Wooing The Masses – A Green Fairy Tale?

Downloading The Deplorables: What Chloe Swarbrick is proposing to her Green comrades is a mass movement, but mass movements are driven by the interests of dominant majorities, not elites, and certainly not by the agendas of ethnic and sexual minorities. Working-class people, poorly-educated people, heterosexual people, Pakeha people: these are the New Zealanders the Greens will be required to accept on their own terms – which are most unlikely to line up with their elitist, anti-democratic, identity-driven political ideology.

CHLOE SWARBRICK has embarked on a brave, but almost certainly doomed, political experiment. She has set out to build a mass movement on the foundations of a political party that rejects majoritarian decision-making, and which, by elevating the particular above the universal, makes the social solidarity that fuels mass action impossibly difficult to achieve. If the transformational movement Swarbrick is hoping to build is ever to eventuate, then she will have to fundamentally remake her party.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the difficulty of the task Swarbrick has set herself is to reverse-engineer the salutary fate of the Auckland chapter of School Strike 4 Climate. This was the organisation, composed mainly of conscientized middle-class secondary-school students, widely credited with mobilising upwards of 50,000 young Aucklanders for the struggle against global warming back in 2019.

Central to the success of School Strike 4 Climate was its correct assumption that mass support for their cause already existed among those aged 15-20 years, and that to mobilise that support all they needed to do was organise a time and place for them to demonstrate it. The leadership of School Strike 4 Climate was largely self-selected, but the organs of organisation they conjured into existence were open to all. The kids who produced one of the largest political demonstrations in Auckland’s history did not ask permission before proceeding. Instead, they took the advice of the Nike Corporation and Greta Thunberg – and just did it.

And what a price they paid for having the temerity to organise a successful political event without first proving themselves fit “allies” for the victims of white supremacy, colonial subordination and heteronormative oppression. In the months and years that followed School Strike 4 Climate’s 2019 success, its organisers and participants were systematically “re-educated” to the point where their casual exercise of white privilege “persuaded” them to disband their organisation and withdraw into silence. In a statement released in June 2021, Auckland School Strike 4 Climate, declared itself to be “a racist organisation”. Henceforth, the fight against global warming would be led by their systemically victimised comrades.

But, if School Strike 4 Climate’s fate was to start huge and be made small, Swarbrick’s problem is how to take an organisation whose political mechanisms are designed to keep it small, and make it huge.

The Greens insistence on consensus-based decision-making, or, failing that, requiring the support of 75 percent of those responsible for making decisions, is driven by a profoundly elitist approach to politics. Those who framed the constitutional arrangements of the Green Party of Aotearoa were mistrustful of majorities and the political behaviour best suited to generating them. They did not want demagogues, they wanted philosopher kings and queens – men and women whose demonstrable wisdom counted for more than their ability to sway a conference of delegates. Investing these wise elders, and their tight circle of supporters, with veto powers was considered preferable to allowing 51 percent of Greens to overrule the preferences of the remaining 49 percent.

The problem with this constitutional structure is that it not only empowers those gathered around the revered philosopher king and/or queen, but also every other minority with the political smarts to throw a spanner in the decision-making works until its own agenda items are ticked-off. Constitutionally and politically, the Greens could hardly be better suited to advancing the cause of “Identity Politics” which, almost by definition, is hostile to the claims of dominant majorities. So much so that any Green politician demonstrating an ability to enthuse, galvanise, and (most alarmingly) mobilise large numbers of people is bound to attract the suspicion, even the outright enmity, of those whose interests would be compromised by an influx of members advancing policies believed to represent the greatest good for the greatest number.

In her speech to the Greens’ AGM in Christchurch (27-28 July 2024) Swarbrick challenged her audience with what, in the context of Green politics, is a deeply subversive question:

“What would it mean to build the biggest Green movement that the world has ever seen? For me, that’s not just about more seats in Parliament. It’s actually not even just about holding the Government benches. It’s about a country of citizens equipped with the understanding and the time and the resources to actively participate in our democracy. To hold those who make decisions on their behalf accountable. Even and especially if that’s us. It’s tens of thousands more Green Party members – people choosing to wear their hearts and values on their sleeves, organising and practising those values to win transformative change. From our neighbourhood corners to the very fabric of our state, in record numbers. Those people can and must come from all kinds of different backgrounds and walks of life.”

