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.

Has Progressivism Peaked?

Let’s Go Crazy! AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) rarks-up the voters of New York’s 16th Congressional District.

HAVE WE MOVED past peak progressivism? Across the planet, there are signs that the surge of support for left-wing causes and personalities, exemplified by the election of the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) to the US House of Representatives in 2018, is fast losing momentum.

In the recent elections for the European Parliament, for example, the Green contingent shrunk from just under 60 MEPs to just over 40 – a drop of nearly 25 percent. Green economics would appear to be an acquired taste.

Then, less than 48 hours ago (25/6/24) there came another straw in the wind. Jamaal Bowman, a member of the so-called “Squad” of left-wing legislators who followed AOC into the House, was trounced in his Democratic Party’s primary election for New York’s 16th Congressional District, by George Latimer, a moderate backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Bowman had been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause. Keffiyehs, it would seem, cost votes.

It gets worse. As the United Kingdom counts down the days to its General Election on 4 July, electors are confronted by a Conservative Party straining to hold its position on the centre ground against powerful forces (led by Brexiteer Nigel Farage’s Reform Party) urging its supporters to move further right; while the Labour Party, with a 20-point lead in the polls, has spent the last five years emptying its ranks of the left-wingers who delivered Labour’s leadership to Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.

Now, it is always possible that Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, may prove to be another Clement Atlee – the Leader of the Opposition Winston Churchill described as “a modest little man, with much to be modest about” – and gobsmack the world by unleashing a second socialist transformation of the United Kingdom, but that is not an outcome upon which even a British MP would place a bet!

Not that the centrist political space is anything like as comfortable as it used to be. In France, where the centrism of President Emmanuel Macron has held sway since the implosion of the French Left in 2017, there is now a good chance that the right-wing populist “National Rally” of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella will soon command at least a plurality (and maybe even a majority) of seats in the French National Assembly.

By calling a snap parliamentary election, Macron hopes to see moderate and radical France unite to repudiate the National Rally’s spectacular gains in the elections for the European Parliament. But, France shows little sign of wanting to be reasonable. Not this time. “Marianne” is in one of her moods.

The most compelling visual example of the progressive Left’s fatal failure to fire, however, is the extraordinary rally organised in support of Jamaal Bowman’s doomed candidacy by AOC herself. Bouncing around the stage like a cheerleader on speed, as if she could roll back the influence of Latimer’s $25 million spend on television and social media attack ads through sheer physical exertion, Cortez, in her radical manqué phase, became the unwitting poster-girl of a political movement floating on an ebbing tide.

As is so often the case, New Zealand anticipated the world’s direction of travel by several months – if not years. Jacinda Ardern became our very own AOC a whole year before the abbreviation was coined. And, if one is looking for surges, no party anywhere in the democratic world has yet delivered a progressive result as decisive as Labour’s 2020 election win. (Always assuming one can call the Covid-19 pandemic “progressive”.)

But, well ahead of their peers once again, New Zealanders have learned the dispiriting difference between what political progressives are winningly quick to promise, and what they are then unwilling and/or unable to deliver. New Zealanders have also learned how little stock progressives place in even the plainest evidence that the policies they have managed to deliver are both unwanted and unpopular.

The triumph of Brexit and Trump in 2016 was all the evidence progressives, worldwide, needed that the masses could not be trusted to make the right decisions. Left to themselves, the progressives reasoned, ordinary voters will likely opt for policies and politicians that are racist, sexist, transphobic, destructive of the environment, and generally hostile to everything the progressive movement stands for.

What progressives could not work out, however, was what to do and where to go with this depressing estimation of their fellow citizens. Trying to impose unwanted and unpopular policies on a majority of the population, in a democracy, can mean only one thing: your party is going to lose. Attempting to do so by stealth, subterfuge and misrepresentation, no matter how tempting, merely guarantees that your party loss will be even more painful.

But if progressives have left the voters infuriated, and determined to be rid of them, then the formula for getting rid of deficient progressive policies, without being landed with a whole set of even more deficient conservative policies by the right-wing parties elected to replace the offending lefties, remains elusive.

