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The threshold of consent.

Long-time readers will recognise that consent (specifically, mass contingent consent) is something that I have written about regularly, here at KP as well in my academic life. In light of what is happening in Europe and elsewhere with regards to popular unrest in democracies, the concept is worth reviewing. There is a phrase in comparative politics and political theory known as the “threshold of consent.” That is the point at which people have had enough, reached the limits of their toleration and decide to push back one way or the other at the government and, in the case of revolutions, the State itself (remembering that revolutions involve but are not reducible to revolts, uprisings, riots etc.). What is happening in many contemporary democracies may in fact be that moment, the moment where mass contingent consent is withdrawn and people cast their gaze over the “valley of transition” between the extant order and whatever comes next. Elections are supposed to channel such discontent, as are policy reforms, well before the valley of transition is even a distant consideration, but as France and other countries (including Italy, India and Argentina) have recently demonstrated, that may not be enough to stave off mass insurrectionist urges. When the valley appears to be transitable and something better appears to lie on the other side, the moment of substantive social change has arrived.


The threshold of consent varies from society to society. In some societies material things like standards of living matter most. In others respect for cultural traditions or religious beliefs are of primary importance. In others freedoms of association, speech, thought and representation are treasured above all. In many places the threshold of mass contingent consent (contingent in that it is not given once, forever, but is dependent on expectations being met and regularly reaffirmed or renegotiated) is like a dew point in that it is a combination of expectations from those governing on the part of those being governed at any given moment in time. What people will tolerate and consent to in the US or NZ is different than what people will consent to in Bangladesh or Albania (I will refrain from mentioning whether this applies in Cuba or Singapore, which if to be treated properly because of the complexities involved needs a dedicated essay of its own). What people consented to five decades ago may well be different than now. When mass contingent consent is withdrawn, it is from country-specific political, economic and social configurations even if the sources of discontent (e.g., material deprivation, lack of opportunity, systemic exclusion) are more widely propagated around the world.

Add to that the fact that for the threshold of consent to be reached an alternative has to be realistically feasible. Withdrawal of mass consent does not necessarily entail the fall of a regime. People may just hunker down, grin and bear it, and go about their daily routines as best they can without making waves or calling negative attention to themselves from authorities. They do not need the stress created by political involvement or social activism, so they retreat into what I have termed elsewhere “survivalist atomisation:” they keep to themselves and focus on their own personal circumstances rather than those of the society at large. In my youth Argentines had a saying for living under the various dictatorships that I experienced: “De la casa al trabajo y del trabajo al hogar” (“from house to work and work to home’). This “heads down” behaviour is what dictatorships cultivate via repression, threatened or actual (because just the threat of official State violence against people for dissent is a very effective weapon of mass control). Since no peaceful or legitimate institutional channels exist for public feedback and redress under most dictatorships, the only alternative is collective violence–organized if it is to be successful in fostering real social change, but spontaneous and disorganised by default.

People throw rocks, burn cars, break storefront windows and loot. They vent their rage, and then go home if they have not been hurt or detained. They may come back and repeat their rage-venting for a period of time, but without leadership, organization and concrete objectives they are no more than an angry mob that will, even if slowly, be forced to heel by the organised violence meted out by the State. Revolutionaries spend much time trying to turn mob spontaneity into organised collective violence with the goal of social or regime change, even going so far as to advocate so-called “leaderless resistance” tactics so as to force authorities to over-extend the repressive apparatus in pursuit of the hydra heads behind the insurgent masses. Depending on what the threshold of mass consent is in a given context (including a tolerance for collective pain) , they may or may not succeed. But modern history is not in their favour, especially in the developed liberal democratic world. Simply put, social revolutionaries do not overthrow democracies. Only authoritarian coup plotters do, and they most often do so from within the State rather than from without it (even in the case of so-called “constitutional coups”).

Liberal democracies cannot resort to repression as a normal part of governance–it must be selective and used as the exception against “outlaws” in a usually peaceful society ruled by law. As Gramsci noted, repression is the iron fist within the velvet glove. The glove is ideological and usually suffices in order to maintain consent. But when ideological consensus frays and State authorities are forced or choose to remove the glove, then what is left is the moment of force. Trouble is, using repression as the basis for rule is a short term solution at best. The State cannot coerce the same number of the people in the same measure indefinitely. It has to replace repression with something else and try to re-establish the basis for mass contingent consent, because at some point the ongoing resort to repression may well make the valley of transition begin to appear transitable by those on the sharp end of the stick, water cannon, tear gas or gunfire. The necessity is to reestablish the bases of mass consent, not confirm the fact of its withdrawal.

All of which is to say that places like France need to move beyond the moment of force and onto the type of reform-mongering that addresses the root causes of popular unrest. Prime Minister Macron did that several years ago in the face of soaring petrol prices that occasioned trucker and commuter strikes, but in doing so via tax breaks and subsidies he only increased French sovereign debt, which has now come due and which contributed the politics of austerity that protestors are currently demonstrating against. As his example shows, all too often, by the time leaders undertake reforms, it is too little, too late and temporary at best. Effective reform has to be anticipatory and proactive, not reflexive and reactive. In European democracies today, that does not appear to be the case.

Elsewhere, things could get worse. If Trump tries to overturn the midterm electoral results, the US may well reach the triggering moment, even if only in some states or in a federal government versus state rights type of conflict.