What Swarbrick is proposing here is a very big tent indeed – one stretching sufficient canvass to cover the sort of numbers needed to transform societies, and rescue planets. But such a big tent – “the biggest Green movement that the world has ever seen” – could not possibly endure for more than a few months under the present Green constitution.

What Swarbrick is demanding of her Green comrades is a mass movement, and mass movements are driven by the interests of dominant majorities, not elites, and certainly not by the agendas of ethnic and sexual minorities hostile to people who “come from all kinds of different backgrounds and walks of life” – most of them radically at odds with their own. Working-class people, poorly-educated people, heterosexual people, Pakeha people: people the Greens will have to accept on their own terms – and whom they must on no account attempt to convert to their elitist, anti-democratic, identity politics.

It is unclear whether or not even Swarbrick grasps this central reality of mass, or, as most commentators prefer to call it these days, “populist” politics. Buried in her challenge to the Green AGM is a perplexing reference to “a country of citizens equipped with the understanding and the time and the resources to actively participate in our democracy”. Nowhere does Swarbrick explain how such a country could possibly come into being prior to the revolutionary changes she is seeking. Only after the revolution is it possible to envisage citizens with “the understanding and the time” to make eco-socialism work.

Could it be that the only people Swarbrick is capable of envisioning as co-participants in the construction of a better world are people exactly like herself? Does she not understand that those in possession of the resources needed to participate meaningfully in the processes of self-government will always, this side of the revolution, be those with the most to lose by its arrival. Doesn’t she “get” that those with the most to gain from revolutionary change are unlikely to evince the placidity and equanimity of philosopher kings and queens? Their willingness to join the fight for change will be born of anger and despair, and the certainty that they have bugger-all left to lose. You don’t tell these sorts of people what they should be looking for – you give them what they want.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Monday, 29 July 2024.

No Questions Please – We’re Revolutionaries!

The Kids Were All Right: By stripping away all moral and practical grounds for unified struggle, Critical Race Theory can only strengthen the elites’ grip on contemporary society. The abdication of School Strike For Climate Auckland offers a textbook example of this phenomenon. The moral force of the nation’s secondary students in the fight against climate change has been significantly compromised. And through it all the mainstream news media has had nothing to say.

PERHAPS THE MOST ASTONISHING aspect of School Strike For Climate Auckland’s (SSFCA) spectacular self-cancellation was the media’s lack of interest. Oh sure, they picked up the group’s news release, and made its contents known to the public, but that was it. There appeared to be a general reluctance, extending across the whole of the mainstream news media, to investigate the story in any depth. No attempt was made to flesh-out and explain what, to most New Zealanders, was a jarring and baffling item of news. The same media which had welcomed the School Strike For Climate Movement, and praised its achievements, accepted the curious demise of its largest section without serious investigation or comment.

The only explanation for such an egregious dereliction of journalistic duty is that mainstream editors and reporters were fearful of the territory into which any serious investigation of the event was bound to lead them. They would have to explain why a group of young and idealistic secondary-school students, people they had written glowing stories about, had somehow been persuaded that they, and their organisation, were racist. They would have been required to question whether the Maori and Pasifika groups into whose hands SSFCA had vouchsafed the climate fight were capable of maintaining the political momentum generated by Greta Thunberg’s global movement.

Most of all, they would have had to help ordinary New Zealanders understand the extraordinary self-abasement contained in the group’s news release:

We apologise for the hurt, burnout, and trauma. We also apologise for the further trauma caused by our slow action to take responsibility. We recognise that this apology can never be enough to make up for our actions on top of years of systemic and systematic oppression, racism, and the silencing of those who are the most affected by climate change. This apology is just one of our steps in taking accountability for our actions.

What could possibly have made these young people say such extraordinary things about themselves, and about the movement they had worked so hard to build?

