmore and Philip Bennett. It examines the rise of conspiratorial politics in the United States from the early 1990s until the election of Donald Trump – paying particular attention to the role played by Alex Jones and his online vehicle, Infowars, in the weaponisation and normalisation of conspiracy theories. The influence of Jones’ falsehoods on the style and content of Trump’s campaigning was immense. The documentary makers’ claim that conspiracy theories now constitute an important component of mainstream political discourse is as troubling as it is true.

The assumption, after Trump and QAnon, is that the weaponisation of conspiracy theories is primarily (some would say exclusively) a strategic innovation of the Right. But, what if the counterfactual – that conspiracy theories have their origins on the Left – turned out to be true?

What if, ever since the triumph of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s, a consistent and increasingly complex web of left-wing conspiracy theories has been woven around that ideology’s success? Theories characterising the entire neoliberal project as the conscious product of a collection of right-wing individuals who, working largely in secret, had set out to undermine and dismantle the entire social-democratic post-war economic order. A cabal whose long-term objective was to make it impossible for social-democracy to ever again threaten the dominance of Capitalism’s economic and social elites.

To such a claim, the Left would immediately raise the objection that the above description of neoliberalism’s success is not a conspiracy theory, but the plain and simple truth. They would point to the very real Mt Pelerin Society, the notorious Powell Memorandum, the plethora of right-wing think-tanks, and such elite retreats as Bohemian Grove and Davos.

The Left’s claim would be that neoliberalism didn’t just happen, it was organised by flesh-and-blood human-beings. Conspiracies belong to the Right, they’d say, for the very simple reason that the outcomes intended by the conspirators inevitably involve impoverishing the many for the profit of the few.

The Left’s position on conspiracy theories is, therefore, relatively straightforward: it doesn’t need them. The Right, on the other hand, has no choice except to conspire behind an opaque curtain of lies. Bluntly, it cannot afford to tell the truth.

But if conspiracy theories are nothing more than politically-inspired deceptions, a definition which The United States of Conspiracy more than justifies, then where does that leave the claims of (for want of a better term) the “Woke Left”?

The quality that most distinguishes Alex Jones’ conspiracy theories is the heightened emotional state in which he communicates them. Jones rages, he weeps, he shouts at the camera and shakes his fists. Only very rarely does he communicate with his followers in a calm and reasoned fashion. It’s as if he is compensating for the lack of facts and evidence in his wild claims, by directing ever more extreme displays of anger and disgust towards the individuals and groups he is attacking.

It is when the fetid atmosphere created by the Right’s toxic accusations and denunciations is at its thickest, that comparisons with the Woke Left spring most easily to mind. If the level of emotion on display, and the strength of the invective used, is inversely related to the truth of the claims being advanced, then the veracity of a great deal of contemporary left-wing discourse must surely be called into question.

On the issues of race and gender particularly, the Woke Left’s almost instant recourse to accusation and denunciation is alarmingly reminiscent of Alex Jones and his imitators. There is the same determination to discipline, punish and suppress the perpetrators of willful falsehoods and the upholders of heretical doctrines. Most alarming of all is the shared proclivity of the Conspiratorial Right and the Woke Left to dehumanise their opponents. Alex Jones describes his enemies as “demons”, the Woke Left brands its enemies as racists, fascists and TERFs.

Naturally, these highly emotive defences of Woke political positions raise questions about whether or not they can be validated by more rational, evidence-based, discussion.

It has always been the Left’s mission to convince by means of reason and science: building toward a crushing demolition of its foes’ arguments by assembling a battering-ram of verifiable facts. This process cannot be successful if the right of those to whom the Left’s case is being made to interrogate its facts is denied. Facts cannot be asserted, facts can only be proved. Unfortunately, the Woke Left is not at all disposed to proving its facts in the cut and thrust of open political debate. It offers dogma. It punishes heresy. But it is only rarely willing to enter into open-ended discussion.