Whatever happens, it is clear that the bases of the mass contingent consent that was given to liberal democracies in the post WW2 era has now crumbled under the weight of political sclerosis, government non-responsiveness and official corruption accelerated by increasing oligarchical control and manipulation of the State, economic deprivation for many and enrichment for a few, increased social alienation, stratification, material deprivation and intra-group enmity, and a breakdown of the liberal rules based International order (such as it existed, at least on paper). It is a turn to a feral politics, of might makes right, of “to the rich go the spoils” social order where mass contingent consent is no longer seen as a core requirement of democratic (capitalist) stability. In fact, even democracy as a political construct and form of rule is now being openly questioned by “techbro” oligarchs and alienated masses alike. For them, the withdrawal of consent to liberal democracy has already occurred.

A simple analogy may help drive home the point. At what moment does an abused spouse or child say enough is enough and walk out, retaliate against, or seek help with regard to their abuser? The specifics of individual circumstances may differ but the commonality is that a threshold of consent has been reached, then breached. In whatever manifestation, the individual withdraws their consent to the family arrangement, the exit option becomes necessary and, if there is shelter and support available away from the oppressive context, then becomes a feasible, if not desired alternative. At that point, the valley of transition for that individual has been reached and the moment to move is at hand..

As collections of individuals marshalled into groups, democratic societies follow this basic pattern of human behaviour. They consent to a given form of rule in exchange for expectations being met (even if these expectations are ideologically framed and manipulated by dominant groups). When those expectations are not met and are not reform-mongered by way of redress, then the threshold limit of consent will be reached, mass consent is withdrawn and the valley of transition becomes a possibility.

It remains to be seen what will happen with the democracies in Europe and elsewhere, especially given the authoritarian resurgence world-wide and the global rise of rightwing politics that seek to narrow rather than confirm or extend notions of rights and responsibilities in the social order. Whatever happens, it is clear that as a political construct liberal democracy has reached its limits when it comes to mass contingent consent to the established project. What lies next is unknown and uncertain, but what is clear is that for many, the threshold of consent was crossed some time ago.

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Weathervane elections.

Here is something short from my other social media accounts.

Weathervane elections forthcoming: Brazil presidential run-off, Israeli parliamentary elections, US midterms and NZ general elections. These are true tests of where voters want their countries to go. The choices are foremost about reaffirming or rejecting the Right as a governing force. These elections occur in four parts of the globe with country-specific issues needing address but one unifying, underlying question: does the (moderate) Left present a realistic and preferable alternative to Rightwing dominance of national politics in these (ostensible) democracies?

At the risk of over-simplification, here is a quick take:

I have already written here about how the NZ Left has to reframe the political narrative away from the market mantras of the last three decades. So far it has not done so, which means it is nibbling around the margins of a pie that is already cooked (in both senses of the term) rather than focusing on its ingredients and allocated portions. The Greens are trying to do that, but Labour prefers to nibble. And in spite of its obvious decay and increased price of the pie, National claims that it is perfectly edible even if it now has an (Opportunity-flavoured) teal mold tinge to it, while Act wants the pie smaller and NZ First wants it to be a different colour with less flavour ingredients.

In Brazil the question is whether to re-elect a corporate Left leader with corruption problems or a Trump-worshipping son of a convicted seditionist former president with ties to organised crime (both of them). It is about becoming a servitor imperialist vassal that submits to the “Donroe Doctrine” or remains an independent sovereign State in a highly stratified society.

In Israel it is about reaffirming or rejecting the politics of genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is more than that, of course, but above all it is a referendum on the Netanyahu-led coalition’s policies leading up to and after October 7.

In the US it is about consolidating the slide into neoimperialist kleptocratic despotism or breaking the Russian-favoring stranglehold that the MAGA Right has on US politics.

For these reasons the next three weeks are very significant in terms of electoral politics in democracies. What happens in them and what their results turn out to be will set the stage for what is to come in global politics, for better or worse.

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Reframing the narrative.

It is said that those who frame the questions win the debate. Those who set the terms win the negotiation. If true, then the resolution to any matter of dispute starts with how the subject is approached, or put differently, how the narrative about the substance of the dispute is framed. That extends to negotiating approaches. Traditional diplomacy starts with areas of contention or disagreement and works towards resolutions via agreement, often of the “second-best” kind where no party get its preferred option but all parties get some of what they want without prohibitively costing the other (in game theory parlance, the strategy pursues even-sum outcomes). In contrast, the so-called Pacifika negotiating method championed by the Ardern government’s foreign policy team is to start with areas of commonality and consensus and then work back towards areas of contention and disagreement. Here the logic is that positive-sum openings can generate higher return even-sum outcomes. The traditional approach seeks to address contentious matters directly with the aim of finding a core of agreement that can serve as the basis for a mutually acceptable resolution even if just over the short-term. The second seeks to establish a basis of trust from which durable agreements on specific subjects can be reached.

This extends to political and electoral framing. US political analysts have noted that although the MAGA administration is grossly incompetent in pretty much every substantive way other than using public office to engage in graft and corruption, it is very proficient at PR and propaganda spinning. This often reaches Orwellian heights, such as when the White House announced that it is winning the war with Iran, that ICE is protecting US citizens from criminal “aliens,” that the US is using lethal force on the open seas to stop drug smuggling, that medicaid and voter fraud is rife, that social security is discretionary income, or that tariffs will be paid by the foreign exporters, not US consumers. A major aspect of this full spectrum disinformation campaign, one that takes its origins from Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with s**t” principle, is to gaslight the public into second guessing the reality that they are living. For example, gas and other commodity prices, including groceries, are not going up and if they are it is president autopen Biden’s fault because he left everything in a shambles.

