Shoving Democracy Around.

I Move That The Speaker Be No Longer Heard: A great many things have to go wrong in a society before naked extremism assembles sufficient support to win public office. People have to feel that they’re not being listened to: that their wishes are being over-ridden. Treat citizens this way and they’re likely to shove your “elite” (per)version of democracy somewhere uncomfortable. 

A WHITE SUPREMACIST, jailed for distributing the banned video record of the Christchurch Mosque shootings, is standing for public office. The office in question: Trustee of Te Aratai College; is hardly the most exalted in the land, but the apprehension of parents with children at the school is easily imagined.

Had Te Aratai received only enough nominations to fill the number of vacancies on the Board of Trustees, the school would undoubtedly have faced some challenges. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. An election will be held, in the course of which the parents of Te Aratai’s students will, presumably, vote for candidates holding less objectionable views than the avowed White Supremacist.

That’s the way democracy works: those subscribing to deeply unpopular beliefs find it extremely difficult to attract a winning number of votes.

A storm in a tea-cup, then? It would be nice to think so, but this story raises some very thorny issues – not all of them easy to resolve.

Let’s return to our hypothetical situation in which the number of nominations exactly equals the number of vacancies. In this case our White Supremacist would have been declared elected, and the parents of Te Aratai College would be stuck with their controversial new Trustee for the next three years. Not a situation to be relished by anyone – except, perhaps, other White Supremacists.

Christchurch City councillor for Heathcote, Sarah Templeton, who has children at Te Aratai, didn’t even want to accept the White Supremacist’s nomination.

“The school has worked really hard to check whether he’s eligible and it is a grey area, and that needs to change” Templeton told RNZ. “Any member of staff or even parent helpers ... all need to have police vetting, and that’s not the same for board of trustees’ members, even though in high schools’ cases, boards of trustees have student reps on them.”

Except, with all due respect to Councillor Templeton, there’s nothing even remotely grey about this area of our democracy. White Supremacy, no matter how distasteful, is not a crime. Those who subscribe to such beliefs remain citizens and, as such, have every right to submit themselves to the judgement of their neighbours.

To have a candidate ruled ineligible for public office on account of his/her beliefs would inflict far greater harm upon our democratic system than the beliefs themselves. Because where would those doing the “vetting” draw the line? How long would it be before the list included not just Nazis and White Supremacists, but all manner of unpopular belief systems deemed “deplorable” by the Powers-That-Be?

All very fine and principled, but we are still left with our hypothetical Board of Trustees and its White Supremacist member. What are they supposed to do? Just let him do his worst?

Of course not! All they need to do is bone-up on a little book called Robert’s Rules of Order. Old-fashioned and high-minded though it may be (it was written by Henry Robert, a US Army officer, in 1876) the book contains within its pages all the many and varied ways to “assist an assembly to accomplish the work for which it was designed”.

Those versed in Robert’s Rules will have little difficulty in protecting their institution from those who would disturb, disrupt, distract, or in some other way prevent its governing body from operating responsibly.

With our White Supremacist waxing eloquent in support of his loathsome beliefs, a fellow Trustee could simply move “That the speaker be no longer heard.” If the motion was carried and the White Supremacist persisted, the Chair could order the Trustee to leave the meeting. If he refused, the Chair could simply adjourn the meeting – pending the Trustee’s forcible removal.

Democracy is not without its own tried and tested means of self-defence.

And if more White Supremacists start getting elected? What then?

Well, then it is time to take stock of where your country is heading – and why.

A great many things have to go wrong in a society before such naked extremism assembles sufficient support to win public office. People have to feel that they’re not being listened to: that their wishes are being over-ridden. Treat citizens this way and they’re likely to shove your “elite” (per)version of democracy somewhere uncomfortable.

In the words of the “American Rasputin”, Steve Bannon:

“We’re gonna give you a democracy suppository!”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 August 2022.

Crossing the Line: What Lies Behind the Surge To Te Pāti Māori?

Rising To The Challenge: Te Pāti Māori is reassuring the angry and the alienated that in 2023 voting will make a difference. Aotearoa is changing. Pakeha – especially young Pakeha – are changing. The racism is still there, of course, heightened, it would seem, by the prospect of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori having the numbers to keep the changes coming. But Te Pāti Māori is also telling them the country had moved on from 2005, from Don Brash and his “Iwi/Kiwi” election billboards. An awful lot of elderly National Party voters can die in 17 years!

