Political Fault Lines

Vox Populi, Vox Stupidi: To be a working-class Trump supporter: “You had to say it’s all right that this guy lies constantly. It’s all right that he encourages violence. It’s all right that despite having more potential financial conflicts of interest than any other presidential candidate ever, he’s the only candidate in recent history who refuses to reveal his tax returns. It’s all right that he has run a series of cons, stealing the life savings from people who put their faith in him in just the way you’re putting your faith in him now.” Paul Waldman, American Prospect

 

RIGHT NOW, the English-speaking Left reminds me of those Shi’ite devotees who ritually flog themselves until their backs bleed. “It’s all our fault!”, they cry into their craft beer. “Trump is all our fault!” Yes, that’s right, Trump is all their fault. Not the stinking, roiling mass of racists, sexists, nativists and xenophobes who, with terrifying  speed, are crawling out of the rank American darkness and into the light. They are not the problem. The problem is the Left – who, apparently, should never have driven them there in the first place.

 

Oh really? So, when the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were finally disinterred from the earth dam in which the Mississippi Klan had buried them, the Left should have shrugged and said: “Well, you know, good ole boys will be good ole boys!” And when feminist researchers confronted the world with the appalling statistics of domestic violence and rape (not only those relating to the incidence of these crimes, but also those exposing the shocking unwillingness of the authorities to do anything to address them) how should the Left have responded? By warning their “sisters” against “dividing the working class”?

 

Being working-class doesn’t give you the right to pull a white hood over your head and murder three young men for the crime of registering African-Americans to vote. Being working-class doesn’t allow you to turn your partner into a terrified combination of punch-bag and sex-slave. Wearing a blue collar around your neck and dropping out of high school doesn’t give you special permission to crucify a harmless gay college student on a Wyoming fence.

 

Nowhere – not even in the United States – does membership of the Proletariat entitle men and women to inhabit a world in which racism, sexism and homophobia are regarded as harmless sins to be winked at and condoned. And yet, this is precisely the sort of free-pass culture that the Left’s energetic self-flagellation over Trump’s victory appears to both imply and condone.

 

Why can’t these bloody-backed leftists see what the American newspaper columnist, Paul Waldman, writing in The American Prospect, sees so clearly: that the working-class voters of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – the American Rust-Belt – were never, ever, the Left’s to win over, or win back.

 

As he acidly observes; to be a working-class Trump supporter: “You had to say it’s all right that this guy lies constantly. It’s all right that he encourages violence. It’s all right that despite having more potential financial conflicts of interest than any other presidential candidate ever, he’s the only candidate in recent history who refuses to reveal his tax returns. It’s all right that he has run a series of cons, stealing the life savings from people who put their faith in him in just the way you’re putting your faith in him now.”

 

What possible reason could any working-class person have for overlooking such failings other than an all-consuming desire to elect a fellow racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, Muslim-hater President of the United States of America?

 

To be poor in America is to be despised. But to be poor and white in America is to feel a special shame. To be poor and white in America is to experience the pain of failure in a way that only the social proximity of failures even more painful and unforgiveable than your own can assuage. You may be poor and white, but you are not poor and black; poor and Hispanic; poor and gay. And, if you’re a poor man, then, at least, you’re not any kind of woman.

 

To see these “others”, these “inferiors”, raised up: to have a black man in the White House; to see a liberal feminist getting ready to replace him; this was simply intolerable. And, to prevent it from happening, poor white Americans were willing to support a candidate with all manner of failings.

 

Waldman calls these folk the “unpersuadables” – but in that description I believe he is mistaken. The shame of poverty and failure is not only assaugeable by the existence of human-beings worse off than yourself: people with life experiences even more humiliating than your own. Shame and failure can also be made bearable by the realistic and believable prospect of escaping them.

 

That is what the Left failed to offer working-class America.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 November 2016.

Not By "Bread And Butter" Alone: Making The Case For A More Inclusive Left.

Emancipation and Solidarity: Powerfully illustrated in the 2014 movie Pride, the emancipatory impulse has the power to transform and enliven the labour movement. An authentic human identity is only available to those who insist on being something more than the means to someone else’s end. Who we are now, and what we may yet become: both conditions drive us forward. In this respect, “progressive politics” and “identity politics” are one and the same.