In spinning this alternate reality the MAGA administration has willing accomplices in the corporate media, including Fox News, OAN and Newsmax. Thanks to billionaire take-overs of once honourable institutions like CBS, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the editorial direction of US “mainstream’ news has taken a distinctly rightwing tilt that, not surprisingly, reinforces MAGA framing of the national narrative. In fact, narrative framing has become more about spinning disinformation that reporting facts, and in this regard the rise of social media as competitors under market conditions only aggravates the situation and perpetuates the syndrome by reinforcing the move to an attention gig economy where all opinions are equally valid, “free” speech is devoid of social responsibility, expertise is disdained and algorithms push individual and collective preferences around lowest common denominators. Book reading gives way to doom-scrolling and learned debate is pushed aside by TikTok memes and podcasting, even when done by ignorant and often illiterate fools.

Although the US can be considered an exemplar in this regard, and has strong competition from State-organised disinformation campaigns in places like the PRC, Iran, Israel and Argentina, NZ has its own version of framing the narrative in the lead up to General Elections. In that regard the Right are, here too, winning.

The strategy is simple and can be summarised in two words: costs and taxes. For whatever reason (and there are several) Kiwis are a notoriously stingy lot. The very mention of taxes evokes images of grim reaper scythe-weilding IRD agents coming to take hard-earned incomes from average Kiwis. It does not matter if taxes are used to assist the neediest, to build and maintain infrastructure, to provide policing, education, housing, welfare and medical care to and for all, and to provide for a minimal level of national defense and security. In other words, even in these days of privatisation and public sector budget cutbacks, taxes fund core functions of the State. That frees the private sector, which is very unregulated compared to many other liberal capitalist democracies,, to pursue material interests without jeopardising basic social needs via public good provision.

In NZ, however, the Right has successfully captured and framed electoral narratives around the subjects of public sector costs and taxation, specifically the need for less of both in the face of the desire of Labour and other Left parties to increase public sector spending derived from taxation (and hence the costs to the average battler) for any number of frivolous “woke” and otherwise unnecessary reasons that ultimately benefit the undeserving, lazy and irresponsibly indolent. For the Right taxes are also just a rent-seeking instrument to justify civil service existence in make-work sinecures and shoulder-tapped public sector positions. They fuel a form of bureaucratic parasitism and as such must be resisted, curtailed and when possible, eliminated because the costs of doing so are economically unsustainable.

Rather than confront this false framing head on, Labour has succumbed to it. Its acquiescence stems from the Blairite “Third Way” legacies of 30 years ago that, much like the discredited neoliberal precepts that fuel the NZ Right’s sclerotic vision of market-led economics, is grounded in contexts that no longer apply to contemporary society. But dogma reigns supreme in NZ and both major parties buy into the narrative about keeping taxes low at all costs, quite literally so.

That is unfortunate because, given the incompetence and mean-spirited elite-serving nature of the NACTFirst coalition, there is a window of opportunity for Labour and its junior partners to emphasise that things do not have to be like this. NZ is capable, through the use of taxation and other policy instruments, to re-order itself as a fairer and more just society, one in which avarice and self-centredness take a back seat to inter-class and ethno-racial solidarity, something that is now very much under siege. This government-led institutional divisiveness and exclusion is often pushed by foreign interests that use NZ fronts as facades for their divisive appeals. The infamous Taxpayers Union and its sister astroturf agencies are cases in point, as Nicky Hager has recently reminded us in his book Dirty Work.

The Right also has been able to reframe narratives on any number of policy specifics by simply repeating the mantras “but what about the cost?” “where is the money coming from?” and/or “who is gong to pay for it?” Labour and its junior partners (save te Pati Maori, which does challenge colonialist narratives) too often fall into the trap by trying to explicate, often using policy wonk and technocratic terminology, how and from where policy funding will come from and how costings will be calculated and funded. This inevitably leads them to into the “no new taxation” and public spending arguments that they cannot win. The circle of despair is never-ending: Even things like a capital gains tax, which is a common public revenue instrument in OECD countries, become the targets of “taxation is theft” claims that leave the Left speechless in response.

All of this reductio ad absurdem Rightwing argument permeates its very effective election campaign strategies. Rather than reply from the back foot while riding the market-fetish policy narrative, Labour and its allies should be doing some narrative reframing of their own, focusing not on immediate costs but on who benefits and gains over the long term from their policy initiatives. Although the NACTFirst coalition has worked hard to dismantle Labour’s social engineering polices (such as with regard to traffic safety, tobacco use, electric car rebates and petrol levies) and replaced them with more deregulation and weakening of social safety nets of various stripes, the NZ Left have an opportunity to restore the commonweal orientation to public policy after three years of what can best be described as malevolently-intended criminal incompetence on the part of the government.

Readers may recall my referencing Gramsci’s notion of good sense versus common sense, the latter being the narrative framed by elite discourse on how the “proper” society should look like, and the former being the reality we see with our eyes and feel in our hearts. Rather than address what passes for market-driven common sense, as has been the case in NZ for three decades, the NZ Left should be countering it with a good sense reinterpretation of social reality as we experience it. From there the solutions to injustice, inequality and deprivation can more properly be addressed.

This includes human rights and civil liberties. The Right frames the extension of rights to previously excluded and marginalised people, including Maori, as an infringement on the rights of the majority and in fact a selective awarding of rights to some but not all. Freedom of speech for the Right means the freedom to engage in bigoted dog-whistling and hate-mongering. Rather than argue the matter as an issue of group entitlement and the limits of opinion, the Left needs to reframe the narrative as a matter of universal rights and human dignity, including respect for difference. The same goes for confronting Rightwing fear-mongering, which plays on ignorance, scapegoating (trans! immigrants!), division and acrimony as the fodder for electoral support. The Left should just call out those types of appeal for what they are and not get mired in arguments about who deserves what in NZ society. For the Left the issue is not one of entitlements but of endowment: humans are endowed with inalienable rights regardless of who they are and nobody is entitled to anything more or less than that. That includes matters of historical redress for past injustices–if a wrong was done it must be rectified.

