Not Far At All.

Right Turn: What social-liberal progressivism faces is a conservative populist surge composed of defenders of a status-quo that, if not gone, is, at least, widely perceived as going.

“PROGRESSIVE” NEW ZEALAND is terrified of what it calls the “Far Right”. To hear progressive activists, academics and journalists tell the story, Aotearoa is crawling with Far Right subversives, all of them engaged in poisoning the nation’s political discourse and threatening its democratic institutions. Fear of the Far Right is the prime driver of the quasi-official campaign against “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation”. New Zealanders are thus presented with the paradox of democracy’s progressive defenders promoting limitations on the freedom of political expression – the most anti-democratic measure imaginable.

The term “Far Right”, itself, requires precise definition. Though the expression is all-too-often deployed as an ideological marker, it is nothing of the sort. The term is descriptive – not definitive. And what is being described are those individuals and/or entities locatable at the extreme right of the Left/Right political spectrum. At this point it is important to acknowledge that the viability of this explanatory tool is being challenged with increasing vehemence in the Twenty-First Century. Exactly who constitutes the “Left”, and who the “Right”, is a question with no generally agreed answer. But, if ideological definitions have grown increasingly opaque, then the progressives’ continued reliance on the term “Far Right” must be seen as problematic.

The origin of the terms “Left” and “Right” is traceable to the French Revolution of the late-Eighteenth Century. To the left of the President of the National Assembly sat those who wanted France to become a fully-fledged republic. To his right sat those who favoured a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain’s. So, radicals to the left, conservatives to the right, with those still making up their minds (almost always the largest group!) occupying the seats positioned in the chamber’s centre.

Though the ideological dogmas of the radicals and conservatives changed over the centuries, the utility of these Left, Right, and Centre designations remained strong. The Left/Right spectrum was especially helpful during the Cold War of 1946-1991.

With the spacious middle ground of Western politics occupied by parties of the moderate Left and Right (in New Zealand’s case Labour and National) the new terms Centre-Left and Centre-Right were handy place-markers. In addition to the reassurance provided by the word “centre”, these new designations made the casting of communists and fascists as Far Left and Far Right that much easier.

That communism and fascism, at least in the English-speaking world, never rose to the status of mass movements proved particularly helpful to its Cold War political establishments. With the candidates of their respective parties attracting a risible number of votes, it was easy to depict their members as “extremist” and “fringe”. Certainly, no reasonable comparison could be made with Labour’s and National’s non-threatening occupiers of the centre-ground.

Hence the electoral utility of the terms “Far Left” and “Far Right”. By affixing the word “Far” to those unreconciled to the status-quo, the keepers of the political ring marginalised and trivialised them. Its use played a critical political role in rendering the ideas and causes with which their adherents were associated “beyond the pale”. Nobody pursuing a career in politics could afford to be labelled “Far” anything. In the Cold War’s consensus politics, extremism of any kind was political death.

In short, “Far Left” and “Far Right” was simply a more dignified way of saying “Bad Left” and “Bad Right”. The terms were expletives – not explanations.

That this was the case was amply demonstrated in those Western states where communism and fascism were not political causes confined to the powerless margins of the electoral landscape. For much of the Cold War era the Communist Parties of France and Italy were key players in their nation’s electoral politics. French and Italian political writers did not dismiss them as “Far Left”, they simply called them by their names. The same is true of the neo-fascist parties that waxed and waned across France and Italy’s post-war politics.

The terms “Far Left” and “Far Right” make no taxonomic sense when applied to parties or movements attracting not tens, or hundreds, but tens-of-thousands of votes. Numbers like that are a signal that ideas and policies once restricted to a handful of true-believers are now attracting the support of those who once would have been counted among the electorate’s sensible centrists. When this shifting of ideological tectonic plates occurs, as it did in the United States in 2016, it is only the people frightened by the magnitude and political implications of the shift who seek to damn and diminish it with the label “Far Right”.