It would, of course, be extraordinarily beneficial for Labour and the Greens to devote their energies to discovering a formula of this sort. Certainly, it would hasten their return to the Treasury Benches. Sadly, convinced of their rectitude, progressive politicians and activists would condemn such a quest as a betrayal. And it is this unwillingness to abandon their ideological positions (an unwillingness shared by their equally uncompromising opponents on the right) that explains the electorate’s falling out of love with progressive politics.

It is also the explanation for the evident global appeal of populist parties of both the left and the right. They have embraced the idea that hardline, ideologically-driven progressives and conservatives consistently refuse to accept. That democracy means giving the people what they want; or, at least, what a skilled populist politician is able to convince a majority of the people is what they think they want.

This is, of course, a trick that only a politician who is willing to listen to the people can pull off. But, as luck would have it, that is exactly the sort of politician most of the people are looking for.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Friday, 28 June 2024.

Democracy Denied.

Political Intervention From Above: From the early-1970s on, lobbying firms and think-tanks have grown like Topsy all across the capitalist world. Had the progressive middle-class not drawn its teeth and clipped its claws, an angry working-class might have risen to meet the Robber Baron’s challenge as it did in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s. Without the kratos of the unruly majority of the demos behind them, however, the paternalist strategies of the progressives were easily countered.

DEMOCRACY WILL ALWAYS BE HATED by the rich and powerful. This is a truth that should never be, but all-too-often is, forgotten. If the kratos (power) really does reside in the demos (people) then it cannot reside in the clubs and boardrooms of the corporate elites. The stronger the people become, the more determined the elites will grow to destroy the institutions through which popular power is expressed. Much has been made recently (not least by the Democracy Project) of the political influence of lobbyists and think-tanks, as if this was somehow a new and disturbing development. It is not. All that the growing power and influence of lobbyists and think-tanks reveals is the growing weakness of our democratic institutions.

Rather than devoting their energies to building up the strength of those institutions – by aggressively re-democratising the Labour Party and the trade union movement, both of which have long-since ceased to evince the slightest democratic energy – more and more leftists are avoiding the implications of their crushing political defeat by jumping down the rabbit hole of Mihingarangi Forbes’ Atlas Network conspiracy theory.

According to Forbes’ narrative, New Zealand’s political life is increasingly falling under the influence of unseen bad actors. These dark forces are unfairly resourced with all the talents and resources needed to shape and steer decisions critical to New Zealand’s future without the public’s knowledge.

If this all sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, it’s because both Forbes and the author of The Da Vinci Code both deal in fiction. Forbes’ dark forces are, in fact, openly acknowledged and registered pressure groups, like the Taxpayers’ Union, which operate in the broad light of day and are constantly seeking to engage with the public via electronic newsletters, public meetings, and the media. Real conspirators do not behave like this. Prior to flying hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, Al Qaeda did not issue a press release!

What Forbes is attempting to paint as sinister and illegitimate is actually a very real tribute to the power of grass-roots organising. What makes the Taxpayers’ Union so effective is what made Halt All Racist Tours (HART) so effective: a popular cause; generous donors; dedicated leadership; powerful propaganda; and a bloody huge mailing-list. It is ironic that the organising model which the Left now attempts to pass-off as diabolical, is what made the left-wing pressure groups of the past so politically effective.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the New Zealand Right borrowing the tactics of the New Zealand Left is the New Zealand National Party. National’s founders were determined that their fledgling organisation should grow into a mass party – as large, if not larger, than the New Zealand Labour Party. How else could they hope to defeat it?

Just like Labour, National gave itself a branch structure which penetrated deeply into ideologically sympathetic communities. Membership fees were kept within the reach of the ordinary voter, and the members themselves were constitutionally empowered to choose parliamentary candidates and participate in the formation of National Party policy. The “divisional” structure of the party guaranteed a large measure of regional autonomy from the party’s central office.

In short, until Stephen Joyce transformed it into a self-perpetuating oligarchy in 2003, National was a thoroughly democratic organisation. Had it not been, the party would not have been able to dominate New Zealand’s post-war politics so emphatically. At its peak in the mid-1970s, National’s membership topped a quarter-of-a-million.

What Forbes and her fellow conspiracy-theorists fail to grasp about democratic success, is that the exercise of real political power by working-class people (as evidenced by Labour’s dramatic economic and social transformations of the 1930s and 40s) does not just alarm the corporate elites.