 

STEPHANIE RODGERS IS RIGHT. It is impossible to build a mass movement for progressive change by ignoring or rejecting, “issues faced by the majority of people in society.” In fact, a movement in which demands for action on these issues are not thrust forward constantly is, almost certainly, not a progressive movement at all.

 

The longing for emancipation, like lightning, cannot be caught in a bottle. It is as wild and dangerous as it is beautiful and brilliant – and it will not be gainsaid. Nor should it be, because the quest for social progress is about nothing if it is not about creating a world in which an ever-increasing number of people are free to live happy, rewarding and fulfilling lives.

 

The past successes of the Left owe almost everything to honouring the emancipatory impulse, and its failures are almost all attributable to the fear generated by emancipation’s disruptive effects. Where this fear takes hold, it typically manifests itself in attempts to narrow the movement’s objectives; manage its members’ expectations; and strictly control their conduct.

 

Nowhere is this narrowing, managing and controlling strategy more in evidence than in the trade union movement. Even in “the glory days of compulsory unionism” it was, more often than not, the standard operating procedure of organised labour.

 

It’s years ago now, back when I was a young union official, but I can still remember the extraordinary speech delivered by a regular rank-and-file delegate to his union’s annual wage negotiations. He passionately condemned year-upon-year of compromise and surrender by the union’s leadership, and ended by thumping his clenched fist on the bargaining table, and shouting: “I say we FIGHT!” The impact of his words on the other rank-and-filers was electric, and the union’s paid officials all looked to me, a fellow bureaucrat, to break the delegate’s spell, lower the members’ expectations, and generally calm the whole discussion down. When I said simply, “I have nothing to add to _____’s contribution”, my colleagues were aghast. The vote was to strike, and the strike was won, but I was never again invited to join the inner-sanctum of official union negotiators.

 

It was only when the unions were prevailed upon to widen the scope of their concerns that their enormous progressive potential was revealed. Not only did Sonja Davies’ championing of the Working Women’s Charter open up the whole issue of the role and status of women in the trade union movement, but it also forced male trade unionists to think about how women were treated in society generally.

 

In a movement peopled by “hard men” and “militants” this was a challenging proposition. Was the bloke so quick with his fists on the picket line equally pugilistic on the home front? What did it mean that his wife was more frightened of him than any scab? And why, when the bosses’ advocates told such awful sexist jokes in the hotel bar after a deal had been signed, did so many of the union delegates join in the laughter? When the debate was about working-class sexism and homophobia, that old union standard “Which Side Are You On?” took on a new and unsettling meaning.

 

Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s the debates raged. More and more women began taking the lead in union affairs; more and more issues were making their way onto the agendas of union conferences. Over six years, the Fourth Labour Government’s Trade Union Education Authority trained thousands of union delegates. For decades the labour movement had limited its purview to “bread and butter issues” – no more. Workers needed little encouragement to begin thinking of their movement as something much more than simply a provider of “bread and butter”.

 

Just how ready they were to assert that wider view of workers’ – and human – rights was demonstrated at the end of 1990 when National’s Bill Birch introduced the Employment Contracts Bill. In a curious way, the ECB’s objectives weren’t that far removed from those of the old-style unionists: to narrow, manage and control. (All the legislation did was cut out the union middle men!) The Council of Trade Union’s affiliated members were having none of it. In the first four months of the following year scores of thousands of them marched and met and voted and declared: “I say we FIGHT!”

 

Would that their officials had learned as much about democracy and emancipation as they had! A union friend of mine once observed of the Moscow-aligned communists in the Socialist Unity Party: “They’d rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side.” Never was that more true than in April 1991! Ignoring the wishes of their rank-and-file members, the leaders of the largest CTU affiliates voted down (by a narrow majority) the motion to call a General Strike against the ECB.

 

Narrowing, managing, controlling: isn’t that the story of the last thirty years? And isn’t the need for a movement driven by the emancipatory principle greater now than it has ever been? We have seen our lives narrowed, managed and controlled to the point where even the idea of rebellion now seems implausible, impossible, absurd. But an authentic human identity is only available to those who insist on being something more than the means to someone else’s end. Who we are now, and what we may yet become: both conditions drive us forward. In this respect, “progressive politics” and “identity politics” are one and the same.