Similarly, it would make absolutely no sense to describe the ideological hegemony of social-liberal progressivism and its twenty-first century “identity politics” as “Far Left”. Forty years ago, New Zealand’s tiny communist parties may have exercised a discernible degree of influence in some trade unions, but that was as far as their clout extended. They were a marginal force, cleaving to an ideology rejected by most New Zealanders as dangerously extreme. Though most politicians preferred to brand these activists “Commies” or “Reds”, a political scientist could call them “Far Leftists” with a clear conscience.

Today, the influence of New Zealanders adhering to ideas and policies that were once restricted to the radical fringe has become pervasive. What political writers once marginalised as the “Far Left” has morphed into an ideology that exercises a decisive influence across the judiciary, the public service, academia, the Māori middle-class, the news media, what remains of the trade unions, and a surprisingly large number of private enterprises. Between them, the political parties subscribing to this ideology attracted in excess of a million votes in the 2023 general election. To describe this latest iteration of the Left as “Far” anything would be absurd. Perhaps that’s why so many New Zealand conservatives have taken to describing the Left’s arguably dominant ideological superstructure as “Woke”. A new term for a new phenomenon.

The progressives’ precarious dominance of New Zealand society would certainly explain its fear of, and aggression towards, what it still insists on calling the “Far Right”. The relegation of the parties that had protected the progressives’ ideological hegemony to the opposition benches provided worrying confirmation of the extent to which those New Zealanders unwilling to accept that hegemony had mobilised electorally to defeat it. By calling their enemies the “Far Right” the progressives hope to convince any remaining centrists that the nation’s democratic institutions are at risk of falling prey to a dangerous – but tiny – coalition of capitalist libertarians, religious conservatives, white supremacists, and out-and-out fascists.

What they actually face is a conservative populist surge composed of defenders of a status-quo that, if not gone, is, at least, widely perceived as going. Contained within that surge is a significant minority of voters who formerly counted themselves as leftists. That they were content to make common-cause with those who, for most of their lives, they’d branded ideological foes only confirms how culturally threatening the ideas, policies and practices of social-liberal progressivism are perceived by those who grabbed the electoral handbrake. They have yet to reach the point at which a complete turnaround of the Woke juggernaut can be attempted, but it’s getting close – not far at all.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 22 July 2024.

A New Government, But No Change, In 2023.

A Distinction Without A Difference: Labour is likely to lose next year’s election because it has become little more than New Zealand’s alternate governing party. New Zealanders lucky enough to live in their nation’s comfort zones will turn to Labour when National appears to have exhausted itself, and to National when Labour fails to impress. The only task which mainstream voters set themselves is determining which of National or Labour is more likely to administer the status quo efficiently and effectively.

WITH THE END of the year racing towards us, the temptation is strong to review the twelve months just gone. Some political journalists even go as far as issuing awards for the best and the worst of the nation’s political players. Others channel their inner schoolmarm and award grades, or marks out of ten. Away with all such malarky! What most interests the politically aware is not the past, but the future. Never is this more true that when the new year fast approaching is an election year.

I would be remiss, however, not to reference to the most jarring political event experienced by New Zealanders in 2022 – the occupation of Parliament Grounds. The full significance of this episode has only become clear with the benefit of hindsight. It intensified a prejudice against ordinary New Zealanders that, already strong, has since become a badge-of-honour among a distressingly large percentage of the political class. Before the Occupation, ignoring the wishes of the Great Unwashed could still elicit feelings of unease among “progressive” MPs. After the Occupation it became a positive duty.

How else to explain the outpouring of official concern at the amount of misinformation and disinformation coursing through the veins of the body politic. So swollen had these “rivers of filth” become that the Security Intelligence Service was prevailed upon to issue a booklet identifying the tell-tale signs of potentially lethal radicalisation in the boy next door. Concerned citizens were even given a number to call. 0800-STASI perhaps? It was all of a piece, however, with the melodramatic “Fire and Fury” documentary produced by Stuff’s Paula Penfold. In it, the time-honoured traditions of journalistic balance were jettisoned in favour of journalism which travelled in (if not at) the direction of the Government.