When confronted by a confident and increasingly insubordinate working-class, broad swathes of the middle-class grow fearful that their superior social status is about to be eroded. To resist the rise of the working-class, two strategic options present themselves. The first is to effect a middle-class alignment with the ruling elites. The second is for the middle-class, using its credentialled expertise, to overwhelm the organisations of the working-class, turning lions into lambs and effectively giving the bosses two parties to play with.

The New Zealand middle-class has chosen both options. It’s commercial and industrial half backs the corporate elites in National, while its professional and managerial half makes sure Labour remains the neoliberal party it helped it to become in the 1980s and 90s. Middle-class idealists may have migrated to the Alliance and the Greens, but their more “progressive” policies have not yet contributed, in any meaningful way, to the re-empowering of the working-class.

Historically, “progressivism” represented the educated American middle-class’s answer to the brutally democratic working-class solutions developed by immigrant communities living in the United States’ largest cities during the Nineteenth Century. Dubbed “machine politics” by middle-class reformers affronted by its ruthless majoritarianism and unabashed clientism (which the reformers called corruption) progressivism successfully tamed the unruly beast that was American democracy, and made sure that working-class Americans kept their red crayoning safely inside the lines.

But, just because the kratos has been relocated in the hands of the more respectable sort of demos doesn’t mean that the corporate elites were willing to leave the political stage to those who clearly saw themselves as stepping nimbly between the Scylla of an angry working-class, and the Charybdis of Robber Baron Capitalism. Progressivism (a.k.a social-democracy) needs working-class votes if it is to wield political power, so, at least some of its measures must be to the obvious advantage of the whole population.

Not acceptable. As the capitalist elites discovered in the 1970s, even the middle-class version of democracy has a nasty habit of eventually encroaching on those parts of the system which capitalism has ruled off-limits. Give people of colour, or women, or the environment, enforceable rights and the next thing you know the cheeky so-and-sos will be wanting to use them.

What to do? Easy. Raise several well-equipped ideological divisions and throw them into the battle of ideas. From the early-1970s on, lobbying firms and think-tanks have grown like Topsy all across the capitalist world. Had the progressive middle-class not drawn its teeth and clipped its claws, an angry working-class might have risen to meet the Robber Baron’s challenge as it did in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s. But, without the kratos of the unruly majority of the demos behind them, the paternalist strategies of the progressives were easily countered.

When the corporate elites discovered how intensely the working-class hated the educated middle-class that had shut them out of power, they must have known they couldn’t lose.

And, that’s the problem with democracy, isn’t it? It’s indivisible. Deny it to some, and you end up allowing its enemies to deny it to all.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 19 February 2024.

Bending Us Towards Compulsory Virtue.

Bending Us To Their Will: It is in the “bending” that the trouble starts. Those convinced that the arc of history is sending humanity in quite the wrong direction, often feel a strong moral obligation to wrench it back on track. For such people “live and let live” is a dangerous principle – not least because it means leaving all manner of “incorrect world-views” to flourish unchallenged and uncorrected.

WHAT A TIME IT WAS! Back in the day. Around the time Fran Wilde’s bill to decriminalise homosexuality was making its fractious way through Parliament. A time of passionate – and often deeply divisive – debate.

Many of the country’s largest institutions: the trade unions, the churches, political parties, sporting bodies; were split. It was interesting though, because those in favour of liberalising the law did not seem to be as quite as angry as those who opposed it.

Some reformers even managed to retain a sense of humour. I remember a tough-as-nails old trade unionist who didn’t care who knew that he belonged to the “live and let live” faction.

He would tell his fellow unionists: “I don’t care what people get up to in their own bedrooms.” Before adding with a wink: “Just so long as they don’t make it compulsory!”

Forty years ago, people laughed out loud.

Forty years on, however, it is possible to locate in the unionist’s bon mot the ideological fissures that have, over the decades, widened to the point of unbridgeability.

At the heart of the liberal impulse lies a revulsion against the tendency of empowered majorities to despise, isolate, condemn and punish refractory minorities. The liberal refuses to locate moral certainty in the judgemental multitude. Though an individual may find him or herself quite alone in their personal convictions, it is nevertheless entirely possible that those convictions are correct. Belief, providing it does not actively, deliberately, and without just cause, seek to impose restrictions upon others, is to be tolerated – not persecuted. Similarly, to prohibit actions which do no harm to others cannot be morally justified.