The lies of Alex Jones, his disgusting conspiracy theories, are, fortunately, easy to refute. The 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by Al Qaeda, not the US Government. The Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre was a devastating human tragedy, not a “false flag operation” performed by actors. The Queen of England is not a shape-shifting lizard. Hilary Clinton is not a demon from hell. The Comet Ping-Pong pizzeria is not the epicentre of a diabolical Democratic Party paedophile ring.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for the claims of the Woke Left. That the Māori chiefs at Waitangi never signed away their sovereignty; complainants of sexual assault never lie; biological sex is a social construct; may or may not be statements of fact, but they are beyond doubt claims of extraordinary political significance.

What The United States of Conspiracy revealed is what might be dubbed an “epistemological crisis”, i.e. the extreme danger posed to the coherence of contemporary societies by the unprecedented lack of a generally agreed means of determining what we know, and how we know it.

The most dangerous conspiracy theory of them all is the one that declares there’s a whole host of dangerous people out there who simply will not accept that ours is the only side that knows the truth.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of  Thursday, 21 July 2022.

An Unvarnished, Straight-Talking Working-Class Man?

Unrepentant Scrapper: Any normal candidate would have run a mile from Guy Williams – rightly fearing the humiliation the comedian would be straining every muscle to inflict upon his hapless victim. But, Leo Molloy is not a normal candidate. The former jockey, qualified veterinarian, highly successful businessman, restauranteur and philanthropist backed himself to beat his woke young interlocutor into a soft-cocked hat.

SINCE NOVEMBER 2016, one of the big unknowns of New Zealand politics has been: Could Trumpism happen here? Over the past week in Auckland there have been strong indications that the answer is: Yes, it could. We even have a name. New Zealand’s Donald Trump may turn out to be the independent candidate for the Auckland mayoralty, Leo Molloy.

Molloy’s tactics on the hustings, and their similarity to those employed by Trump in his quest for the Republican nomination, have been commented upon since the mayoral campaign began to pick up speed. His most serious challenger from the right, former Heart of the City boss, Viv Beck, he has dismissed as “Vanilla Viv”. Former Far North District Council Mayor, Wayne Brown, now falling back in the Curia/Ratepayers Alliance poll, is dismissed by Molloy as “The Walking Dead” – subsequently amended to the even more insulting “Shuffling Dead”.

The problem for Molloy’s opponents, as it was for Trump’s, is that these jibes make audiences laugh. Political aspirants on the stump can survive many things, but the derisive laughter of those whose votes they are soliciting is, generally speaking, not one of them. Molloy’s wicked sense of humour and unrestrained tongue are dangerous weapons.

Until last week, however, Molloy’s Trumpian stump tactics have gone unnoticed by all but the most dedicated followers of local government politics. The latest Curia/Ratepayers Alliance poll showed the Labour/Green endorsed Efeso Collins edging ahead of Molloy – a trend which powerfully reinforced the argument of the Auckland Right that the only sensible strategy was for the unserious jokester, Molloy, to withdraw in favour of the moderate and exceedingly serious Viv Beck.

Efeso Collins could be defeated, the Auckland Right insisted, but only if the numerically superior mass of conservative voters were united behind a single viable candidate. Conservative pundits further suggested that nationwide success for the Right in 2023 was contingent upon it ripping Auckland from the Left’s grasp in 2022. The time had come for all those who, in this fatally overcrowded field, could not hope to defeat Collins, to swing their supporters behind Ms Beck – the candidate most favoured by the Communities and Residents group and the National Party.

But the broadcast of TV3’s “New Zealand Tonight” on the evening of Thursday, 14 July 2022, threw all the sensible plans of the Auckland Right into the air. Comedian Guy Williams had persuaded Molloy to join him on one of his trademark forays into televised journalistic anarchy and questionable taste. The result is generally agreed to have been a gamechanger.

Any normal candidate would have run a mile from such a proposal – rightly fearing the ridicule and humiliation Williams would be straining every comedic muscle to inflict upon his hapless victim. But, Molloy is not a normal candidate. The former jockey, qualified veterinarian, highly successful businessman, restauranteur and philanthropist backed himself to beat his young woke interlocutor into a soft-cocked hat.

