Crossing The Boundaries: Kent State University, Ohio, USA, 4 May 1970. The Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 70s was not quelled by Ohio National Guardsmen shooting down student protesters. All the conservative establishment's heavy-handed repression did was fuel the “New Left’s” sense of grievance and drive an iron spike of intolerance into its soul. Today's liberal establishment appears equally determined to make martyrs out of its right-wing critics.
TRANSGRESSION is extraordinarily appealing to the young.
Giving voice to opinions that cause older people to throw up their hands in
horror is always great fun. Almost as much fun as listening to music dismissed
by the old folks as “noise”, or wearing clothes calculated to provoke Mum into
inquiring: “You’re not going out dressed like that – are you?”
Adolescent psychologists put this sort of behaviour down to
young people’s need to “test the boundaries” of the adult world. A coming-of-age
process which helps to firm up the outlines of their future adult selves.
Politics, too, has its own forms of adolescent transgression,
and this past week New Zealand has been introduced to two of its more notorious
exponents. Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, both hailing from the
mild-mannered nation of Canada, have turned testing the boundaries of political
discourse into something of an art form. (Or, at the very least, into a million
views on YouTube!)
Like the normal adolescent, who is concerned to discover
exactly how far he can go before his parents/teachers/friends bring the hammer
down, political adolescents seek to discover how broadly or narrowly society
has set the bounds of tolerance.
When I was a young person, political transgressors hailed
almost exclusively from the left of the political spectrum. This was hardly
surprising, since the prevailing social mores of most western nations in the
1950s and 60s were those laid down by the mainstream Christian churches. Throughout
most of the Cold War era, the dominant political values were similarly
conservative: unflinchingly hostile not only to the claims of communism and
socialism, but also to all but the most anodyne forms of social democracy.
Yet, to the horror and fury of the RSA, young anti-war
protesters attempted to lay wreaths commemorating the millions killed in “imperialist”
wars – with special reference to Vietnam’s civilian dead. Scandalising the
nation’s editorial writers, student leaders (like Tim Shadbolt) and visiting feminist
luminaries (like Germaine Greer) uttered the word “bullshit” in public places.
Young-at-heart poets also joined the provocation game: most memorably with
James K. Baxter’s “A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting”.
Baxter cited the example of Robbie Burns “that sad old
rip/From whom I got my fellowship”. A man who liked, as the bearded poet
reminded his readers, “to toss among the glum and staid/A poem like a hand
grenade”.
Fifty years on, however, most of the rhetorical
bomb-throwers (like Southern and Molyneux) hail from the Right – not the Left. What
happened?
In a nutshell, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s
congealed into an all-embracing liberal establishment. Over the course of fifty
years, the transgressive ideas of what Colin James dubbed “The Vietnam
Generation” became the orthodox beliefs of the Twenty-First Century’s ruling
elites.
Accordingly, young women like Southern are calling
“bullshit” on what they see as the constantly encroaching claims of an
ever-more-intolerant feminism. Intellectuals like Molyneux are loudly insisting
that what they call “the scientific evidence” must over-ride the plans of “politically
correct” social-engineers to obliterate even the most obvious human
distinctions.
Across the western world these right-wing firebrands are
igniting bonfires of controversy over the meaning of nationality; the
desirability, or not, of unlimited diversity; and the limits of religious
toleration. Whether their agitation constitutes a rebirth of Enlightenment
values, or (as the Left insists) the resurgence of ideas more commonly
associated with extreme nationalism, even fascism, there is no disputing right-wing
populism’s impact on the political complexion of the times we are living
through.
Which is why, in my opinion, the Auckland Mayor, Phil Goff, erred
in denying Southern and Molyneux access to all the public platforms controlled
by the Auckland Council. Quite apart from turning the pair into free-speech
martyrs (to the undoubted benefit of their YouTube accounts) Mayor Goff’s
actions represented an authoritarian solution to a democratic problem.
The Youth Revolt of the 1960s was not quelled by jailing the
Chicago Seven or allowing the Ohio National Guard to shoot down student
protesters. Suppression merely fuelled the “New Left’s” sense of grievance and
drove an iron spike of intolerance into its soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher of whom the Alt-Right are
inordinately fond, wrote: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Those who believe they can kill right-wing extremism by denying it a stage are
in for a very unpleasant surprise.
DISCLOSURE: Chris Trotter is a member of the Free Speech
Coalition which is seeking a judicial review of Mayor Goff’s decision.
This essay was
originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday,
13 July 2018.