The bottom line is that the Left cannot win if it simply responds to a policy narrative set by the Right (including on policy specifics), and even if it wins an election (a tactical victory) it cannot pursue a progressive policy agenda that will make a tangible difference to the majority’s lives if it continues to do so. Given that NZ is a capitalist society inserted in a capitalist world economy in which post-colonial, pro-market rules apply throughout the social hierarchy even if Maori are awarded “their” space in the socio-economic and cultural order, the best way for the NZ Left to advance is to reframe elections specifically, and politics in general, as a contest about how a new social contract should be defined in this technogarchical world.

Think of it as a foundational reset. The issue is more about an ideological shift, in fact an ideational shift, rather than about technocratic solutions under market-oriented conditions. Put another way, if it is true that politics is the art of the possible (as in what is possible to achieve under the circumstances given the socio-economic, cultural, political and get strategic context), then the basic issue is about framing what is defined as “possible.” For the Right, no matter how much it may use the language of agency, freedom and choice, what is possible is limited to those with a particular set of material endowments, social backgrounds and connections, and value orientations (lets say for the sake of argument White Anglo Saxon Protestant in nature). For the Left, what is possible is what we collectively aspire to be when unconstrained by material or sociodemographic difference. In that regard, Left politics as the art of the possible is about pursuing (and redressing where violated) universal ideals rather than catering to particularistic, elite-dominated interests, however incremental and reformist that pursuit may have to be given the dominant narrative confronting it..

Because for the Left, even as milquetoast as it is in NZ, arguing about policy specifics in a debate framed by the Right is always going to be a losing proposition.

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Cartoon Villains.

The 25th anniversary of September 11 got me to thinking. Marx wrote that history tended to repeat itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. It seems that the MAGA administration in the US has decided to combine the process and roll both together in its second term while elevating its stupidity and cruelty to new heights. Let’s call it “tragicfarce.” The US is a historical tragicfarce unfolding before our eyes. The slide into decadence began long ago but 9-11 was the accelerant that fed the flames of reflexive imbecility and its attendant turn to global villainy.

The cast of culprits is large and the cliches write themselves: the gilt-edged monumental vanity project known as the MAGA circus clown car dumpster fire careening downhill has now jumped the shark. It is led by a snoozing Russian asset pedophile rapist diaper-wearing conman with orange facial skin and a cotton candy hairpiece (and his grifter family), seconded by a coke-snorting steroid freak, road-kill eater and racoon penis collecting Secretary of Health; a closeted Beta-boi Islamophobe misogynist alcoholic as Secretary of War; a google eyed podcasting ambulance-chasing lawyer drunkard as FBI director and a mob attorney as Attorney General; a former plumber/cage fighter as Secretary of Homeland Security (who replaced an adulterous former beauty queen puppy-killing mean girl); the wife of a wrestling mogul as Secretary of Education; a bitchy top as Treasury Secretary; a real estate fraudster as Secretary of Commerce; an adulteress fraudster with an on-the-job drinking problem as Labor Secretary; a sofa-humping neo-Nazi billionaire’s hand puppet whose fictionalised accounting of his life story was the launching pad for his rise as Vice President; a reality TV personality on a long road trip with a dozen kids as Secretary of Transportation; a closeted ideological troglodyte in heels as Secretary of State; the former head of the think tank that produced Project 2025 as the blueprint for this Carnaval side-show posing as government as Director of the Office of Management and Budget; and so many lesser sycophantic and opportunistic others that the list could fill an anthology of cravenly crass creeps (including a bleached blond known as the human printer who dotes on the slumbering Jabba with a diaper bag at her side). These extend down to the local US political level and to places overseas like the presidencies of Argentina and El Salvador (and the NZ First and ACT parties).

This ensemble of morons and cretins striving hard to become idiots have waged war on the US people using their own Gestapo known as ICE and are in the process of losing a war of opportunistic choice against Iran started at the behest of a genocidal Israeli state and its criminal Netanyahu government. It has killed scores of innocents at sea without evidence or trial, forcibly deposed and removed a foreign head of state and his wife while killing dozens in the process, then corruptly appropriated that nations’s oil assets, threatened to annex Canada and Greenland, renamed international bodies of water as “American,” blockaded Cuba, openly interfered in several Latin American elections, deported people to prisons in El Salvador and elsewhere, launched a global tariff war, eliminated foreign aid programs and financial support for international organisations and humanitarian relief agencies, ignored international law and engaged in punitive retaliation against international legal bodies like the ICC, and generally acted in what can only be described as a rogue way.

There is so, so much more on that score. Remember the reflecting pool make-over into a sewage pond? Or the Kennedy Center re-naming? or the Arch d’Trump at the entrance to ArIington National Cemetary? Perhaps not because there is so much more piled on top of those cultural and architectural atrocities. In fact, the plan seems to have been all along that the MAGA administration would perpetrate one or two outrages per day or at least several a week, in order to, as Steve Bannon advised them, “to flood the zone with sh*t.” That way one scandal would blend into another affront that in turn would bleed into a a vortex of policy and personal dysfunction that would be lost in the media cycle in the so-called “attention economy.” Forget North Korea, Iran or any other of the despotic regimes extant at the moment. The real threat to global peace comes from this criminal rabble and their endless dirty spin.

MAGA mouthpieces keep on speaking of “winning” and being great when inflation is unchecked, prices of domestic staples are rising, poverty is growing (and along with it civil unrest). It mugs and postures on real and imagined holidays but always with an eye on itself, not on the people or causes being venerated. It speaks of traditional Christian values and beliefs but it only worships its power over others. In a fairer time it would just be a parody of bad governance, sort of like a “Yes Minister” pitched along very dark lines. Sadly, it is not.