The thing about the liberal temperament is that, for some on the left, it comes across as just a little too relaxed. Getting the angry masses to march behind a banner inscribed with the words Leben und leben lassen (Live and let live) is a lot harder than mobilising them behind the more active slogans of progressive radicals and revolutionaries.

The very term “progressive” embodies movement. Progressives are people with a purpose. People determined to, in the splendid metaphor of Dr Martin Luther King, bend the arc of history towards justice.

Unfortunately, it is in the “bending” that the trouble starts. Those convinced that the arc of history is sending humanity in quite the wrong direction, often feel a strong moral obligation to wrench it back on track. For such people “live and let live” is a dangerous principle – not least because it means leaving all manner of “incorrect world-views” to flourish unchallenged and uncorrected.

So long as evil thoughts do not father evil deeds, a complacent liberalism seems happy to leave the Devil alone. For the revolutionary Left, however, that’s the problem. The Devil has never been content to just sit on his hands and think evil thoughts. Lucifer, Satan, the Devil: Patriarchy, Capitalism, White Supremacy; all of them prefer their brainchildren alive and kicking in the real world. If the Liberals aren’t willing to fight against these evil things, then it’s safe to assume they’re fighting for them.

This is what explains the unusually high heat in the political kitchens of the 2020s. It is no longer enough to take up arms against a specific evil: labour exploitation, racial persecution, sexual discrimination; and defeat it. The struggle for justice must be continuous.

While evil ideas and practices grow strong in the dark interstices of contemporary society, justice-seekers can accept no respite. To those still in possession of the wrong beliefs, it is no longer morally acceptable to apply the principle of “live and let live”. To argue that beliefs do not lead to actions flies in the face of all historical experience. If we are not to live in a worse world, then the struggle for a better one must be constant.

When Fran Wilde’s Homosexual Law Reform Bill became law, many liberals cracked open a bottle of bubbly and toasted a job well done. The “Blackmailer’s Charter” was gone. People could be who they were without fear of legal persecution. Conservative New Zealanders didn’t have to like gays, but they were now required to tolerate them.

Live and let live.

“No!”, shout the moral Jacobins, “Not good enough! Not while homophobia and transphobia destroy lives. Not while heteronormative privilege endures!”

Bending us towards compulsory virtue.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 June 2023.

Progress, Or Restoration? Which Way For The Left?

God Given, Or Man Made? Historians might quibble that the “rights and freedoms” which a great many nineteenth century industrial workers (especially in the English-speaking world) believed their forefathers had enjoyed were more imaginary than real. But, for English socialists like William Morris and Oscar Wilde, the “Revolution” was, indeed, about a restoration of the social equilibrium and mutuality which many workers were convinced had characterised the pre-modern era.

YOU GOTTA LOVE the pseudonyms people come up with. “Pope Punctilious II”, for example, combines orthodoxy and accuracy, with just a hint of the nit-picker. Not a bad combination of talents to bring to the wild and woolly business of political analysis. The comment he appended to my recent Daily Blog post really set me thinking:

One beef with this article. Trotter claims the country’s current isn’t ‘progressive’, suggesting he’s still attached to a word which has become thoroughly disreputable. I wonder, do we need ‘progressive’ policies, or ‘restorative’ policies?

Progress or Restoration? That struck me as a particularly interesting question.

Does human progress actually have an end-point? Or, is it something that goes on forever? And, if it is continuous, then what will happen to us? If every aspect of the human experience is subject to improvement, then, surely, it is at least theoretically possible that the species will one day “progress” to a point where it becomes something else – something non-human? And is that really what most human-beings want?

A few years ago, I recall watching an animated propaganda film from the Soviet era. It anticipated the evolution of “Soviet Man” – a superhuman being capable of subduing all things to his will. Although it was clearly intended to be inspiring, the film struck me as horrific. Its Soviet makers defined super-humanity as the power to subordinate the whole material world (i.e. the planet) completely to Soviet Man’s progressive will. His monstrous machines consumed forests, straightened rivers, levelled mountains and drained seas. Nothing was impossible. The film ended with Soviet Man boarding the ultimate machine, an interstellar spacecraft. Off he went to spread his planet-consuming socialism across the universe.

