Giving Trump Enough Rope.

Not Drowning, Waving: What the political scientists and mainstream media pundits, the Hollywood celebrities and TV comedy show hosts, all fail to understand is that they are the people who keep the Right’s rope tight. The more they disparage and deride Trump and his “deplorable” followers, the tighter they wind it around themselves: the harder they try to pull the Right down, the more closely the separate fibres of Trump’s eclectic coalition are drawn together.

THE SPEED at which the Right is mutating is nowhere more evident than in Donald Trump’s America. One has only to examine the tensions within the American Republican Party to get some measure of its disarray. In spite of controlling all three branches of the federal government, the Republicans have never looked more fractious. Fewer and fewer on the right are convinced that politics-as-usual is any longer capable of delivering the changes they seek.

The American experience is far from unique. Across the world, rightists are rejecting the argument that political power is accessible only from the centre. Increasingly, right-wing leaders and activists are turning to ideas and traditions long considered moribund, disreputable – or both. The era of monolithic parties, held together by monolithic ideologies, has ended. By twisting a campaign rope out of many ideological strands, Trump was able to lasso the White House and hog-tie the institutions of American democracy.

It was not always so. For many decades, American political scientists fondly assumed that the average conservative voter in the United States was an essentially benign creature. Conservatives affirmed the verities of the Christian religion and the traditional values which flowed from them. They believed fervently in individual liberty, the sanctity of private property and the virtues of untrammelled capitalist enterprise. If asked to sum up their political philosophy in a single sentence, they would, likely as not, repeat some version of Thomas Jefferson’s claim: “The best government is that which governs least.”

What conservatives were most emphatically not assumed to be, were malignant enemies of freedom and progress. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower cleaved proudly to the founding principles of the American republic. On occasion, Republicans had even been known to fight for them.

This “progressive” conservatism was, however, always more apparent than real. It required the constant effort of newspaper editors, party grandees and intelligent presidential aspirants to robe the naked prejudices of conservative Americans in the togas of small-r republican virtue. So long as the means of political communication remained in the hands of these political elites, the vicious ideas and aspirations of small-town America could be filtered out of their betters’ lofty political discourses. No one gave much thought to what might happen to right-wing politics if technology advanced to the point where every citizen could become their own publisher.

Even in the Internet Age, the idea that the President of the United States might dispense altogether with the services of the elite media and communicate directly with his electoral base via social media remained unthinkable – until Trump started tweeting.

Political scientists are aghast at the intellectual chaos manifested every day in Trump’s utterances and tweets. They, along with the political journalists they taught, are utterly unable to make sense of the President’s communications. It’s as though the myriad crazy notions of the American Right have been gathered together in a huge basket (let’s call in Fox News!) into which Trump reaches every day for inspiration. The results are as incoherent and self-contradictory as they are illustrative of the astonishing ignorance and credulity of the “ordinary” American citizen. To the educated, the credentialed, the experts, it simply makes no sense.

But it does. It makes perfect sense. The only way to prevent the Right’s “rope” from unravelling is to ensure that every strand receives equal care and attention. It doesn’t matter that Trump’s electoral base is composed of racists, homophobes, misogynists, fundamentalist Christians, Islamophobes and out-and-out fascists; as well as hard-line neoliberals, climate-change sceptics, union-busters, flat-taxers, economic nationalists and Ayn Rand libertarians; so long the dearest hopes and darkest fears of each component of this bizarre coalition continue to be encouraged by their President.

The other thing that the political scientists and mainstream media pundits, the Hollywood celebrities and TV comedy show hosts, don’t understand is that they are the people who keep the Right’s rope tight. The more they disparage and deride Trump and his “deplorable” followers, the tighter they wind it around themselves: the harder they try to pull the Right down, the more closely the separate fibres of Trump’s eclectic coalition are drawn together.

The Republican Party is no longer an ideological and organisational monolith and it lacks anything remotely resembling a coherent plan for “making America great again”. The billionaires who back it have almost nothing in common with the marginalised men and women of the rustbelt states who secured Trump’s victory. Except this: their hatred for the Democratic Party and their media allies.