It is a theatre of the absurd made real and stocked with cartoon villains.

I could go on and on but we all know what we are seeing even if it is hard to fully comprehend. Some even seek to emulate these monsters in suits, spray tans, big hair and fake breasts. That cannot be allowed to happen, either in the US or anywhere else.

May their reign soon end and may their demise be painful..

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Some recent social media snippets (mine).

A few years ago former KP colleague Lew decamped for more fertile writing territory and to attend to more important priorities. To my surprise he began posting on a word-limited social media platform of some notoriety, and I remember thinking that it was a waste of his talent to limit himself to pithy phrases and snarky asides. Whatever my opinion, he has developed a large and devoted following. and continues to inform NZ political discourse with his observations and critiques.

I held that view on social media posting because in the old days I used to have several types of writing outlets and felt that Lew could do likewise. I used scholarly books and articles for my academic research, opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines as a form of short piece public service, consultant analyses on a dedicated web site, and blog posts that were more personal or ideological than what the other formats comfortably allowed. For a while I did all of them concurrently, as I saw them as different parts of my writing personality.

Then, inevitably, life changed. I began doing some podcasting with a close colleague and slowly stopped academic writing once I left academia. I stopped media writing once editorial standards and word limits dropped along with the pay per word (and in some cases no pay or pay to play editorial approaches). I did media commentary until they stopped paying for “expert” analyses and charlatans entered the field. Think of it this way: If I was going to stop my normal “monetarized” or remunerated activities in order to take the time and make the effort to prepare and offer insights into world affairs when called upon by media outlets with no significant notice, why would I do that for free? Do we ask tradesmen to perform unscheduled specialist services for free? So why ask me to do so? To get my mug on TV? To hear my voice on the wireless? Geez, I have a face made for radio and in fact was a jazz DJ on radio for several years, so neither TV mugging or broadcast audio locution floats my boat. Best to leave that for (with a few exceptions to the rule) the attention-seeking poseurs.

As a result, nowadays I am down to blogging, sporadic consultancy writing and, as fate would have it, social media posts. I opted to do the latter basically to offer quick takes on current events rather than offer “deeper” analyses or opinions.

In that light here are a few recent snippets about NZ domestic politics. They refer to this year’s election and what is looking like Labour handing victory to the coalition of nasty rightwing incompetents in November.

From May: Is the NACT election campaign strategy based on promoting sectarian hatred of public sector workers by private sector ‘battlers?” Or to push public sector cuts so deep that they cannot easily be reversed and private interests can exploit the service delivery gaps? Just wondering.

From August: With a strong female majority workforce, who does ACT expect to use “reasonable force” on unruly middle and secondary school students, some of whom may either be large, violent or both? Does ACT propose to hire school discipline officers to deal with such students? If not, then what? (as the parent of a 13 year old boy this resonates close to home).

More in August:

Thoughts: By kicking the leadership can down the road National is making its election chances/options worse; Given certain contexts, it can be better to lose now and win later;
Labour excels at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so why make it harder for it to do so?

And: If the opponent’s platform is all about being anti-taxes with no positive policy initiatives, then it truly is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory for Labour to be timid and status quo-ish when it comes to election promises. They must read the room better. Bold is beautiful. Positive policy! (Because they other side has nothing to offer on that score. It is all about what they oppose, not what they propose).

More (revised): Labour must understand that National’s performative pretence that they are doing something about kid’s social media use (i.e., pretending that it is doing something effective about digital harm to children when it in fact it is not), is just kicking the problem down the road while suckering Labour into supporting its political theatre. That is, it is an election neutralising ploy that will leave Labour holding the failure bag when the time comes for it to take office. The current bill is a plaster, not a panacea. It only postpones the hard choices that must be made if kids are to be made safe as effectively as is possible given the circumstances of their lives in an all-encompassing digital era.

Seen differently, National are doing a version of the hackneyed “tough on crime” and “countering terrorism” tactics employed by right-wingers everywhere by enticing Labour into either supporting their political theatrical performance staged to address digital harm against children or opposing what is framed as a common sense solution to the problem (when in actuality it just shifts the burden of responsibility onto households while offering ethereal promises of corporate accountability). After all, who in their right mind is not against crime, terrorism and digital harm to children?

Of course, Labour has taken the bait and supports the plaster bill. What is worse, the extremist Right clustered in ACT and NZ First cloak their concerns about the bill under a “infringement on privacy and parental rights” mantle that undercuts sincere opposition to the ongoing expansion of the surveillance State and its private sector adjacents. Then Labour doubles down on its attempt to cover National’s pre-election moves by supporting National’s rates increase cap without proposing other funding initiatives, in what amounts to another veiled anti-tax measure posing as fiscal relief on households. In doing so Labour is chasing a narrative framed by National at a time when National should be having its feet held to the fire over its gross across-the-board incompetence on virtually all matters of public policy (be it on e.g., health, economic growth, housing, education, welfare or agricultural-industrial-service balance).

In any event, as I wind down my other writing and commentating pursuits I will occasionally cobble together a patchwork of revised and edited social media posts and publish them here. Think of them as an epiphenomenal takes on contemporary events, or in other words, surface reflections on larger realities.

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Adobe Canyon Men

This is a bit of a departure from my usual blogging, but a long-time friend sent me something that made me reminisce. With some license taken, please allow me to indulge the moment and write of other times and places.