Clearly, democracy – unguided by the morally superior members of the political and academic mandarinate – can degenerate very quickly into the terrifying mobocracy that unleashed arson and violence in Parliament Grounds. These feelings of personal vulnerability, aroused among parliamentarians and journalists by the Occupation’s fiery end, were both palpable and novel. For the first time in decades they had been made aware of just how destructive those excluded from the nation’s political discourse could become – if sufficiently provoked.

The historical precedent for this outrage and anguish can be found in the reaction of “respectable” politicians and journalists to the rioting and looting that broke out in New Zealand’s four main centres in the summer and autumn of 1932 – when the Great Depression was at its deepest. The NZ Herald’s cartoonist, Gordon Minhinnick, captured the disgust of the newspaper’s middle-class readers by depicting the rioters as rats erupting from the sewers. The governing conservative coalition responded to the violence by passing the draconian Public Safety Conservation Act. Unconstrained by entrenched electoral clauses, the Reform and United parties were also moved to postpone the general election scheduled for 1934 until 1935.

As the Labour Party confronts the New Year, it will not only struggle to move beyond its now visceral mistrust of the Occupiers, but also of the third of the country who believed their anti-vaccination mandate grievances worth worthy of a hearing. There will be some among Labour’s ranks who feel keenly the irony of a supposedly working-class party living in terror of the actually existing proletariat, but most of the party’s members and MPs will dismiss the whole notion that the people Trevor Mallard turned the sprinklers on are working-class.

Certainly, they were very different from the ageing, Pakeha, blue-collar trade union delegates who turn up to Labour Conferences, or the loyal Pasifika workers who sit beside them. What Labour has forgotten, however, is that barely 10 percent of private sector workers any longer belong to a trade union. The world that the Employment Contracts Act made in the 1990s – and which Labour has never seen fit to unmake – changed the New Zealand working-class no less thoroughly than Thatcherism and Reaganism changed the British and American working-classes. Driven from the political stage, they have wandered into strange pastures and swallowed strange fruits. The degree to which these abandoned and marginalised workers are able to surprise the contemporary parties of the centre-left can be summed up in just two words: ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’.

‘Idiot Savant’, the hard-working blogger behind “No Right Turn” asks rhetorically: “Why won’t Labour keep its promises?” His favoured explanation is that the party has become too beholden to the lobbyists and donors that keep it solvent. He’s right, of course, but there’s much more to the problem than that. Labour is vulnerable to lobbyists, and increasingly dependent on wealthy donors, for the very simple reason that it is deeply fearful of ever again becoming a mass party – most particularly, a mass party of today’s working-class.

Such a party would be economically radical and socially conservative – precisely the opposite of the entity Labour turned itself into by embracing the more-market ideas of the Reserve Bank and Treasury in the 1980s. A key aspect of that transformation was the catastrophic defection of the tens-of-thousands of Labour members who did not sign-up for Rogernomics. But the dramatic reduction in the size of the Labour Party was a feature, not a bug, of the neoliberal transformation. Having a lot of members is more-or-less a guarantee of having a lot of trouble.

It used to be the case that New Zealand’s political fault-line ran not between National and Labour, but squarely down the middle of the Labour Party itself. Up until 1984, the really big arguments concerning New Zealand’s economic and social future were those that took place between the right and left wings of the Labour Party. But, when Rogernomics caused Labour to split in 1989, it lost virtually all of its left-wing members to Jim Anderton’s NewLabour (later the Alliance). That was critically important, because although it has gone largely unnoticed and unreported by this country’s political journalists for the last 30 years, the transformations of 1984-1993 relocated the nation’s political fault-line to the left of both National and Labour where, ever since the demise of the Alliance and NZ First, there is only the swirling and inchoate rage of unrepresented rebels in search of a cause.

