Centering The Right.

It's All In Our Heads: Prefixing right and left with the word “centre” was once a gesture of moderation, intended to reassure voters that the people being put up for election by these “mainstream” parties weren’t crazies. Today, however, the use of the word in relation to parties like America’s Republican Party, Britain’s Conservatives and Australia’s Liberals is, simply, inappropriate. These are no longer centrist parties, they’re unabashed promoters of the policies of the far-right.

IF PETER DUTTON is the answer, then the question should never have been put! The predicament of the Australian Liberal Party, left with no choice but to go from bad to worse, encapsulates the dilemma confronting all of the world’s centre-right parties.

Prefixing right and left with the word “centre” was once a gesture of moderation, intended to reassure voters that the people being put up for election by these “mainstream” parties weren’t crazies. Today, however, the use of the word in relation to parties like America’s Republican Party, Britain’s Conservatives and Australia’s Liberals is, simply, inappropriate. These are no longer centrist parties, they’re unabashed promoters of the policies of the far-right.

As such they have nothing positive to offer an electorate slowly becoming aware of just how much the planet will have to face – and overcome – in the years ahead. If they do not already, these voters will soon comprise a clear majority of their respective populations. In order to rip-up this emerging majority’s preferred policy track, it will be necessary for the parties of the far-right to rip-up democracy as well.

America’s Republican Party is leading the way in this regard: passing voter suppression legislation and shamelessly gerrymandering congressional districts in its favour. Britain’s Conservatives are more dependent on the fundamentally undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system than ever. Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority in the House of Commons was won with just 43.6 percent of the popular vote!

The fate of Australia’s Liberals was sealed by many factors, but their country’s complicated (and rort-resistant) preferential voting system must be counted among the most important!

Now, it may be that a comprehensive rorting of the democratic system is the far-right’s preferred option. Being the sworn enemy of moderation and compromise, extremism may simply be unwilling to countenance either. Assuming, however, that the far-right’s objective is not the “illiberal democracy” currently on display in Hungary, Brazil, and the Russian Federation, what must these errant movements do to earn the reapplication of the trusted centre-right label?

The answer provided by the Australian general election is unequivocal. No party of the centre-right can any longer afford to do anything other than affirm its unqualified belief in the science of Climate Change.

The social and economic consequences that follow logically from that crucial affirmation explains why far-rightists are so unwilling to make it. To meet the challenges of Climate Change it will be necessary to rebuild the machinery of collectivism. The state will have to become much, much larger, and the taxes of the super-wealthy will have to be set much, much higher. Since a small state and low taxes have constituted the sine qua non of centre-right parties since (at least) the late-1970s, what does that leave for them to champion?

The answer, surely, lies in what liberal democracy has always demanded, and will continue to demand, of the party system. At least one major party that is devoted to the protection of the rights of the small against the depredations of the large.

Individual liberty, with all its trappings – most particularly the freedoms of speech, communication, and association – would seem like the logical place to start. Building from there, a centre-right party should champion entrepreneurial enterprise and the creation of small businesses. It should also argue for what the Europeans call “subsidiarity” – the idea that decision-making bodies should remain as close as possible to those most directly affected by their decisions.

The new rule-of-thumb for the parties of the centre-right should be: big is oppressive, small is beautiful.

The political-economy of fighting Climate Change will ensure that this contention between bigness and smallness remains a constant theme of political debates for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, left-wing parties will also find themselves struggling to retain their centrist credentials. The temptation to simply crush any opposition to their radical measures will be very strong. Already, right across the planet, citizens of democracies have experienced how forcefully the state feels entitled to respond to a system-threatening emergency. The global Covid-19 Pandemic has revealed just how difficult defending the rights of the few can become when governments are confronted with the urgent demands of the many.

In the new political configuration that is fast approaching, individuals and communities will have need of centre-right champions. If only to remind us that a planet without freedom isn’t worth saving.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 June 2022.