In the northeastern Sonoran Desert Basin, where the high chaparral grasslands meet the oak, sycamore and cottonwood-heavy foothills of the Sky Island mountain ranges that straddle the Arizona-Mexico border at 5,000 feet, there have lived very different types of people who are different in different ways. People like Geronimo and Cochise, bandidos, pony express riders, train and stagecoach robbers, cowboys and cattle rustlers, US calvary, hunters, gatherers, ranchers and farmers, vigilantes and fugitives, later hippies, cultists, off-road meatheads and the occasional writer, painter or poet. Although there are no saguaro cactus at this altitude, here the Sonoran landscapes are lush and varied, with skies, especially at dawn and dusk, that are shades of pink, orange, yellow and white set against hues of blue as broad as the eye can see, and nightscapes that are a psychadelic kaldeoscope of stars, planets, meteors and nebula. Wildlife abounds, from the elusive jaguar to the playful coatamundi, with bear, puma, bobcats, fox, wolves, badgers, antelope, deer and other mammals sharing space with hundreds of bird, snake, insect and anthropod species, some only to be found in this part of Earth. It is truly Nature’s Paradise.

Among the people who have passed through this space, in the 1990s there was a trio of wayward travelers, “ruffians” at best, “trouble makers” to some and “riff-raff” as they were affectionately known by their kin. Before they arrived in the Sonoita-Patagonia area on the southeast end of the Santa Rita Mountains, they had traveled far and wide abroad in pursuit of knowledge and adventure, cultural enrichment and earthly pleasures. They accumulated wisdom beyond their years, dodged a few (figurative and literal) bullets, consumed way too much mind-altering substances and worked to re-define themselves in light of their individual and shared experiences. They earned advanced degrees but did not flaunt them. Two studied traditional cultures and one studied comparative politics. All wrote about social organizations. They spoke other languages and listened to jazz, Norteno and borderland blues on KXCI FM. Two drove old American pick-up trucks and all rode fast bikes. They were not feminine and supported feminists. They understood risk but were not always averse to it. They played with sharp objects. They were comfortable with weapons. They could cook for others. They liked dogs.

They were men being boys and boys thinking that they were men. It rewarded and cost them in equal measure.

That was before “woke” meant anything other than rising from slumber. They were Keto before 30-30-40 diets were a thing. They lived macro lives by focusing on micro details. The had situational awareness. They did not need testosterone boosters. The liked their wine dry and their beer cold, sometimes with a shot on the side. They were cool, calm and cordial on first impression but warm and affectionate when the occasion warranted. They shared their opinions and could spin a yarn but listened as much as they spoke. They behaved in a mannerly fashion around women and kids, and confronted ne’er do wells when other options were exhausted. They did not start fights but knew what causes were worth fighting for and what not to back away from. They looked out for each other.

I like to call them “Adobe Canyon Men” because of a certain location near the 32nd North/111th West parallels where they congregated from time to time to discuss the finer things of life as well as the state of current affairs. Alas, those days could not last and the centrifugal pull of other adventures carried them away to other climes, different meridians and a new millenium. But one record of their passage in that special space remains, and it is this:

Adobe Canyon, circa 1993.

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Fear-mongering the “Other.”

One of the signs of desperation of a political campaign, movement or ideology is the resort to fear mongering. Rather than offer a a bias for hope in the form of positive policy initiatives, fear mongerers use stereotypes, scapegoats and distorted narratives to stir anxiety and dread of the “others” in amongst the body politic. The “others” are the usual suspects–immigrants and foreigners, sexual, ethnic, religious and racial communities, social classes, intellectuals (remember Pol Pot?) ideological non-conformists and contrarians, witches and witch doctors, heavy metal Satanists, even tax-and-spend liberals–the list is as long as human history itself. New ones are invented every generation. They often are held to be carriers of disease and other pestilence or are pet eaters, children snatchers, rapists and murderers. They could well be shape-shifters or aliens, so the best precaution against their insidious designs is to beware and vote/follow those who saw the danger first and call it out. Oftentimes fear mongers will try a rock by rock approach, throwing out accusations against one entity to see if they can gain political traction with it, and if not, then move on to another scapegoat. Again, the targets are endless.

In recent times the US Right has focused on Islamicists and communist/socialists. The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New Youk and Abdul El-Sayed as Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Michigan has galvanised US conservatives into a frenzy of xenophobic bigotry over what they see as the imminent takeover of the self-proclaimed land of the free by Islamocommies. These forces of doom used to be called Islamofacists but once they introduced social democratic views into their political discourse, then they conveniently morphed into “commies” because as we all know, for the Right, socialists and communists are two sides of the same Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Trotsyite-Castroite coin, with a little Ho Chi Minh, Guevara, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Angela Davis thrown in.

I will leave aside the differences between communism, socialism, social democracy and democratic socialism because my point (beyond the fact that most of the Right would not know the difference between them) is that for the fear mongers the objective is to tar them all with the same “othering” brush, to conflate them as one evil hydra and inflate them as an existential threat to the Republic and the Nation on which it purportedly stands.

NZ has its mini-me variant of that with the peripheral Right parties scapegoating various immigrant communities, most lately Indians (NZ First), and the ACT Party seeing Reds under beds anytime regulations are proposed or rights extended rather than curtailed. They both see Te Pati Maori as Maori-communists and the Green Party as wokester-communists seeking to infringe on the traditional rights of patriarchical white cis male capitalists (or, as they would say, “natural leaders”). The key point is that, because they have nothing positive to offer anyone other than their corporate patrons and pocket-liners and the mouth-breathing troglodytes who find reassurance in their hatreds, the NZ Right, just like the US Right, resorts to fear mongering as its weapon of choice.