What unfolded was an magical moment of gonzo television. Using the sort of language generally confined to male locker-rooms, Molloy soon had Williams hanging on the ropes of his own boxing ring. It was vulgar, disreputable and extremely funny. Between them, Williams and Molloy carved out a decorum -free-zone that threw into sharp relief the po-faced puritanism of the contemporary mainstream news media. Within hours of being released by TV3, the Williams/Molloy encounter was all over social-media. The usual woke commissars were, unsurprisingly, outraged, but thousands more were delighted.

It was Oscar Wilde who quipped: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Molloy’s thinking clearly runs along similar lines. In a single stroke he had transformed an extremely dull mayoral contest into something everybody was talking about. And, as Molloy quipped to Williams: “As long as people are talking about me, I’m winning.”

What his opponents will be fearing is that the sort of bloke (Molloy’s pitch was unashamedly masculinist) who would normally not even bother to open his voting papers when they arrived in the mail, will now be sufficiently motivated to tear open the envelope and triumphantly place a tick beside Molloy’s name.

Will this bloke be highly educated? No. Will he be a member of the Professional-Managerial Class? No. Will he be culturally sensitive? No. Will he have anything much in common with the sort of people who run the Labour Party and the Greens? He will not.

Most likely the bloke who responds positively to the Williams/Molloy encounter will be one of the 63 percent of registered voters who declined to participate in the 2019 Auckland elections. A working-class man who long ago became convinced that the sort of people who control his city have absolutely no idea, and even less interest, in how he, and people like him, feel about the way their city is run. Someone who likes hearing a politician who swears like he does; despises the same people he does; and patently does not give a flying-fuck who knows it.

This bloke will cast a vote for Leo Molloy in the same spirit that so many disillusioned American workers cast a vote for Donald Trump: because, if it works, he will have delivered a very forceful one-fingered salute to the Powers That Be.

The $64,000 Question is, of course: “Will it work?” Much depends upon the size of that angry male vote. If the “New Zealand Tonight” segment induces even ten percent of those who abstained from voting in 2019 to back Molloy with their ballot-papers in 2022, then he will be Supercity Auckland’s Third mayor. More importantly, if the next Curia/Ratepayers Alliance poll shows him leaping into the lead, then Auckland’s committed right-wing voters will not need to be told to swing their votes in behind him. They will be well aware that if Labour loses Auckland, then its chances of holding the rest of New Zealand are wafer thin.

With that grim prospect in mind, Labour and the Greens must take great care to avoid giving the impression that they consider Molloy and his supporters to be “a basket of deplorables”. They need to understand that the more habitual Labour voters learn about Molloy and the causes he believes in – which will surprise many – the more their kneejerk loyalty to Collins will be tested.

It should not be forgotten that the reason Trump made it across the line in 2016 was because he embraced many of the policies that American workers had for decades been begging the Democratic Party to implement. Owing nothing to the Republican Party grandees, Trump possessed a political flexibility unmatched by former GOP nominees. It is worth recalling that it was not the American Left that nixed NAFTA, but the standard-bearer of the American Right.

Swearing like a trooper, and having no patience whatsoever for wokeness, does not ipso facto make you a fascist. On the contrary, it just might convince a winning number of currently disillusioned Labour voters that, like them, you are simply an unvarnished, straight-talking working-class man – someone worthy of their support.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 18 July 2022.

Decisive Action.

2020 Was Just A Rehearsal:  From a purely strategic standpoint, Trump’s, and the new, post-November 2022, Republican dominated Congress’s, best move would be to take Biden and the Democrats completely by surprise. If the attention of Trump’s enemies is focused almost entirely on what he might do in 2024, then the obvious strategy is to move against them as soon as the new Congress convenes. Depose Biden, and install Trump as President, in January 2023.

THE FALL OF AMERICA would unleash hell: economically, diplomatically, militarily, culturally; the whole world would be rocked to its foundations. Like the fall of Rome, the nearest historical equivalent, the collapse of the United States would mark the end of an era.

The musings of a history buff? Not really. The odds of the American Republic collapsing into chaos and civil strife – even civil war – are already better than even.

In the latest issue of the Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Barton Gellman, puts it bluntly: “Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.”