Labour is likely to lose next year’s election because it has become little more than New Zealand’s alternate governing party. New Zealanders lucky enough to live in their nation’s comfort zones will turn to Labour when National appears to have exhausted itself, and to National when Labour fails to impress. The only task which mainstream voters set themselves is determining which of National or Labour is more likely to administer the status quo efficiently and effectively. In the face of a Labour Government struggling to cope with record inflation, a cost-of-living crisis, and all the other side-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, National’s hopes of reclaiming the Treasury Benches are, justifiably, high.

And that swirling mass of unrepresented and cause-less rebels: unimpressed by National and Labour, or their respective outriggers, Act and the Greens; what will they do in 2023? In the absence of a truly charismatic populist leader (sorry Winston) most of them will abstain from the electoral process altogether. Overall turnout is likely to be well down in next year’s election. An abstention rate of 25 percent is not inconceivable.

Not that National or Labour will care all that much. They have seen what the Deplorables can do when they get angry. They have no desire to see what they could make of Aotearoa-New Zealand if they ever got organised.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Tuesday, 20 December 2022.

Fractured Realities.

How To Heal A Fractured Society: On March 27th 1939, Michael Joseph Savage opened the new Social Security building on Aotea Quay, Wellington, replacing, in just six weeks, the Aitken Street building destroyed by right-wing arsonists earlier that year. As the economic and social historian, Bill Sutch, later recalled: “The ceremony took place in the presence of thousands of people, in time to mark, five days later, the end of poverty.”

IT’S A PRETTY CONFRONTING VIDEO. Recorded in Starship Hospital, it shows “Baby Will” being taken from his protesting parents for pre-operative tests. Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the video is the father’s loud and repeated accusations that the Police officers present are acting illegally. As if the court case, which the father witnessed, was of no significance. As if the judge’s decision – which found in favour of the medical authorities seeking guardianship of the infant so that the life-saving surgery he needed so urgently could go ahead – was not binding. Clearly, the “reality” inhabited by the father differed radically from the reality inhabited by the Police officers, the medical staff, and the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders.

Kate Hannah, of the University of Auckland’s “Disinformation Project”, characterises the situation depicted in this disturbing video as “a split reality”. Human-beings in the same room, breathing the same air, and utilising the same light, nevertheless believed themselves to be engaged in entirely different activities. “Baby Will’s” parent believed their child was in imminent danger and were trying to protect him. The Police and Starship’s medical staff believed they were doing what was necessary to save a baby’s life. Tragically, the impasse could only be resolved physically – by the Police officers interposing their bodies between the child and its parents.

Much of the responsibility for the emergence of this split reality lies with the augmented powers of communication vouchsafed to “ordinary” people by the Internet and social-media. It is now relatively easy to pour false or misleading information into the minds of tens-of-thousands of citizens.

Ironically, these extravagant lies have the power to effectively inoculate their victims against the truth. If people can be persuaded that, as Donald Trump insists, “the whole system is rigged”, then all the officially-sanctioned expertise in the world becomes untrustworthy. The alienated masses’ response to ‘the facts’, echoing Mandy Rice-Davies’, becomes: “Well, they would say that – wouldn’t they?”

It would, however, be wrong to think that this triumph of misinformation and disinformation is a new thing. Technological innovation has empowered all sorts of communications over the centuries. The equivalent of a twenty-first century video, recorded on a smart phone, might be the anti-elite graffiti daubed on the walls of Ancient Rome; or the inflammatory religious pamphlets, illustrated with blood-curdling woodcuts, rolling-off the new-fangled Protestant printing-presses of the Sixteenth Century.

If ever there was a time of split-realities, it was during the Reformation. At stake in this great 100-year-long falling-out between Christians was nothing less than the individual’s immortal soul. The perceived existential threat, registered by Protestants and Catholics alike, wasn’t just to their well-being in this world, but to their long-term location in the next!

But, if religious disputes were bad, political conflicts proved to be even worse. In no other facet of human existence are split realities more common than in the hotly contested realm of political belief – and action.