Unwilling to go there, a more politically savvy mainstream news media would simply have ignored the news release. Certainly, if your intention is to let a story die, then the last place you should put it is on RNZ’s “Morning Report” or the NZ Herald’s website. That, however, is where the statement ended up – in all its woke glory. Tens-of-thousands of astonished New Zealanders heard it, or read it, and said: “What on Earth?” But, from the editors and reporters who had salved what remained of their journalistic consciences by broadcasting and publishing SSFCA’s words, no answers came – just enthusiastic endorsements of the organisation’s actions from indigenous activists.

Those astonished New Zealanders seeking an explanation for SSFCA’s actions need look no further than the American-born ideology known as “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). According to the University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin School of Public Affairs:

CRT recognises that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalisation of people of colour. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colour-blind, however, CRT challenges this legal “truth” by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle of self-interest, power and privilege.

Now, while you might need to be a professor to write the above definition of CRT, you most certainly do not need a PhD to grasp how CRT works in practice. In a nutshell, CRT operates according to the principle: “If you’re white, you cannot be right.”

Naturally, in the United States the historical force credited with creating white privilege and white supremacy is Slavery. In New Zealand, however, the place of Slavery has been taken by Colonisation. It is not to white slavers, but white settlers, that the followers of CRT look for the root of all Aotearoa’s evils.

Leftists who object that white workers will always have more in common with brown workers than they will with a white ruling-class that oppresses all workers, get no joy from the followers of CRT. White elites may derive material benefits from their dominant position, but working-class whites derive equally important psychological benefits from their position in the racial hierarchy. According to CRT, the existence of a whole category of human-beings deemed immutably inferior to the white race, makes it easier for white workers to accept their own socio-economic subordination. At a stroke, Marxism is reduced to just another prop for white supremacy!

By stripping away all moral and practical grounds for unified struggle, CRT can only strengthen the elites’ grip on contemporary society. The abdication of SSFCA offers a textbook example of this phenomenon. The moral force of the nation’s secondary students in the fight against climate change has been significantly compromised. Doubts and resentments will spread swiftly through the SSFC Movement, making it a pretty safe bet that the turnout for any future demonstrations will be only a fraction of its former efforts. If the oil companies had set out to sabotage the domestic movement against anthropogenic global warming they could hardly have done a better job than these local adherents of CRT.

Black American progressives have themselves noted the dangerous ironies inherent in CRT. As Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora note in their recent Guardian article “Today, the self is the battlefield of politics. Blame Michel Foucault”:

Despite the ever-growing presence of this politics, its shortcomings are growing clear. “White guilt and black outrage,” as Cedric Johnson, professor of African American studies, has recently pointed out, “have limited political currency, and neither has ever been a sustainable basis for building the kind of popular and legislative majorities needed to actually contest entrenched power in any meaningful way” ….. In fact, he added, this “militant expression of racial liberalism” will “continue to defer the kind of public goods that might actually help” all those who are “routinely surveilled, harassed, arrested, convicted, incarcerated and condemned as failures”. With material stakes of politics growing ever more urgent many in the liberal centre would much prefer us to busy ourselves with loud rituals announcing our inner battles.

It would be unfair, however, to heap too much blame upon the young students at the heart of this story. One can only imagine the emotional intensity of the “struggle sessions” required to induce the activist core of SSFCA’s abject capitulation. During the infamous “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s, the brutality of similar sessions, at the hands of Mao Zedong’s fanatical “Red Guards”, was sufficient to break Communist Party veterans of the “Long March”. What chance had an well-meaning, idealistic bunch of middle-class Auckland kids against such tactics?

We conclude, therefore, where we began. In its coverage of the SSFCA’s self-immolation, the mainstream news media touched upon none of the issues featured in this post. Why? Because, bluntly, any such investigation would be severely career-limiting for the young (or old) mainstream journalist who undertook it. This is unfortunate, because arising out of this story are a number of important questions.

Does it mean, for example, that in spite of being disadvantaged and under-resourced by colonisation, and only responsible for a small part of the local climate problem (which tends to be correlated with income, as well as population) Maori and Pasifika will also now bear the burden of solving the whole of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s climate change problem? Does it mean that Pakeha climate change activists will no longer accept historical responsibility for persuading the country’s farmers – overwhelmingly Pakeha for obvious colonial reasons – to do their bit to reduce biogenic methane and plant more trees? (Hat-tip to Dr Chris Harris.)