While the Democrats and the mainstream media keep the Right’s rope tight, the Republican Party’s disdain for politics-as-usual will grow – and so will the President’s.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 4 May 2018.

Eleanor Catton And The Sociocultural Logic Of Kiwi Neoliberalism.

Brains, Beauty and Balls: Eleanor Catton's uncompromising assault on New Zealand's neoliberal regime pushed all of the Right's political panic-buttons. Shock-jock Sean Plunket verbally slapped her down with the accusation of being both a "traitor" and "an ungrateful hua". Such over-the-top responses have vividly exposed the crude "sociocultural logic" of New Zealand's unique iteration of the neoliberal project.

 

ELEANOR CATTON was always going to be trouble. With her fine-china good-looks, transparent intelligence and uncharacteristic (for a Kiwi) articulateness, she was a political reprimand just waiting to happen. One had only to read her books or hear her speak to know that the same intuitive grasp of the human condition which secured her the Man Booker Prize was never going to let her line-up alongside the vacuous celebrities that accessorise the power brokers of the Right.

 

Catton’s beauty is a significant factor in the current controversy. No matter how unfair, a regular set of human features confers a very special kind of power upon those fortunate enough to possess them. In a culture saturated with advertising imagery, beauty has come to enjoy a mutually reinforcing relationship with authority. In a nutshell: beauty is believed, therefore, beauty sells. It also carries a potent sexual charge. Like it or not, messages, of whatever kind, have a much better chance of making it through our defences when they’re delivered by George Clooney or Scarlet Johansson.

 

That is why the Right becomes more than usually incensed when it is challenged by good-looking opponents. They know that their messages will reach the public unfiltered, and that their audience will not be distracted by bad hair or crooked teeth. It’s been that way since (at least) 1960, when the handsome, tanned and supremely confident John F. Kennedy easily overcame the jowly pallor and five o’clock shadow of a perspiring Richard Nixon in the first televised presidential debate. (Interestingly, those listening to the debate on the radio gave the victory to Nixon.)

 

The other great sin the Right could lay at Catton’s door is the near faultless diction of an upper-middle-class girl raised in the comfort and security of a loving academic family. Accents are an instant indicator of one’s social origins and a usually reliable guide to one’s place in society’s pecking-order. Deploying cut-glass vowels has always been an excellent way of putting the lower orders at a disadvantage. Under no circumstances, however, should they be deployed against members of one’s own class!

 

The third strike against Catton was her possession of a rich vocabulary and the wit to deploy it with jarring political accuracy. In other words, she was an intellectual. Even worse, she obviously felt no special obligation to hide her intellectual brilliance under a bushel.

 

The Right loathes intellectuals. The life of the mind offers little to those who place their faith in tradition and prejudice. Conservatives are, consequently, the natural enemies of critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making. A young, attractive, well-spoken and intellectual woman speaking truth to power will always be a cause for concern on the Right. But, when that woman is also an internationally celebrated Man Booker Prize winner, ‘concern’ doesn’t nearly cover it.

 

One suspects that to the lengthening list of her sins Catton’s critics were especially keen to add the sin of deceitfulness. How could someone from such a good family; so well-spoken and accomplished academically; the winner of a prestigious international literary prize; turn out to be a bloody leftie ?! Did the NZ Herald know about these “progressive” tendencies when they advanced her as a New Zealander of the Year? Surely not! And did Creative New Zealand know, when they were doling out all those grants to the little minx, that she was going to turn up at the Greens’ campaign launch and endorse them? One certainly hopes not.

 

And then, of course, there was Catton’s use of the term “neoliberal” to describe the governments of New Zealand, Canada and the UK.