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN people who don’t usually participate in elections decide to vote? Things turn weird – that’s what happens. This is because the people who don’t vote are very different from the people who do. The motivations relied upon by the pundits to explain the behaviour of habitual voters are not the motivations of non-voters. That’s why, when these folk cross the line separating the passivity of non-voting from the world of active political citizenship the results can be startling.

It’s why political entrepreneurs like Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon work so hard to reach and motivate the people perennially dismissed and abandoned by the smug political campaigners of the mainstream. The Cummings and the Bannons know these marginalised individuals: the people that shit happens to; the people who live in the shit; are extraordinarily combustible. Strike a match in the right place, at the right time, and – Kaboom! – the “deplorables” explode into action.

It is precisely the “otherness” of these non-participants that makes them so potent politically. An across-the-board expansion of the electorate: one in which exactly the same proportion of National, Labour, Act, Green and Te Pāti Māori voters simply stepped across the line separating non-voting from voting; would make no appreciable difference in either the opinion polls or the polling booths. Indeed, this is pretty much what happens when people step out of the “Don’t Know” category to express a clear preference. They tend to break the same way as those who have already disclosed their electoral choices. But non-voters: the sort of people who tell pollsters and phone canvassers to fuck-off; they are different.

Non-voters come in two flavours. There are those who never got into the habit of voting, and those who, for a whole host of reasons, got out of the habit.

The habit of voting, like the habit of going to school, is a reflection of a settled family environment. In such households, all manner of social and economic connections serve to keep their inhabitants tethered to the local community and its values. The absence of these connections produces individuals estranged and alienated from the community and its concerns. The impact of politics on their daily lives being neither perceived nor explained, they do not care about elections – or vote in them.

Those who have gotten out of the habit of voting usually have a sad story to tell. For some reason, the ties that bound them to their community have been severed. It may have been the result of family disintegration, substance abuse, criminal offending and incarceration. Alternatively, it could have been job loss, prolonged unemployment, indebtedness, homelessness and/or severe mental illness. Something happened to set these individuals on a downward spiral to economic privation and social isolation. What had been citizens with rights, become invisible un-persons with nothing. Politics was for winners – not losers like themselves.

Breaking into the world of these non-voters isn’t easy. Somehow, a political movement has to convince them that the vote they cast will produce a direct and positive impact on their lives. Non-voter politics tends to be grounded in the not unreasonable observation that participating in elections, voting, changes nothing. Their cynicism is encapsulated in pithy anarchic aphorisms: “Don’t vote, governments always win”, or, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.

The crucial thing to note about these aphorisms, however, is that they identify an enemy. “Governments.” “Them.” For non-voters, politics is what the people with power do to you. The idea that politics could be about what you do to “them” is dismissed as absurd.

The critical insight of Cummings and Bannon was that it is possible to persuade these non-voters to use their votes as weapons. Deployed strategically, the right number of votes, cast in the right number of places, can make “governments” quail and cause “them” to weep. Sell non-voters that message and you will have given them a truly visceral reason to vote. Their unlooked-for participation can ruin the whole day of the Powers-That-Be – delivering a massive one-fingered salute to the whole, evil, vicious system that ruined their lives. By voting, they can say “Fuck You!” to the people in charge, and – lo – the people in charge will find themselves unexpectedly and irremediably fucked. As happened with Brexit. As happened with Trump.

So, where would the Kiwi equivalents of Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon go looking for estranged and alienated non-voters? What part of the New Zealand population is most likely to have been uprooted from family and community? Which citizens are most likely to fall foul of the Police, MSD, Oranga Tamariki and Corrections? What sort of New Zealander is the most likely to end up in jail – and the least likely to vote? Who, if they used their votes as weapons, could strike a mortal blow against the status quo? The urban Māori underclass – that’s who!

And who has the best chance of reaching the urban Māori underclass? Te Pāti Māori .

Not that Te Pāti Māori has its very own version of Cambridge Analytica to identify the angry and the alienated and bombard them with carefully crafted social media messages. TPM just doesn’t have those kinds of resources. What it does have, however, is its own place in the networks created to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. These networks led Māori service providers to places and people undetected and ignored by the state and its agencies. More importantly, they began the process of reconnection and tethering that allows political messages to be taken in, rather than simply thrown away.