Be Woke - Or Go Politically Broke.

Conventional Wisdom? The Republican Right is convinced that to “go woke” is to “go broke”. It simply does not believe sufficient Americans feel strongly enough about social justice to make any kind of boycott remotely effective. Clearly, the Boards of Directors of more and more American corporations disagree. 

RECENT MOVES by large American corporations to distance themselves from Republican Party voter suppression initiatives signal a profound historical shift. For the past 100 years, most political scientists have worked on the assumption that no political party cares more for the welfare of American capitalism than the Republican Party – and vice-versa. To hear Republican presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio come out swinging against Delta Airlines for its criticism of Georgia’s new voting law is, therefore, both confusing and disconcerting. If “woke” capitalist corporations have joined the ranks of the Republican Party’s enemies, then who the hell are its friends?

Before answering that question, however, let’s sample just a little of Rubio’s invective. According to the left-wing American periodical, Mother Jones:

“In a strange line of logic, the Florida senator seemed to argue that the law, which among other restrictions bans non-poll-workers from distributing water to waiting voters, was not as bad as genocide against Uighur Muslims in China, where Delta also does business, and therefore should not be subject to the company’s reproach. ‘They make billions of dollars in a country that doesn’t even have elections…and they don’t say a word about it,’ Rubio argued, ‘but in America they’re prepared to boycott a state and condemn them publicly…They’re hypocrites.’”

Not that they would stoop so low, but Delta Airlines could have responded that Georgia’s Republicans and the Chinese Communist Party have all the appearance of political brothers, given that in both jurisdictions only one party is allowed to win.

The airline might also have pointed out that, while a boycott of China by Delta would have not the slightest impact on the fate of the Uighurs, a boycott of Georgia would greatly assist the efforts of black voters in that state to defend their hard-won civil rights. Certainly, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 had that effect!

The Republican Right is, however, absolutely convinced that to “go woke” is to “go broke”. It simply does not believe sufficient Americans feel strongly enough about voter suppression to make any kind of boycott remotely effective. Clearly, the Board of Directors of Delta Airlines disagree.

And, they’re right. The demographic structure of the United States population is undergoing a profound transformation. It is becoming younger and browner and, worse still, from the Republicans’ perspective, it is becoming “woker”. If this were not the case: if the ‘natural home’ of a clear majority of American voters was the Republican Party; then what possible interest would GOP-controlled state legislatures have in making it harder for young, brown and black Americans to cast their ballots?

Capitalists, both in the United States – and here in New Zealand – are rightly focusing their attention on the workforces and consumers needed to generate profits in the future. Far-Right political strategists refuse to acknowledge this. Unfortunately, for them, the terrified and angry whites upon whose slumping shoulders Donald Trump built his 2016 victory, are growing older and sicker and deader. Their political dominance can only be maintained by keeping voters who do not look and think like themselves away from the polling booths. But, that way lies the suppression of democracy and civil war – neither of which is particularly good for business. The last thing intelligent capitalists ever want to see is blood in their own streets.

Donald Trump’s Republicans must be getting ever-so-slightly panicky about how many of the party’s friends and allies are abandoning them. They are right to be worried. By alienating corporate capitalism and making bitter enemies of the mainstream media and universities, the Trumpists are, if they only knew it, corralling their followers into a socio-economic and cultural dead-end.

When all is said and done, it is corporate capitalism that manufactures the future, the mainstream media which decorates it, and the universities that pass out the credentials entitling their holders to live in the nicest parts of it. By shutting themselves out of liberal capitalism’s Emerald City, Trump’s poorly educated munchkins are slamming the door on their own and their children’s best chance for a happy and prosperous future.

“Go woke, go broke!”, the Far-Right gurus bray. They should pay more attention to history. For more than 250 years, Capitalism has avoided going broke by consistently putting its prodigious energies behind those widest awake to the future’s most profitable possibilities.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 April 2021.