The Washington Post is no less pessimistic. It has just published an opinion piece by three retired Generals urging the military to begin preparing now for the “insurrection of 2024”. As befits senior military officers, their words are not minced:

[T]he Defence Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military […..] The military and lawmakers have been gifted hindsight to prevent another insurrection from happening in 2024 – but they will succeed only if they take decisive action now.

These words should quell immediately any impulse to scoff at the idea that the United States could fall. The Generals’ opinion piece is not so much a straw, as a whole haystack, in the wind. The key question it provokes is daunting. Either, they are writing to warn Trump and his followers that the United States Armed Forces are prepared to stop them. Or, it is an act of desperation from military men who already sense that the armed forces can no longer be considered reliable defenders of the US Constitution.

Alarmingly, at least some of the Generals’ advice suggests that it may be the latter:

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove all potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

The picture painted here could not be clearer. If American democracy falls beneath the blows of Trump and his followers, then the American armed forces will not escape the breakdown of legitimate authority, nor the open recourse to violence, that will sweep across the rest of American society. The Army, itself, will split between Trumpists and Constitutionalists. Civil war will be inevitable.

The most astonishing feature of this looming threat to American society and its democratic institutions is how few members of the Constitutionalist political class can see it. From the President on down, there is not the slightest evidence that anything is being done to hasten the “decisive action” the Generals are demanding. The Democratic Party, in particular, is a rudderless hulk, riven by faction, and incapable of self-discipline. Trump and his followers, with scant regard for the Constitution or even the Rule of Law, are clearly preparing to re-write the political rules of engagement, and the Democrats just look at them, blinking helplessly in the headlights of the Republican Party’s onrushing Mack Truck.

One can only speculate what the Generals are saying to themselves – and any other Constitutionalists still willing to fight for the republic – behind closed doors. The strategic position can only be described as dire.

The mid-term elections are less than twelve months away and, right now, all the smart money says that the Republicans will re-capture both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The key question then, of course, is what will they do with the full powers of Congress at their disposal?

Some will no doubt be clamouring to impeach Joe Biden. But, unless the Republican Party emerges from the mid-term elections with two-thirds of the Senate under its control, Biden’s conviction on the Senate floor is most unlikely. Impeachment also runs the risk of finally concentrating the minds of the Democrats. As Trump, himself, demonstrated, an incumbent president has a lot of resources – military resources in particular – upon which he can call in extremis. In Biden’s case, those resources might even agree to come to the President’s rescue.

From a purely strategic standpoint, Trump’s and the Republican Congress’s best move would be to take Biden and the Democrats completely by surprise. If the attention of Trump’s enemies is focused almost entirely on what he might do in 2024, then the obvious strategy is to move against them as soon as the new Congress convenes. Depose Biden and install Trump as President in January 2023.

But, surely, there is no legal way President Biden can be deposed? If the Republicans lack the numbers to impeach him, then he cannot be removed from office until the General Election of 2024. Obviously, that is correct. But the Republicans may decide that the “legal way” is not their best option. If they can depose Biden quickly and cleanly, without warning, then they can, almost certainly, rely upon their mates in the Supreme Court to bestow an ex post facto blessing on Trump’s fait accompli. (They would no doubt plead that the maintenance of peace and national unity demanded nothing less of them!)

The Republican blitzkrieg would be swift and brutally effective. By a Joint Declaration of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the 2020 Presidential Election would be declared fraudulent and Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory voided. The Joint Resolution would, further, confirm that the Office of President of the United States had again been bestowed upon Donald Trump by a clear majority of the American people on 3 November 2020. This would be acknowledged by correcting the Electoral College vote, and by the Chief Justice administering the Oath of Office to the President-Elect. The proper constitutional order would, thereby, be restored.

Congress would then decree the immediate arrest of the “November 2020 Traitors”, leaving the House and the Senate devoid of Democrats. Trump loyalists in the armed forces would attempt to arrest all senior military officers deemed sympathetic to Biden and the Constitution. Public protest would be met by a declaration of martial law.