Consider the following passage, drawn from an editorial published in The Dominion on election-day 1938:

Today you will exercise a free vote because you are under this established British form of government. If the socialist government is returned to power your vote today may be the last free individual vote you will ever be given the opportunity to exercise in New Zealand.

A level of paranoid hyperbole to rival even the most egregious National Party troll on Twitter!

Not that Labour Party voters took their lead from the Tory press – not in 1938. That was the election in which Labour received its greatest ever share of the popular vote, an astounding 55.8 percent. If reality was split in 1938, then Labour’s portion was a large one. Not even the united and venomous opposition of what we would today call the “mainstream” media could shake the loyalty of Labour’s voters.

The reality inhabited by working-class New Zealanders prompted an unequivocal endorsement of the government they had elected in 1935. Change had been promised, and change had been delivered. And “their” government wasn’t finished – not by a long shot. A vote for Labour in 1938 was also a vote for “Social Security”. The eponymous Act of Parliament, passed before the election, was due to come into force on 1 April 1939. If New Zealanders wanted a welfare state, then they knew what to do.

There are some interesting parallels between the elections of 1938 and 2020. Both came after a sustained period of crisis – seemingly overcome as the result of Labour’s inspirational leadership. The voters were grateful; they were keen for more; and they were willing to vote for it – even some National supporters. The big difference between 1938 and 2020, of course, is that Jacinda Ardern had nothing like Mickey Savage’s Social Security Act waiting for voters on the other side of the ballot-box.

Not everybody was on-side with Savage’s agenda. In the wake of Labour’s landslide victory, and with the Social Security Act’s coming-into-force date fast approaching, forces on the other side of the Thirties’ fractured reality struck back – torching the new Social Security Building that was rising on its Aitken Street building-site, barely a stone’s throw from Parliament. The smoke that swirled around Parliament in February/March 2022 was not without precedent.

Those ugly scenes in Starship Hospital this week are an echo of the unprecedented divisions that opened up in the months immediately following the 2020 Labour landslide. Future historians will sift through those months for explanations as to how and why the love for Labour and its leader was lost. Much will be said about vaccination mandates and extended lockdowns, but those, alone, will not be enough to explain the steady erosion of Labour’s position.

Perhaps, we should ask ourselves what would have happened to the mood of New Zealanders if, in the wake of the arson attack in Aitken Street, Savage had announced that, in the name of national unity, he was going to repeal the Social Security legislation. Imagine the sense of betrayal, the sense of loss. Imagine the level of animosity ordinary working-class voters would have directed towards the Labour Party. We can only speculate as to whether or not it would have exceeded the disappointment experienced by the New Zealand electorate in 2021/22 as kindness was cancelled, and the Team of Five Million disbanded. One outcome, however, is easily predicted – reality would have become even more dangerously fractured.

Except, of course, Mickey Savage did not do that. This is how I described his response to the arson in Aitken Street in No Left Turn, published in 2007:

“We have got to get the Social security Act working on April 1st and it’s going to work”, Savage told the country […..] and his government were as good as their word. “We are not going to weep,” said the irrepressible Minister of Public Works, Bob Semple. “It is a question of getting our backs into it, and getting the job done.” While firemen were still dampening down the smoking ruins on Aitken Street, Semple promised the construction of a replacement building within six weeks. The Public Works Department, Fletcher Construction, and the building firm of R.C. Love began work immediately on a site in Aotea Quay. James Fletcher admitted that this schedule would “necessitate the working of two 10-hour shifts, and it is anticipated that approximately 150 men will be required for each shift”. It is a measure of how vital the replacement of the building was seen to be that the normally obstreperous building trades unions agreed to work the site around the clock. Even more remarkable is the fact that the contractors agreed to take no profit!

On March 27th 1939, Savage opened the new building. As the economic and social historian, Bill Sutch, later recalled: “The ceremony took place in the presence of thousands of people, in time to mark, five days later, the end of poverty.”

That’s how you hold a country together.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 12 December 2022.