 

If, in our “left-wing movement”, it’s become a sin to struggle for anything more than just “bread and butter”, then I, for one, range myself proudly on the side of the sinners.

 

“I say we FIGHT!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 20 January 2016.

We Should All Be Sorry

His Finest Hour: Under pressure from TV3's Patrick Gower, David Cunliffe not only refused to step back from his "I'm sorry I'm a man" speech to the Women's Refuge Symposium, he actually pressed forward with a passionate defence of Labour's plan for reducing domestic and sexual violence. True leadership has nothing to do with following the line of least resistance.

“PLEASE TELL ME I’M DREAMING”, texted a friend of mine. “Please tell me that David Cunliffe didn’t just apologise for being a man.” I stared at my cell-phone in disbelief. Was he joking? Why would the leader of a political party languishing in the opinion polls alienate at least half of the voting public? Why would he hand his opponents such an enormous cudgel? As if his party wasn’t already battered enough?

 

Later that day, at the pub, the guffaws and the jokes continued. I have to confess, I contributed my fair share of them. I would also point out that although all of my drinking companions were lefties, by no means all of them were men. This was equal opportunity ridicule.

 

So what was going on here? Why were a tableful of seasoned leftists – male and female – and all of them well-versed in the facts and figures of domestic violence in New Zealand so unanimous in condemning the opening sentences of David Cunliffe’s speech to last Friday’s Women’s Refuge Symposium?

 

It might be useful, here, to remind ourselves of his actual words:

 

‘‘Can I begin by saying I’m sorry – I don’t often say it – I’m sorry for being a man, right now. Because family and sexual violence is perpetrated overwhelmingly by men against women and children. So the first message to the men out there is: ‘wake up, stand up, man up and stop this bullshit’.’’

 

You see? Written down in full and contextualised, Cunliffe’s words don’t look all that silly – do they? Indeed, you might even say they look rather brave.

 

None of us seated around that table at the pub, and no intelligent person reading Cunliffe’s sentences anywhere else in New Zealand, would dispute them. The perpetration of psychological, physical and sexual violence is overwhelmingly a masculine phenomenon. And while not every male is guilty of assaulting and/or raping women and girls, the violence inflicted upon females by a minority of males does contribute to the maintenance of a patriarchal culture from which all men derive benefit.

 

Patriarchy and Imperialism are closely related, so perhaps it would help to elucidate the role that violence plays in shoring up our patriarchal culture by elucidating the role it played in shoring up the British Empire.

 

It is said that the entire Indian sub-continent was kept in the thrall of Great Britain by an imperial administration of fewer than 100,000 men. By no means all of these men were engaged in the brutal business of repression. The majority were well educated, thoroughly decent civil servants who would never have dreamed of flogging a man to death, or presiding over the slow starvation of an entire province. Such dreadful acts were carried out by others: by soldiers and policemen. Deplorable, of course, but necessary – if the British Raj was to survive.

 

Is that why even we lefties buried our heads in our hands upon hearing Cunliffe’s words? Because we knew, instinctively, just how outraged “ordinary” men would be when they heard them?

 

Not because these other men were in favour of hurting women and children, but because, however ham-fistedly, Cunliffe had acknowledged all men’s complicity in the myriad acts of violence and intimidation that mandate the equally numerous acts of female-to-male deference and acceptance by which the patriarchal individual defines himself.

 

The exercise of power and control constitutes the common coinage of both patriarchy and imperialism. And, no matter how thoroughly we attempt to conceal them beneath the draperies of romantic love and the “White Man’s Burden”, the true character of their brutal transactions cannot be hidden.

 

All men (and, I suspect, an alarmingly large number of women also) learn to both see and not-see the effects of domestic and sexual violence. We recoil in horror from the murdered wives and children but find it next to impossible to recognise the manifest evil in the perpetrators – the men invariably described as “just an ordinary bloke, a good family man”.

 

But, in portraying these “enforcers” of patriarchy in such chillingly normative terms we confirm (albeit unconsciously) our own participation in the dark secret that Cunliffe shouted to the world.

 

That these horrors are of our making – men’s making – and will persist until, acknowledging the role violence plays in preserving our patriarchal privilege, we can all say: “I’m sorry for being a man.”