American democracy would thus be extinguished in less than a week – and all hell would break loose. The more numerous and much wealthier “Blue States” ( i.e. Democratic Party-controlled) would secede from the Union. A second American civil war would tear the United States apart. The savagery of the conflict would intensify. Ultimately, as Margaret Atwood anticipated in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, an uneasy truce would follow the use of tactical nuclear weapons by the armies of both sides.

With America in ruins, and the global economy in free-fall, ethno-nationalism and autarky would be the order of the day. To complete this grim apocalyptic picture, successive global pandemics and runaway climate change would bury what remained of humanity’s hopes. A new Dark Age would descend.

A grim prognosis. Which is why we must all hope that a great many more Americans than “three retired Generals” are, at this very moment, readying themselves for “decisive action”.

A version of this essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 December 2021.

Of Commoners And Kings: Steve Bannon’s New Traditionalism

Telling It Like It Was: In order to restore the natural balance of society, New Traditionalists like Steve Bannon (above) argue, it is necessary to look deep into the heart of the ordinary people whose daily labours keep society going. Only when guided by the simple but durable virtues of those at the bottom of society, they argue, will those positioned at the top re-discover the wisdom, strength and power required to restore their nation to greatness.

CONSERVATIVE POLITICS in New Zealand is running out of puff. Both National and Act are struggling to offer voters much in the way of new political insights. The radical right-wing ideas that swept all before them in the 1980s and 90s have solidified into a pallid orthodoxy: one increasingly at odds with observable reality. The Churches’ political influence in New Zealand has been in steady decline since the 1970s. Robust though it may be in caucus, National’s right-wing Christian faction merely testifies to the growing distance between their party and the electoral mainstream.

When a political party is fortunate enough to possess a charismatic leader, such ideological frailty counts for much less. Absent such a leader, however, philosophical cluelessness constitutes a formidable barrier to electoral success. Unfortunately for their respective parties, Judith Collins and David Seymour cannot be included in the same company as Sir John Key and Jacinda Ardern. It remains to be seen whether Winston Peters still possesses the power to harness the political zeitgeist to NZ First’s battered chariot.

If Peters has spent the last few months scouring the conservative landscape for an ideology to match the temper of the times, then it is likely he will already have encountered the most radical right-wing movement since the rise of fascism, almost exactly a century ago. Although “Traditionalism” predates fascism by at least two decades, it shares the latter’s comprehensive rejection of Enlightenment values, liberal capitalism, scientific rationalism and democratic politics. When one considers that the leading promoters of Traditionalism in the world today are Steve Bannon – formerly Chief Strategist to President Donald Trump – and Aleksandr Dugin – long-time behind-the-scenes adviser to the Kremlin – any temptation to dismiss the movement as something wacky from the fringe should be resisted.

Like so many of the reactionary creeds emanating from fin-de-siècle Europe, Traditionalism fetishized what it considered to be the core values of the pre-modern era: hierarchy, spirituality and the (now very rare) ability to live honourably in the moment, unburdened by the weight of material concerns. The two individuals most closely associated with the early Traditionalist doctrine were the Frenchman, René Guénon, and the Italian proto-fascist, Julius Evola. Their Traditionalist utopia combined theocratic government with what amounted to a socio-economic caste-system. Cloaked in this antique guise, the doctrine’s prospects of political success in the Twentieth Century were slim. As modified by Bannon, however, Traditionalism has the capacity to act as an extremely powerful solvent of the electoral status-quo all over the Western World.

Bannon’s Traditionalism imputes to what New Zealanders would call the “ordinary Kiwi bloke” (or, in colloquial American, “the average working stiff”) the core definitive values of the nation’s character. It is in such folk: most particularly in their faith, generosity and resilience; that the nation’s ability to endure and triumph over all manner of adversities is located. They are the bedrock: the best; the people without whose support nothing of any lasting worth can be accomplished.

In the unanticipated triumph of Brexit and Trump, the world witnessed the extraordinary political resonance of Bannon’s version of Traditionalism. It had the power to mobilise electorally groups which had, for decades, been disengaging from their traditional electoral champions – Labour in the UK, the Democratic Party in the USA. It was Bannon’s strategic, and Trump’s performative, genius that caused these disillusioned and disgruntled citizens to reassess, at a personal level, the costs and benefits of political engagement. Hillary Clinton may have dismissed them as “deplorables”, but Trump transformed her insult into a badge of honour: convincing them that they were the only people who could make America great again.