Soviet Man reaches for the stars.

But, before all you conservative readers out there start shaking your heads knowingly and getting ready to tap out a comment identifying the above story as just one more example of the historical and moral bankruptcy of socialism, I would invite you to pause, and think.

How different, really, is the vision of those “progressive” Soviet animators from the vision of today’s charismatic billionaires? The Bransons, the Bezoses, the Musks: aware of this planet’s imminent descent into the doom-spiral predicted 50 years ago by the Club of Rome; haven’t they also succumbed to the fantasy of exporting their special brand of superhuman, hyper-capitalist, progressivism across the universe?

Is there a fatal flaw in progressivism?

As with most things, the answer lies in its beginnings. The post upon which Pope Punctilious II was commenting, identified the emerging social-liberal revolution as the ideological defence mechanism of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC). Tellingly, the “discoverers” of the PMC, American academics Barbara and John Ehrenreich, linked its rise to the related and simultaneous rise of the so-called “Progressive” movement in the United States:

The generation entering managerial and professional roles between 1890 and 1920 consciously grasped the roles which they had to play. They understood that their own self-interest was bound up in reforming capitalism, and they articulated their understanding far more persistently and clearly than did the capitalist class itself. The role of the emerging PMC, as they saw it, was to mediate the basic class conflict of capitalist society and create a ‘rational’ reproducible social order […..] ‘Class harmony’ was the stated goal of many outstanding PMC spokespeople, and to many in the capitalist class as well, it was clear that ‘professionals’ could be more effective in the long run than Pinkertons [professional strike-breakers].

So, Progressivism – far from being a simple synonym for “socialism” – was actually a way of entrenching the principles, and modernising the practices, of capitalism.

In the professional opinion of PMC reformers, the raucous and rowdy conduct of American democracy, with its “machine politicians” and their disreputable knack for “delivering”, in the most unprofessional (not to say corrupt) fashion, the big city, mostly working-class, immigrant vote, needed to be reduced to something altogether more manageable. Democracy, the Progressives argued, was much too important to be left to the people.

The “primary” system of winnowing candidates; the recall of governors; the placing of “propositions” on the ballot-paper: all of these were Progressive initiatives aimed at breaking the power of party caucuses, and curbing the influence of the men who wheeled and dealed in smoke-filled rooms.

New Zealand’s own progressives, gathered in the Liberal Party, were no less dedicated to professionalising capitalism than their American counterparts. New Zealand’s arbitration-based system of industrial relations was intended to obviate the need for union militancy. The Liberals may have attracted working-class voters, but socialists they most emphatically were not!

If the PMC was busy making plans for the proletariat’s own good, what ideas were driving the workers themselves? Were they “progressives” too? Or, were they actually more inspired by the notion of restoring to ordinary working people the independence and autonomy which they fervently believed to be the birthright of all “freeborn” human-beings.

Historians might quibble that the “rights and freedoms” which a great many nineteenth century industrial workers (especially in the English-speaking world) believed their forefathers had enjoyed were more imaginary than real. But, for English socialists like William Morris and Oscar Wilde, the “Revolution” was, indeed, about a restoration of the social equilibrium and mutuality which many workers were convinced had characterised the pre-modern era. Morris’s focus on traditional craftsmanship, and his horror of the cheap, machine-produced, commodities pouring out of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills”, stands in sharp contrast to the “scientific socialism” of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

It is no accident that the vast working-class crowd which gathered outside Transport House (headquarters of the British Labour Party) to celebrate their historic electoral victory in 1945 did not sing The Internationale, or The Red Flag, but William Blake’s Jerusalem. And the words of Blake’s great poem do, indeed, have more about them of Pope Punctilious II’s “restorative” politics than anything today’s “progressive” politicians would own up to:

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 16 December 2021.

Hillary Clinton, Progressive.

Neoliberal War Goddess, Or Stalwart American Progressive? Why is this woman, this feminist, this progressive, demonised as some sort of fanatical neoliberal war goddess? Why do even New Zealanders who identify as “left-wing” claim to see no meaningful difference between Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump? How has the woman who campaigned for George McGovern – the most radical presidential candidate in recent American history – been so egregiously defamed?