And when these folk lifted up their heads, looking around through eyes brightened by unfamiliar feelings of pride and hope, TPM was there with the promise that, this time, this special time, voting could make a difference. Aotearoa was changing. Pakeha – especially young Pakeha – were changing. The racism was still there, of course, heightened, it would seem, by the prospect of Labour, the Greens and TPM having the numbers to keep the changes coming. But TPM also told them the country had moved on from 2005, from Don Brash and his “Iwi/Kiwi” election billboards. An awful lot of elderly National Party voters can die in 17 years!

To the bigots still breathing, however, the Māori non-voters could deliver a very special gift – one that would ruin the racists’ whole day. In the spirit of the community that had discovered them in their time of need, and which they had rediscovered, Māori non-voters could step across the line that separates the un-person from the citizen. By casting a vote in the 2023 General Election, not only could they re-make themselves, they could re-make their country.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 4 August 2022.

Of Commoners And Kings: Steve Bannon’s New Traditionalism

Telling It Like It Was: In order to restore the natural balance of society, New Traditionalists like Steve Bannon (above) argue, it is necessary to look deep into the heart of the ordinary people whose daily labours keep society going. Only when guided by the simple but durable virtues of those at the bottom of society, they argue, will those positioned at the top re-discover the wisdom, strength and power required to restore their nation to greatness.

CONSERVATIVE POLITICS in New Zealand is running out of puff. Both National and Act are struggling to offer voters much in the way of new political insights. The radical right-wing ideas that swept all before them in the 1980s and 90s have solidified into a pallid orthodoxy: one increasingly at odds with observable reality. The Churches’ political influence in New Zealand has been in steady decline since the 1970s. Robust though it may be in caucus, National’s right-wing Christian faction merely testifies to the growing distance between their party and the electoral mainstream.

When a political party is fortunate enough to possess a charismatic leader, such ideological frailty counts for much less. Absent such a leader, however, philosophical cluelessness constitutes a formidable barrier to electoral success. Unfortunately for their respective parties, Judith Collins and David Seymour cannot be included in the same company as Sir John Key and Jacinda Ardern. It remains to be seen whether Winston Peters still possesses the power to harness the political zeitgeist to NZ First’s battered chariot.

If Peters has spent the last few months scouring the conservative landscape for an ideology to match the temper of the times, then it is likely he will already have encountered the most radical right-wing movement since the rise of fascism, almost exactly a century ago. Although “Traditionalism” predates fascism by at least two decades, it shares the latter’s comprehensive rejection of Enlightenment values, liberal capitalism, scientific rationalism and democratic politics. When one considers that the leading promoters of Traditionalism in the world today are Steve Bannon – formerly Chief Strategist to President Donald Trump – and Aleksandr Dugin – long-time behind-the-scenes adviser to the Kremlin – any temptation to dismiss the movement as something wacky from the fringe should be resisted.

Like so many of the reactionary creeds emanating from fin-de-siècle Europe, Traditionalism fetishized what it considered to be the core values of the pre-modern era: hierarchy, spirituality and the (now very rare) ability to live honourably in the moment, unburdened by the weight of material concerns. The two individuals most closely associated with the early Traditionalist doctrine were the Frenchman, René Guénon, and the Italian proto-fascist, Julius Evola. Their Traditionalist utopia combined theocratic government with what amounted to a socio-economic caste-system. Cloaked in this antique guise, the doctrine’s prospects of political success in the Twentieth Century were slim. As modified by Bannon, however, Traditionalism has the capacity to act as an extremely powerful solvent of the electoral status-quo all over the Western World.

Bannon’s Traditionalism imputes to what New Zealanders would call the “ordinary Kiwi bloke” (or, in colloquial American, “the average working stiff”) the core definitive values of the nation’s character. It is in such folk: most particularly in their faith, generosity and resilience; that the nation’s ability to endure and triumph over all manner of adversities is located. They are the bedrock: the best; the people without whose support nothing of any lasting worth can be accomplished.