 

It is one of the peculiar quirks of neoliberalism that its adherents not only vehemently deny that they are neoliberals, but also insist that neoliberalism itself only exists in the minds of economically illiterate leftists. Their denial is born of their need not to be thought of as ideologues. The neoliberal project is, above all else, an effort to have the market regarded as a natural phenomenon  – no more amenable to human intervention than the weather. Their great objective is to have their highly contentious ideas accepted, finally, as simple common-sense, thus becoming the unremarked wallpaper of twenty-first century life. This cannot happen if people are encouraged to view them as the ideologically-driven zealots they truly are.

 

It is here that Catton’s gender, her beauty, diction and intellectual prowess become entangled in what the Australian sociologist, Professor Raewyn Connell, describes as “an embedded masculinity politics in the neoliberal project”.

 

“With a few exceptions”, writes Connell in Understanding Neoliberalism, “neoliberal leadership is composed of men. It’s treasured figure, ‘the entrepreneur,’ is culturally coded masculine. Its assault on the welfare state redistributes income from women to men and imposes more unpaid work on women as carers for the young, the old, and the sick. Its attack on ‘political correctness’ and its rollback of affirmative action specifically undermine the gains of feminism. In such ways, neoliberalism from the 1980s on offered middle-class men an indirect but effective solution to the delegitimation of patriarchy and the threat of real gender equality.”

 

The particular venom of the Right’s reaction to Catton’s criticism of John Key’s “neoliberal” government – exemplified by Sean Plunket’s vicious verbal backhanders: “traitor” and “ungrateful hua” – derives from the very special character of the “masculinity politics” embedded in the New Zealand neoliberal project.

 

As a political phenomenon, competing for power in democratic states, neoliberalism is constantly in search of viable electoral vectors. Under John Key, the vector selected is the overwhelmingly male, determinedly anti-intellectual, painfully inarticulate, culturally moronic and sports-mad portion of the New Zealand population. The part that reacts with frightening emotional fury against everything Eleanor Catton stands for. Theirs is the militant egalitarianism of the “ordinary bloke” who would instantly identify in Catton’s unblemished features, rounded vowels and polysyllabic vocabulary the absolute embodiment of an “up-herself middle-class bitch”.

 

Catton was wrong to invoke New Zealand’s 'tall-poppy syndrome' as the explanation for her personal cultural Calvary. A much more appropriate term has been coined by the South Korean sociologist, Jesook Song. Eleanor Catton is a victim of the “sociocultural logic” of Kiwi neoliberalism.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 2 February 2015.

Why Jamie Whyte's 11-Year-Old Daughter Is A Better Philosopher Than Her Dad

Philosopher King-Hit: Jamie Whyte used the behaviour of his 11-year-old daughter to explain the motivations of the Jihadi assassins who massacred the staff of Charlie Hebdo. Upon examination, however, Whyte's daughter's grasp of basic ethics turns out to be a lot stronger than her dad's!

 

IN YESTERDAY’S HERALD (20/1/15) the former leader of the Act Party, Jamie Whyte, offered the behaviour of his 11-year-old daughter as a useful guide to the thinking of the Jihadis responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

 

Wow! That’s not a context into which I would want to plunge my daughter, but then, I’m not a Cambridge-educated philosopher.

 

Jamie’s daughter’s deadly act of extremism, as elaborated by her father, was (by Jihadi standards) pretty mild. “She took the cigarettes of one of our dinner guests and threw them into our back hedge.”

 

Gosh! That’s pretty bloody hard to equate with the bloodbath at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, but, okay, let’s follow Jamie’s argument all the way to its conclusion.

 

En route to that conclusion, thankfully, Jamie does pause to observe, generously:

 

“Of course, my daughter and her moral tutors do not want to slaughter smokers or satirists. They are not as angry or bleak or deranged as the Parisian killers and the others who have committed ideologically motivated atrocities.”

 

Whew! That was good to hear! Even if, as I was reading Jamie’s exculpatory aside, the word “but” was already taking shape in my mind. And, just as I feared, there it was, right at the beginning of the next paragraph:

 

“But they have the same basic urge – to compel, to dominate. And they seek justification for it in the supposed vices of their victims.”