 

“WHAT WE HAVE TO DO every so often in America is save capitalism from itself.” Hillary Clinton’s take on capitalism is pretty much the same as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s take on capitalism. If that doesn’t justify placing Clinton among America’s progressives, then the definition of “progressive” must have been changed when the world’s political scientists weren’t looking.

 

Only the most extreme denizens of the Far Right would dispute that Roosevelt’s “New Deal” rescued American capitalism from the looming political consequences of the Great Depression. Certainly, that remains the firm judgement of practically all American socialists. Indeed, the great tragedy of American socialism is that the progressive movement (almost always in the guise of the Democratic Party) has unfailingly stepped up to defuse those economic and social bombs which, left undefused, might so easily have exploded into revolution.

 

Clinton fits very comfortably into that Democratic tradition. Ideologically-speaking she rates as a fairly staunch American “liberal” (New Zealand political scientists would call her a social-democrat). United States experts locate her on the same section of the left political spectrum as President Barack Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren, and only marginally to the right of Senator Bernie Sanders who, in spite of calling himself a “democratic socialist”, has devoted his life to promoting a social and economic programme indistinguishable from Roosevelt’s New Deal.

 

So why is this woman, this feminist, this progressive, demonised as some sort of fanatical neoliberal war goddess? Why do even New Zealanders who identify as “left-wing” claim to see no meaningful difference between Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump? How has the woman who campaigned for George McGovern – the most radical presidential candidate in recent American history – been so egregiously defamed?

 

The answer is simple. Hillary Clinton has been demonised by the most reactionary elements of the American Right ever since she and her husband looked set to claim the White House in the presidential election of 1992. For nearly quarter-of-a-century she has been the target of an unrelenting campaign of false accusations, scurrilous rumours and outright lies. Recall the disgraceful campaign to undermine the prime-ministership of New Zealand’s own Helen Clark, multiply it by 10, and you will have some idea of the magnitude of what Clinton quite correctly described as “a vast right-wing conspiracy” dedicated to her and her husband’s destruction.

 

Those who were not yet born in 1992 find it difficult to fathom the depths to which the American Right was (and is) willing to sink in order to neutralise any and all threats posed to the legacies of Reagan and Bush by the Democratic Party and its more electable leaders.

 

That Hillary Clinton, as the Junior Senator from New York, voted for the invasion of Iraq has been parlayed by Sanders’ millennial supporters into proof positive of her war-mongering instincts. That dozens of her fellow Democratic senators did the same, is simply ignored. So, too, is the historical fact that ever since the days of the red-baiter, Joseph McCarthy, the Democratic Party has felt obliged to out-perform the Republicans on issues of national security.

 

The Millennial Left’s refusal to put the behaviour of politicians into some semblance of historical context is also evident in the their criticism of Clinton’s actions in regard to Libya. As US Secretary of State, Clinton was acutely aware of how much her country owed to its Nato partners for their unwavering support of the USA’s military commitment to Afghanistan. That was why she was willing to recommend to President Obama that he lend his support to British and French efforts in the UN Security Council to provide air support to Libyan rebels fighting Muamma Gaddafi. Clinton’s critics conveniently forget that it was the Security Council, not the US Secretary of State, who subsequently authorised the “humanitarian” bombing of Libya.

 

Unfortunately, this is not the sort of argument that sways Clinton’s younger critics in the slightest. Anyone who takes money from Goldman Sachs and their Wall Street partners-in-crime is obviously guilty beyond redemption. As is anyone who acknowledges the extraordinary electoral power of the Jewish Vote in US politics by making favourable references to Israel. (Did anyone hear Bernie condemn “Israel’s apartheid regime”?)

 

The “Bernie-or-Bust” die-hards who, unlike their mentor, refuse to recognise the brute realities of American presidential politics, have proved to be fast learners when it comes to orchestrating exactly the same phantasmagorical parade of falsehoods that, hitherto, Clinton only had to fend off from the Right.

 

Hillary has become “Killary”. Bumper-stickers scream “Liar, liar, pants-suit on fire!” Never mind that the US media’s fact-checkers have pronounced Clinton the most truthful of all the major primary contenders. Or that on her watch as Secretary of State the USA markedly improved its global conduct.