In the unanticipated triumph of Brexit and Trump, the world witnessed the extraordinary political resonance of Bannon’s version of Traditionalism. It had the power to mobilise electorally groups which had, for decades, been disengaging from their traditional electoral champions – Labour in the UK, the Democratic Party in the USA. It was Bannon’s strategic, and Trump’s performative, genius that caused these disillusioned and disgruntled citizens to reassess, at a personal level, the costs and benefits of political engagement. Hillary Clinton may have dismissed them as “deplorables”, but Trump transformed her insult into a badge of honour: convincing them that they were the only people who could make America great again.

To be politically effective, however, Traditionalism needs a special kind of enemy. In this regard, an elite layer of effete professionals and managers, who look down with disdain upon “ordinary people” and their beliefs, and who react with abject horror at the very thought of these usually biddable yobbos intervening decisively in the political process, is exactly what Traditionalists are looking for.

In the eyes of the elites, this ignorant lumpen element presents itself as an army of terrifying zombies. Civilly dead, but now, by the power of Bannon’s weird political voodoo, electorally re-animated, they represent the very deepest fears of the people in charge. Shuffling menacingly towards them, their arms outstretched for ballot papers, these possessed political corpses must be cut down where they stand. Under no circumstances can general elections be turned into re-runs of The Night of the Living Dead.

A less tendentious presentation of Traditionalism may be found in the television series Yellowstone. In their sprawling ranch, “Yellowstone”, set in the rock-ribbed Republican stronghold of Montana, live the Duttons – a powerful family in whom the best constitutive elements of the American character are embodied.

On every side, however, a hostile world is pressing in upon them. From the adjoining Native American tribal reservation – in which an even older embodiment of America is stirring – to the avaricious development buccaneers poised to turn the Dutton patrimony into ski resorts and casinos. Interestingly, those “best constitutive elements” include a willingness to defend the family’s interests with deadly, and often illegal, force. (Which is, at least, an honest admission of core American values!)

In the lead character, John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) the viewer is frequently presented with something approximating that Zen-like ability to live in the spiritual moment which the original Traditionalists prized so highly. The series’ general contempt for the democratic process, and its clear preference for maintaining the established hierarchy of ‘natural’ leaders, similarly echoes the ideas of Guénon and Evola.

New Zealand political leaders as different as Rob Muldoon and John Key have secured lengthy stints of political power on the strength of elevating ordinariness into something very special. Muldoon pitted his “ordinary blokes” (aka “Rob’s Mob”) against the hapless “Citizens For Rowling” – whom he successfully portrayed as an ineffectual collection of over-educated snobs who thought they were better than everybody else. Key’s trick was to convince nearly half the electorate that they were already the ones in charge; and all they had to do to prove it was make an ordinary millionaire their Prime Minister.

At the moment, few conservatively-minded New Zealanders would admit to feeling in charge of very much at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. In Traditionalist terms, all the worst elements of modernism are in the saddle and riding New Zealand hard. Even worse, no political party of the Right is currently willing (or, seemingly, able) to swing the axe in defence of the values of “Real New Zealanders”, or even explain, in simple terms, what those “real” values are. While this remains the case, the conservative cause will continue to languish.

What Bannon and his Russian equivalent, Dugin, understand is how quickly Democracy exhausts the ordinary man and woman. How ready they are to put their faith in those they recognise as belonging to the natural hierarchies of wisdom, strength and power. And how angry they become when those they trust to lead them prove unequal to the task.

In order to restore the natural balance of society, the Traditionalists argue, it is necessary to look deep into the heart of the ordinary people whose daily labours keep society going. Only when guided by the simple but durable virtues of those at the bottom of society, they argue, will those positioned at the top re-discover the wisdom, strength and power required to restore their nation to greatness.

This is, indeed, a step backward into pre-modernity. What Bannon and Dugin are describing is the enduring political alchemy of leaders and followers: that allegedly sacred bond between sovereign and subject which owes nothing to the intervention of elite interests, or, at least, not to those elite interests who refuse to make their first two priorities the protection of the leader and the welfare of the people. Bannon and Dugin may call this Traditionalism, but a better name for their system might be “Monarchical Socialism”.

Think, the King and the Commons, without the Barons and the Bishops: the doomed dream of the Peasants’ Revolt. Or, the Fuhrer and the Volk, without the Capitalists and the Jews: the murderous dream of Hitler’s stormtroopers.

An earlier version of this essay was posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 21 June 2021. This version was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 29 June 2021.