 

Well, yes, that’s right Jamie, they do. Just as the members of the Act Party offer up their unwillingness to be subjected to the vices of others (taxation, regulation, collectivism) as justification for their attempts to impose their own frankly bizarre social, economic and political beliefs upon the rest of us. Indeed, when it comes to compelling and dominating, the Act Party is pretty hard to beat. (How else to explain David Seymour’s willingness to exercise what is, in effect, Act’s casting parliamentary vote on the strength of just 16,689 Party Votes!)

 

Except, of course, I would delete such sententious words as “compel”, “dominate”, “vices” and “victims” from Jamie’s description of his daughter’s motivation. That’s because his daughter’s behaviour is entirely consistent with the highest moral conduct.

 

Not even Jamie, I trust, would argue that it is the right of every individual to inflict actual physical harm upon individuals who are inflicting no actual physical harm upon him. Indeed, I would expect him to argue that human-beings, both individually and collectively, have the right (even, some would argue, the duty) to prevent the unjustified infliction of actual physical harm upon other people.

 

Certainly, by throwing her father’s dinner guest’s cigarettes in the hedge, Jamie’s daughter was doing exactly that. Having learned from her teachers that the passive inhalation of tobacco smoke is every bit as dangerous as its deliberate inhalation, she was well aware that there was no “safe” way the guest’s cigarettes could be consumed. Though she was only 11, she also appears to have shrewdly calculated that the other people present were quite capable of endangering her own and her loved ones’ health out of a misguided respect for the norms of social etiquette. Her unilateral decision to steal the cigarettes and ditch them in the hedge was, thus, no more worthy of her father’s condemnation than another person’s decision to deprive a drunken guest of his or her car keys.

 

The actual or potential threat to the rights of other human-beings always trumps the right of an individual to indulge in behaviour that puts those rights in jeopardy.

 

Not that Jamie gets this – no siree Bob! After a perfectly reasonable critique of American drug laws, the father of the person he describes as his “sanctimonious, bullying daughter” goes on to state that:

 

“Decisions Western governments do not leave to you and the adults you freely deal with include: how much money you work for, what you wear on your head when cycling, the quality of your house, what you eat, the race of the people you employ, the ways you kill yourself.”

 

Decoded, this sentence tells us that Jamie is opposed to the minimum wage, basic health and safety regulations, anti-discrimination laws, and the State’s not unreasonable refusal to countenance you dynamiting yourself in a crowded street as a means of committing suicide.

 

It also tells us that Jamie’s “philosophy” is blissfully unaware of the fact that the consequences of one’s individual actions radiate out through society in ways that are  all-too-frequently extremely damaging to other individuals and groups.

 

What he obviously believes to be the entirely harmless act of agreeing to work for a pittance, if repeated often enough by other like-minded individuals, will depress the incomes of people who have entered into no such voluntary agreement to work for less than they are worth.

 

Likewise, Jamie sees nothing wrong in allowing individuals to refuse to follow sensible safety precautions – thereby imposing the costs of any accidental injuries upon the rest of us.

 

And is he fazed by the billion-dollar consequences of the leaky homes scandal? Not one bit!

 

The former Act leader is able to articulate such absurdities because, like so many others on the Right, he really does believe that Margaret Thatcher was correct when she announced that “there is no such thing as society”.

 

And that’s a perfectly understandable position to take if it’s one’s intention to empower a tiny minority at the expense of the overwhelming majority of one’s fellow citizens. Indeed, taking any other position must, in the end, open the right-winger to social, economic and political claims that he or she is personally loathe to acknowledge. The fact that such untrammelled individualism is philosophical twaddle is neither here nor there. As Humpty-Dumpty informs Alice in Through The Looking Glass: “The question is, which is to be master – that’s all.”

 

Questions of political mastery aside, it would be wrong to end these observations without acknowledging that, in spite of his absurd philosophy, Jamie has clearly succeeded in raising an intelligent, daring and, ethically-speaking, disarmingly mature daughter. To whom I can only say: “Good on ya luv! A ‘little thuggery’ in defence of other people’s rights is no vice.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 22 January 2015.

