Not What Simon Says, But How He Says It: From those who decried the Greens' attack ad ridiculing Opposition Leader Simon Bridges' accent, the challenge was as brutal as it was simple: Would the Greens’ campaign team have produced an attack ad making fun of a National Party MP from China or India who spoke English with a pronounced accent?
“CLASSIST BULLSHIT!”, was the tweeted response of one Green
Party supporter. It was a sentiment shared by enough of the Greens electoral
base to convince James Shaw to act. Within hours of the Green Party’s
anti-National attack ad going up, it was taken down. Mocking the Leader of the
Opposition’s broad Kiwi accent was unacceptable – even in the cause of fighting
Climate Change.
On the face of it, the reaction of the Greens’ support base
is a welcome confirmation that it still believes the Greens should keep well
away from “dirty politics”. Attack advertising, according to these principled
folk, is a foul form of political communication, best left to the hack parties
of the centre-left and right.
From those who decried the ad, the challenge is as brutal as
it is simple: Would the Greens’ campaign team have produced an attack ad making
fun of a National Party MP from China or India who spoke English with a
pronounced accent?
We all know the answer to that. To even suggest releasing an
ad built around such an obvious racial slur would be a sacking offence in the
2019 Green Party apparatus. But, if using race in your party’s propaganda is
utterly verboten, why is it permissible to use class? What does it say
about the people who produced and approved the offending Green Party ad, that
the decision to satirise Simon Bridges’ working-class accent set off no
alarm-bells?
Is it because making fun of the cultural markers of
working-class people is still not seen as an act of unforgiveable prejudice?
And, if that is true, then why is it true? Drawing attention to the cultural
markers of non-white ethnicity – especially for the purposes of ridicule – was
long ago, and quite correctly, deemed racist. Why aren’t the injuries of class
similarly condemned?
Answering that question leads us straight down a very deep,
and very strange, rabbit-hole.
Twenty-first century New Zealanders are constantly
reassuring themselves that their society is a meritocracy. If they apply
themselves and acquire the right skills, then there is nothing to prevent them
from rising to the very top of the social totem pole. By the same token: if
they refuse to work hard and improve themselves, then they cannot expect to
rise very high at all. Indeed, laziness and a lack of self-discipline can cause
a person to fall deeper and deeper into material and moral poverty. The logic
of meritocracy is unforgiving. If you have risen high in society, it’s because
you have merit. If you have failed to rise, or, worse still, fallen, it’s
because you lack merit. In a meritocracy, success and failure are both
self-inflicted conditions.
Small wonder that meritocracy and neoliberalism have become
inseparable. If people’s misfortunes are self-inflicted, then the state’s only
responsibility towards the poor and marginalised is to provide them with the
minimum sustenance required to prevent them from disturbing the peace (and/or
threatening the property) of their more diligent neighbours. That word
“minimum” is important. If the state were to become excessively generous, then
meritorious behaviour would cease to be its own reward, and meritocracy, as a
system for rewarding human striving, would collapse.
Accent, as the playwright George Bernard Shaw pointed out,
plays a crucial role in identifying merit. In the words of Professor Higgins in
Pygmalion:
The English have no respect for their language, and will
not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have
nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the
consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently
no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is
impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman
despise him.
In twenty-first century politics accent has become an
indispensable marker of merit. Far more than was the case in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, how we speak confers upon us the right to speak. In the
early decades of the democratic age, the humbug of meritocracy was not yet in
evidence. (Although its religious progenitor, Protestantism, certainly played
an analogous role in justifying the ways of the rich to the poor.) The poor,
themselves, were in no doubt as to why they lived such harsh lives. It was
because the rich forced them to. In the heroic phase of democracy, it was
certainly no disgrace for a working-class politician to address his followers
in the accents of their common condition.
In democracy’s decadent phase, however, these class markers
serve a less positive function. A working-class person who has succeeded in the
fields of entertainment, sport and (certain types of) business may retain his
or her accent without incurring too much social disdain. But a politician who
refuses to speak in the accents of someone deserving of respect, should not
expect to get very much of it. It is no accident that the two most successful
populists of the English-speaking world, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, both
speak in the accents of the ruling-class. How they speak to their
followers tells them as much about their heroes as what they say –
perhaps more.
In the crudest possible terms: losers do not want to be
wooed by losers; they want to be seduced by someone in the accents of a winner.
That’s why so many middle-class people are happy to make fun
of Simon Bridges accent. His failure to teach himself how to speak “properly”
is seen as a failure to appreciate what is required of someone aspiring to the
office of prime minister. Someone born in China or India who has, nevertheless,
mastered the language of their adopted country is, by contrast, seen as a
person to be admired. Making fun of their accent represents a failure to
recognise their true merit. It is the behaviour of someone who does not
understand how twenty-first century meritocracy works; someone still mired in
the nineteenth and twentieth century fallacy that ethnicity, in and of itself,
confers merit. Yesterday’s ideology, for yesterday’s failures.
Neoliberalism cares nothing for the markers of ethnicity,
gender or sexuality. What it values is the individual who understands not only
the importance of rising up the socio-economic ladder, but also the importance
of “making it” in the right way. The meritocratic winners can be black or
white, male or female, gay or straight: no one cares. But, those aspiring to
membership of the global elite who fail to grasp the importance of thinking in
the right way, dressing in the right way, and yes, speaking in the right way,
will soon discover that being laughed at and ridiculed are the least of their
worries.
While capitalism endures, it will always be open season on
the working class – even its accent. “Classist bullshit” it may be – but it
works.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 25 July 2019.