Moving past the cut and thrust of the daily political news cycle, this is the lesson of the moment. The Right, both here and elsewhere (there are parallels to be drawn in places like Argentina and Brazil as well), have crested their wave of electoral popularity and run out of ideas for governing besides scripted corporate-speak mantras about financial discipline, governmental efficiency, law and order and traditional values. In fact, it is the lack of new policy ideas and initiatives that have made them electorally vulnerable, which is why they are now resorting to their weapon of choice.

I can only hope that the opposition in the US, NZ and other places like Argentina can focus on this syndrome as a campaign issue while offering a more positive vision for the future based on concrete proposals to improve commonweal conditions in the countries in which they are located. This means rejecting timidity, incrementalism and purely centrist-focused prescriptions in favour of bolder initiatives that move beyond cautious and defensive postures that serve to reaffirm the status quo by tinkering around the margins and onto more progressive actions that seek to accomplish more than just undo the bad Right policies of the recent past. That involves taxation, social policies, macro-economic re-orientation, foreign relations and a re-framing of what government exists to do and what the role of the State is in doing it–both a narrative and a substantive change, in other words–so that the tired recourse to fear-mongering can finally be put to rest based on a new, more inclusive social contract in which the license of consent is granted by the masses, not just by the entrenched elites of the current moment.

All of this must be done as a “sincere” campaign strategy rather than by hiding behind a curtain of centrism while the governing Right defends its position via fear mongering about “extremism” and assorted “other” assaults on the social fabric. Because in doing so, the Right inadvertently demonstrates that the time is ripe for more radical and progressive change. If being radical is to be progressive, then to be status quo is to be regressive. And regression is the breeding ground for fear-mongering “others.”

In this context bold change is not being ideologically extremist. It is being realistic and practical given the circumstances and alternatives. So Carpe diem!

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Reactionary bookends.

Now that election season is underway in NZ, I shall very briefly drift into a subject I usually tend to avoid: NZ domestic politics, and more specifically, policy agendas during election campaigns. In this case I would like to note two examples of what I (and many experts far more knowledgeable than myself) see as a major flaw in MMP, as exemplified by the Right’s embrace of populist themes.

First we have NZ First and its NZ version of MAGA mendacity. Slamming all contrary views as “woke,” sucking up to mining and fishing interests, going full xenophobic racist on Opposition MPs and communities of Chinese and Indian descent, dog-whistling homo- and trans-phobic hysteria, kissing the rear of the gun lobby and generally being grumpy old codgers is pretty rich for a party led by opportunistic rather than self-recognised Maori men in parliament. They may have been born Maori but when it comes to election agendas, they are anything but. In the US such type of MAGA people–people of color who use their color only when it suits them–have some processed snack-related names attached to them.

They are also unimaginative. They might have some One Nation/Hanson tropes in their policy mix but they are simply MAGA lite, Kiwi style. Insults included. It is a pity that a former academic political scientist is one of Peter’s main advisors because he certainly has the capacity to know better about how corrosive that brand of politics is to national cohesion and civilised debate. But for Peters and his colleagues the main goal is to exploit the MMP weakness and carve out the 5 percent needed to stay in parliament and perhaps figure in coalition discussions. Forget the other 95 percent of voters. What matters is to grab that sliver of electoral pie and if that means catering to the baser instincts of reactionary Deep State and other conspiracy theory types as well as religious bigots and assorted other anti-social ideological riff-raff, then so be it. They just need to reach the election threshold to convert their narcissistic self-interest into a parliamentary presence, perhaps as no more than a vanity project but also perhaps as a power-broker faction under MMP (as we have recently and sadly seen).

Phrased differently: The price of Grumpy Winston’s and Greasy-palmed Shane’s baubles is stirring the effluent pools of NZ politics. PM Luxon’s tepid response to NZ First’s antics demonstrate more than his personal weakness. It serves as a passive enabling device that allows racist and xenophobic beliefs to be mainstreamed into election politics. Luxon needs the financial contributions to National from certain ethnic-based business groups, but he also knows that on current polling he can either condemn MAGA-style sectarian and culture war extremism or he can hope to make a pact with the devil. He has chosen the latter.

Then there is ACT. One thing is obvious beyond the racism that is behind its Treaty Principles bill and its corporate pimping with regard to the Resources Management Reform bill. It also does not know or care about children or educators. Take its latest campaign initiative. With a strong female majority employee base, who does ACT expect to be the ones who use “reasonable force” on unruly middle and secondary school students, some of whom may either be large, violent or both. Does ACT propose to hire school discipline officers to deal with such students? If not, then what? Does Seymour, a posterboi for incels who says he has a girlfriend but whose obsession with former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman was more that of the stalker creep rather than the partisan policy difference type, have a clue about how to deal with contrarian, disturbed, distressed or alienated 12 to 18 year olds? And no, I do not include as “experience” chatting up minor females on social media.

Plus, what about teacher safety? Does he really expect teachers, not trained in physical restraint techniques and deescalation procedures, to be on the front line against “miscreant” students once things threaten to or get physical? How would the chickenhawk Paul Henry fare in a tussle with a teenager? Or will it be the Cruella de Ville South African woman who cracks the whip on those do not conform, obey and bow to the rod? And if all of this was somehow achievable, what is the cost and who pays for it? Is not ACT’s schtick about reducing budgetary deficits and bloated public sector expenditures? How does a “reasonable force” policy enter into that equation, both in terms of financial costs but also in terms of the human costs involved in the resort to physical control of young people? Who pays the price for all of this, and how?

Surely ACT know that the proposal is not practicable. But they can blame teacher’s unions for being “soft” on student misbehaviour and pass the buck onto education professionals who know how and why “reasonable force” is not the answer to problems that begin far from classrooms. They can talk about parental failure and inter-generational dependencies resulting in bad school-kid behaviour. They do so not because they care or have realistic remedies, but because as with the NZ First racists and xenophobes, they hope that it stirs the pot enough to keep them in parliament as power-brokers using the same logic as Winston and company.