Oh, For A Well Mannered Left

IN A RECENT POSTING, Cactus Kate fulminates against the Left’s presumption that only they know how to care about their fellow human-beings. Her caustic polemic reminded me of the editorial I wrote for the Autumn 2003 issue of N.Z. Political Review.

"Oh, For A Well-Mannered Left" drew attention to the curious fact that "the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit."

The whole editorial is reproduced below.

WHY IS IT that I can get a friendlier discussion about New Zealand politics out of an ACT regional conference than I can out of practically any gathering of New Zealand lefties? Come to think of it, why was a gathering of right-wing ACT party members confident enough to invite an avowed social-democrat like Chris Trotter to address them, when a gathering of socialists and communists were unwilling to grant him speaking rights at a post-9/11 rally?

Why is the Left so bloody unpleasant?

In the end, I think it comes down to the stark differences between conservative and radical political cultures.

Conservatives operate on the not unreasonable assumption that, since they already control most of the things that really matter in our society, their paramount political responsibility is to hold on to what they’ve got.

Having firmly settled upon their guiding strategy, conservatives feel free to debate its tactical ramifications without rancour. What’s more, like any good general taking up a defensive position, they possess an insatiable appetite for reliable intelligence about their political enemies’ intentions. If they’re going to be attacked, they would like to know when, by whom, and with what.

All of which contributes to a conservative culture of civility and curiosity. Historical memories of aristocratic honour and noblesse oblige mingle with more recent bourgeois values inherited from the Enlightenment – like the spirit of scientific inquiry – to produce the personal generosity, social ease, and intellectual flexibility so characteristic of conservative politicians the world over.

Radical political culture is altogether different.

For a start, there are long-standing and very sharp disagreements among radical leftists about "the movement’s" ultimate objectives. You can be a radical socialist, a radical Maori nationalist, a radical feminist or a radical ecologist and, depending on which camp you belong to, identify Capitalism, Pakeha Privilege, Patriarchy and/or Industrial Civilisation as the primary target of your political assault.

Worse still, because the radical’s default-mode (and here we are talking about radicals of both the Left and the Right) is opposition to the status quo, radical movements evince a praxis which encourages not only intellectual aggression, but all-too-often verbal and physical violence as well. Add to this volatile mixture the radical’s confusion over objectives (and the interminable tactical squabbles that it generates) and you have the perfect recipe for a culture of competition and intransigence.

Such cultures are highly intolerant of dissent. Indeed, intellectual subtlety of any kind tends to be frowned upon as proof of insufficient "staunchness". As a consequence radicals display all the attributes of (if I may continue to employ a military metaphor) the classical attacking force: an insistence on unity and unquestioning obedience; the strong validation of personal sacrifice and loyalty to the group; and a preoccupation with ends as opposed to means. Small wonder that so many radicals employ the language of combat – campaigns, rallies, marches, attacks – to describe political behaviour.

There is a paradox here. Conservative political culture, whose raison d’être is the preservation of social inequality and economic exploitation (not to mention the institutional violence these things create and upon which ruling class power rests) tends to produce individuals of considerable personal charm and genuine liberality. While radical political culture, which sets its face against the violence and injustice of entrenched privilege, all too often produces individuals who are aggressive, intolerant and utterly indifferent to the suffering which their relentless quest for justice causes.

In short, the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit.

I can’t help thinking that the revolution would come a lot sooner if the Left set about achieving its own radical objectives with its conservative opponents’ infinitely better manners.

As Gilbert Shelton’s wonderful 1970s poster put it: "Remember kids, when you’re out there smashing the State, to keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart."

EIGHT YEARS ON, little appears to have changed. Perhaps all of us, Left and Right, should ponder the truth of the following line of dialogue from an old Hollywood movie I saw many, many years ago – but which I've never forgotten:

"It’s a whole lot harder to love just one person than all humanity – but it’s not one bit less noble."