Don’t hold your breath for the answers. Like it or not, the precepts of CRT are now accepted as holy writ in the newsrooms of the nation. Guilty white journalists may cheer-on the Revolution as loudly as they wish, but they must not, under any circumstances, interrogate it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 June 2021.

Losing The "Struggle-Session" Over Climate Change.

Blaming And Shaming: A "property owner" is humiliated before the masses during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Critical Race Theory may substitute "White Privilege" for "Class Privilege", but the inescapability of the offending group's responsibility for "oppression" is exactly the same. The self-abasement of School Strike For Climate Auckland for its "racist" crimes against People of Colour is grimly reminiscent of Mao's Red Guards' "struggle sessions" against the enemies of the Revolution. 

THE GREAT WEAKNESS at the heart of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is its wilful ignorance of History and Anthropology. Its demonisation of “Whites”, along with the civilisations they created, owes more to religion than it does to science. A scientist would quietly explain to the adherents of CRT that the whole concept of race – especially when conflated with skin colour – is deeply flawed. That, genetically-speaking, the human species has always been one and indivisible. Culture may have elevated morphological differences into social, economic and political barriers, but such artificial barriers have always been the cause of racism – not the solution to it.

Just this week we have witnessed CRT in action in the “decision” of School Strike For Climate Auckland (SSFCA) to wind itself up. In spite of its obvious success in mobilising tens-of-thousands of mostly secondary-school students; and materially influencing the breadth and speed of the New Zealand Government’s response to the challenges of Anthropogenic Global Warming; SSFCA – “advised” by Maori and Pasifika groups also engaged in fighting Climate Change – declared themselves to be a racist organisation and handed over the entire cause to their slightly darker-skinned comrades.

The statement released by SSFCA was heart-breaking. To find an historical precedent for the document’s abject self-negation and unqualified acknowledgement of guilt it is necessary to go back to the “struggle sessions” of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s. Or, even further back, to the “confessions” tremulously delivered by the broken victims of Joseph Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. The shaming and vilification required to reduce these idealistic young people to a state of such utter intellectual prostration proves conclusively that human viciousness is not a trait peculiar to those whose skins are white.

The fate of the School Strike For Climate Movement in New Zealand must now be considered tenuous – at best. Across the country, activists will be struggling to come to terms with SSFCA’s decision. What should they do? Continue mobilising their generation against the greatest existential threat of our age? Do their best to fight off the CRT-based attacks on their alleged “white privilege” and racism? Or, should they, too, hand over the cause to Maori and Pasifika?

The temptation to adopt the latter course will be very strong. Although the School Strike For Climate Movement can put thousands of young people on the street, it is important to bear in mind that the organisational cores of such movements are actually quite small. Certainly, they are small enough to be intimidated and overwhelmed by CRT extremists ready, willing and able to wear them down in struggle-sessions of ever-increasing emotional intensity. If hardened Chinese Communists, veterans of Mao’s Long March, could be broken by such methods, it’s difficult to see Kiwi secondary-school kids resisting such unrelenting ideological pressures for very long.

The natural human response to such tactics is to say “F**k it!” and simply walk away. Sadly, it won’t just be the activists doing the walking. What’s the bet that a substantial number of those who formerly responded to the SSFC Movement’s calls will walk away with them? Word will spread about what happened in Auckland (and, other places) and a bright, sharp, sliver of iron will enter these young New Zealanders’ souls. They will struggle to resist the temptation to make a racist response, and yet, from somewhere deep inside them, the angry cry will rise: “Bastards!”

“You see?”, the CRT extremists will then respond. “We were right all along. The whole SSFC Movement is deeply and irretrievably racist.”

Not that CRT allows “White People” to be anything else. In essence, CRT is a Manichean system of thought. At its heart, an uncompromising struggle between Good and Evil; where Black, indigenous, people of colour – the righteous – are pitted against the incurably wicked White Supremacists. No room in CRT for the notion that what unites the human species is vastly more important than what divides it. Were Dr Martin Luther King still with us to share his dream that: “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”, the CRT extremists would shout him down.

To defeat global warming, humanity must be united. The zealotry of the Critical Race Theorists is making that much more difficult.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 June 2021.