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 July 2014.

A Disturbing Precedent

GUILTY MEN? Tried and convicted in the Court of Public Opinion for their insensitive questioning of "Amy", a friend of one of the "Roastbusters'" victims, Maori broadcasters Willie Jackson and John Tamihere were taken off the air. Radio Live's decision was assisted by massive criticism from social media and direct pressure on the radio station's advertisers. But, were Willie and JT's failings personal or cultural? Is it pure coincidence that their Pakeha colleagues - also guilty of insensitivity in relation to the Roastbusters scandal - have escaped Willie's and JT's fate?

 

AM I ALONE, amidst all the liberal self-congratulation at the silencing of Willie Jackson and John Tamihere, in experiencing a chill of foreboding? Has no one else on the Left paused for a moment to consider what manner of precedent this appeal to advertisers may have set? Has no thought been given to how – or even if – the demise of The Willie & JT Show can be reconciled with the NZ Bill of Rights’ guarantee of freedom of expression?

 

Because there can be little doubt that the decision by so many businesses to withdraw their advertising from Radio Live was prompted by the implicit threat of a consumer boycott of their products if they didn’t. Bluntly, the proposition put to Radio Live amounted to: “Take these guys off the air, or, first off, we’ll hurt your advertisers; and then we’ll hurt you.”

 

And it worked. Messrs Jackson and Tamihere have been silenced and their show shut down for at least two months. They have been tried in the Court of Public Opinion for expressing opinions and evincing attitudes that a great many New Zealanders deem to be not only objectionable but dangerous. They have been found guilty and punished.

 

But, when you think about it, they didn’t really get a fair trial – did they?

 

In a fair trial they would have been asked why they treated the young woman caller, Amy, the way they did. Were their questions about her friend’s attire and the amount of alcohol she’d consumed framed deliberately, to inflict maximum harm and humiliation? Or were they merely reflective of the values and assumptions that characterised the circumstances in which her inquisitors were raised?

 

At a fair trial, someone might have posed the question: “Is it more or less likely that Willie’s and JT’s alleged “misogyny” reflected a predisposition toward deliberate cruelty? Or, was it the product of deeply ingrained misconceptions about sexuality and gender?” And, if we’re willing to concede that it might have been the latter, then hasn’t the discussion moved on from failings that are personal, to responses that may be cultural?

 

At a fair trial, Willie’s and JT’s defence attorney might even have tried to turn the story around to where it was no longer about sexism but racism. Because the charge of rape, when levelled against a black man, carries with it all manner of disreputable historical baggage.

 

What did Willie and JT see when 3 News broke the Roastbusters story? Two young brown faces. What did they hear? Middle-class Pakeha liberals baying for their blood. To what did their first thoughts turn? Rape Culture or Lynch Law?

 

And the sad fact is, there could have been a fair trial – or, at least, a free exchange of views about the many issues raised by the Roastbusters scandal. Had the first instinct of Willie's and JT’s critics been to ask Radio Live for an opportunity to go head-to-head with them on air; to challenge their ideas about young women and rape; then the result might well have been a week’s worth of productive and progressive dialogue. But that is not what happened. Rather than korero, the left-wing social media’s first instinct was to condemn, threaten, punish and shut down.

 

And now that they have tasted blood; now that they have fixed the heads of these two high-profile Maori “misogynists” above the gates of their virtual Utopia; listen to what some in the left-wing social media believe it to mean:

 

“Old media Radio Live have been damaged by the new media blogs. The power of Twitter and Facebook allows a focused roar from the crowd to descend with crushing force on whatever target it decides to destroy. It’s trial by social media.”

 

Now, I’m pretty sure that the author of those sentences, The Daily Blog editor, Martyn Bradbury, did not intend them to sound quite so triumphant. Because the situation he is describing in no way merits self-congratulation. Nor is it one which any leftist worthy of the name will approach with equanimity.

 

Freedom of expression is absolutely basic to any movement which places challenging the status quo at the core of its political practice. In denying that freedom to Willie Jackson, John Tamihere and Radio Live, the Left has set a precedent upon which, at the first opportunity, a vengeful Right will pounce.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 November, 2013.