To be politically effective, however, Traditionalism needs a special kind of enemy. In this regard, an elite layer of effete professionals and managers, who look down with disdain upon “ordinary people” and their beliefs, and who react with abject horror at the very thought of these usually biddable yobbos intervening decisively in the political process, is exactly what Traditionalists are looking for.

In the eyes of the elites, this ignorant lumpen element presents itself as an army of terrifying zombies. Civilly dead, but now, by the power of Bannon’s weird political voodoo, electorally re-animated, they represent the very deepest fears of the people in charge. Shuffling menacingly towards them, their arms outstretched for ballot papers, these possessed political corpses must be cut down where they stand. Under no circumstances can general elections be turned into re-runs of The Night of the Living Dead.

A less tendentious presentation of Traditionalism may be found in the television series Yellowstone. In their sprawling ranch, “Yellowstone”, set in the rock-ribbed Republican stronghold of Montana, live the Duttons – a powerful family in whom the best constitutive elements of the American character are embodied.

On every side, however, a hostile world is pressing in upon them. From the adjoining Native American tribal reservation – in which an even older embodiment of America is stirring – to the avaricious development buccaneers poised to turn the Dutton patrimony into ski resorts and casinos. Interestingly, those “best constitutive elements” include a willingness to defend the family’s interests with deadly, and often illegal, force. (Which is, at least, an honest admission of core American values!)

In the lead character, John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) the viewer is frequently presented with something approximating that Zen-like ability to live in the spiritual moment which the original Traditionalists prized so highly. The series’ general contempt for the democratic process, and its clear preference for maintaining the established hierarchy of ‘natural’ leaders, similarly echoes the ideas of Guénon and Evola.

New Zealand political leaders as different as Rob Muldoon and John Key have secured lengthy stints of political power on the strength of elevating ordinariness into something very special. Muldoon pitted his “ordinary blokes” (aka “Rob’s Mob”) against the hapless “Citizens For Rowling” – whom he successfully portrayed as an ineffectual collection of over-educated snobs who thought they were better than everybody else. Key’s trick was to convince nearly half the electorate that they were already the ones in charge; and all they had to do to prove it was make an ordinary millionaire their Prime Minister.

At the moment, few conservatively-minded New Zealanders would admit to feeling in charge of very much at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. In Traditionalist terms, all the worst elements of modernism are in the saddle and riding New Zealand hard. Even worse, no political party of the Right is currently willing (or, seemingly, able) to swing the axe in defence of the values of “Real New Zealanders”, or even explain, in simple terms, what those “real” values are. While this remains the case, the conservative cause will continue to languish.

What Bannon and his Russian equivalent, Dugin, understand is how quickly Democracy exhausts the ordinary man and woman. How ready they are to put their faith in those they recognise as belonging to the natural hierarchies of wisdom, strength and power. And how angry they become when those they trust to lead them prove unequal to the task.

In order to restore the natural balance of society, the Traditionalists argue, it is necessary to look deep into the heart of the ordinary people whose daily labours keep society going. Only when guided by the simple but durable virtues of those at the bottom of society, they argue, will those positioned at the top re-discover the wisdom, strength and power required to restore their nation to greatness.

This is, indeed, a step backward into pre-modernity. What Bannon and Dugin are describing is the enduring political alchemy of leaders and followers: that allegedly sacred bond between sovereign and subject which owes nothing to the intervention of elite interests, or, at least, not to those elite interests who refuse to make their first two priorities the protection of the leader and the welfare of the people. Bannon and Dugin may call this Traditionalism, but a better name for their system might be “Monarchical Socialism”.

Think, the King and the Commons, without the Barons and the Bishops: the doomed dream of the Peasants’ Revolt. Or, the Fuhrer and the Volk, without the Capitalists and the Jews: the murderous dream of Hitler’s stormtroopers.

An earlier version of this essay was posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 21 June 2021. This version was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 29 June 2021.