 

The only conclusion to be drawn from the above is that, in the minds of politicised Millennials, the meaning of “progressive” has changed. It now means: “Somebody who could not possibly be elected President of the United States.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 11 August 2016.

From Customers To Voters: Drawing The Line Against Energy Profiteers

Drawing The Line Against Misconduct: Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt (1858-1919) twenty-sixth President of the USA and champion of the progressive regulation of America's over-mighty corporations and their "robber baron" proprietors. The Labour-Green plan for regulating the New Zealand energy market falls squarely within the Rooseveltian tradition.

 

IN ITS BROADEST SENSE, socialism is about putting society’s needs ahead of the market’s choices. Indeed, socialism comes into being only when it makes more sense to be a voter than a customer: a citizen than a consumer. In this sense, at least, the Chief Executive of Mighty River Power, Doug Heffernan, is right: the Labour-Green policy package, Energising New Zealand, is “a socialist consumer model”.

 

But, the economic commentator, Bernard Hickey, is also right when he says:

 

“In the world of corporate and government relations there’s a vague concept referred to as a ‘licence to operate’. It means that large companies or departments know there’s only so far you can push the public and politicians before they react by, in effect, removing that licence to operate and regulating profits lower.”

 

That point has been reached many times before in history, and the result has always been the same: the large companies and departments lose.

 

The period of American history spanning 1890 to 1910 was known as the “Gilded Age”. The fruits of America’s break-neck industrialisation had been captured by an infinitesimally small percentage of the population. These “robber barons”, as they came to be called, flaunted their unprecedented wealth by constructing mansions and castles modelled on those of the European aristocracy. Names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan and Carnegie became synonymous not only with great fortunes, but with great power.

 

Too much power.

 

Curbing the power of the robber barons of the Gilded Age was the mission of the US political movement known as “Progressivism”. It’s most effective advocate was President Theodore Roosevelt. His summation of the Progressive Movement’s attitude to the great American corporations provides a useful, and eloquent, definition of the licence of operate:

 

“Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavouring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”

 

“[S]o handled as to subserve the public good.” It’s a line Labour and the Greens would do well to borrow and develop. Because the opposite of “subserve” is “subvert” – and to demonstrate the meaning of subversion in relation to electricity pricing, they need only describe what happened in California when its energy needs were left to the tender mercies of an over-mighty US corporation called Enron.

 

Enron was revealed to be a corporation in which “misconduct” bordering on “evil” was the surest route to promotion and profit. Inevitably, the people of the United States (and of California especially) “drew the line” and Enron’s licence to operate was withdrawn.

 

The system of electricity pricing operating in California today is strikingly similar to the system being proposed by Labour and the Greens.

 

There’s a very good reason for emulating the Californians. Our energy companies may not be as red in tooth and claw as Enron, but the quantum of “super-profits” which they have extracted from the long-suffering New Zealand consumer is truly staggering.

 

Research undertaken for the NZ Commerce Commission by American energy expert, Professor Frank Wolak, and published in 2009, concluded that “over a period of some six and a half years the generators have exercised their substantial market power to earn market rents estimated conservatively to be $4.3 billion.”

 

As trade union leader, Matt McCarten, put it: “That’s $1000 profit for every man, woman and child.”

 

Clearly, New Zealanders have lost themselves a great deal of money by submitting docilely to the roles of consumer and customer. Voices crying in the wilderness – most particularly those belonging to long-time energy campaigners Molly Mellish and Geoff Bertram – have been telling us for years to wake up and realise how much it’s been costing us to smell the coffee.

 

To the undoubted relief of Molly and Geoff, Labour and Green policy-makers have finally begun to listen and now we, the consumers and customers of wildly over-priced electricity, are being invited to put aside those passive identities and become, instead, active citizens and voters.

 

In 2014 the Opposition parties have invited the New Zealand electorate to revoke Mighty River Power’s, Genesis Energy’s, Meridian Energy’s and Contact Energy’s licence to operate as unfettered super-profiteers. As citizens and voters we’ll finally be empowered to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice: drawing a line against our energy generators’ social misconduct and subserving them to the public good.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 23 April 2013.