And true to form, Luxon and fellow National Party leaders dutiful go along with the proposed uncosted “tough on youth crime” overreach.

I say all of this only slightly tongue in cheek because this is what NZ has become, at least on the Right. And from what I can see, the corporate media is happy to give them a platform to spew their nonsense as if it were common sense.

But here lies the rub, because “common sense” is what elites tell us how things should be, whereas good sense is what our hearts and minds tell us what should be regardless of what elites say. Something tells me that, notwithstanding the crackpots in Groundswell and other astroturf outfits associated with the Wellington protests a few years back, in their hearts and minds most Kiwis know that when it comes to public policy, Seymour, Peters and their entourages are no more than grandiloquent turd-polishers posing as politicians.

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Something on early life reading.

Well, I guess that it was inevitable that this day would come given that he is the son of Kate and I, but today Enda started reading the Communist Manifesto. Apparently the word “communist” is in his school history books regarding the anti-apartheid/Springbok tour protests in NZ in the early 1980s and he came home curious about its meaning. Then he watched some news with the imbecile in chief railing about communists as the biggest threat to the US. He asked us what the term meant.

As you can imagine, the first response from his mom and dad was “don’t get us started.” But we did, at length. Kate had been to an anti-Springbok protest with her parents when she was three (in a baby stroller) and I had been introduced to the Manifesto at age 14 after getting my first real summer job at an Argentine brake factory (courtesy of my dad, who believed in honest labor although he certainly was no commie). So we gave him a quick synopsis of what communism is and is not, and then Kate suggested that he read the Manifesto since, let’s just say, our bookcases are littered with commie subversive literature and then some (e.g. feminists, environmentalists, The Anarchist Cookbook).

So now he is buried in text about workers losing their chains. Almost immediately he asked us what “bourgeoisie” meant, and I tell ya, it is going to be a swift ride into the loss of political and economic innocence with that kid. We talked about lords and serfs, farmers and peasants, shopkeepers, factory bosses, proletarians, wage labor–let’s just that we are just getting started. Surplus value and the universal tendency of the rate of profit to fall, here we come!

It occurred to me that we should think of what other works might serve as nice bookends to the Manifesto (as an introduction to political writing). My first thought was de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America because it is short, succinct and written by a non-“American.” Kate suggest Machiavelli’s The Prince, which is also not overly long or burdensome on the eyes and mind. I have written some derivative essays about the applicability of Machiavelli to contemporary politics, so that appeals to me. But so does de Tocqueville’s optimism about American Democracy in a simpler time, as seen from the vantage point of this terribly unhappy moment in US history.

Anyway, we shall see if another Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Castro, Guevara, Mao, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh or Patrice Lumumba comes from his readings. Maybe a Chris Hitches if that is the way he rolls. Of course he could go the neo-Gramscian route or perhaps get all Althusserian or Poulantzas on us, but as long as he does not go full blown Foucaultian and po-mo, I can live with that.

But what about Hegel (as a context for dialectical materialism)? Wittfogel on Hydraulic Societies? Wittgenstein? I have already thought of the brilliant Para Leer al Pato Donald (On Reading Donald Duck). Remember, we want to keep things relatively short and simple and in some logical order of intellectual progression. That may or not be possible at this point, e.g., Nietzche might be too much at this stage (if ever).

This is not about being presumptuous. It is about introducing a young-but-keen reader to texts about the human condition, forms of social organisation, political representation and voice, etc. Instead, it is about what would be a good reading list for a curious kid with the makings of a political mind? He has already been introduced to the Greeks and Romans, so I am trying to steer him away from the “old pale, male and stale” point of view although to be frank that is exactly what I am and where I come from. Kate, on the other hand, may have some/many ideas on that score.

So what should he read n next (as a soon-to-be 13 year old)? Please drop your suggestions in a comment.

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The Liberal Internationalist Delusion.

Now that the football World Cup is over and I have sated my thirst for the beautiful game for the time being, albeit with a very bitter taste at the end of the tournament given my background and team loyalties, I figure it is time to return to the real world. So let’s begin that effort by dispelling some misconceptions about what is and is not the global geopolitical and strategic situation at the moment.

As I have consistently written and said for some years now, liberal internationalism, the foundation of the Western-centric global order created during the Cold War and continued into the first decades of the post-Cold War era, is dead. Part of this is due to the shifts in the last four decades from a bipolar to a unipolar to a multipolar and now polycentric international system where emerging and declining great powers compete for influence and control. This long transitional moment (again, one that I have written and spoken about extensively on this blog and elsewhere), has been characterised by two major features: 1) rules and norms violations by an increasing number of actors; and 2) as a result, the resort to conflict as the systems regulator. The combination leads to uncertainty and a corresponding turn to self-interested national geopolitical strategies as a hedge against it. This has been likened to a return to the “state of nature” or international anarchy as Thomas Hobbes and many of his successors have referred to the core aspect of the international system.

The combination of these two features has fundamentally undermined the liberal international order because its very premise was to use international and multinational organisations as the basis for conflict resolution and adjudication of cross-border disputes as well as arbiters and mediators of international negotiations and agreements. An entire institutional edifice was constructed to this end, spanning agencies as diverse as the UN, WHO, ILO, International Whaling Commission (IWC), IAEA, ICC, and many more. This edifice was constructed on a latticework of laws, rules, regulations, treaties, agreements, compacts, and other instruments that are designed to regulate the interactions of actors in the fields in which they are situated. This includes defining what is acceptable and proper and unacceptable and improper behaviour in the subject areas where international and multinational institutional jurisdiction was applied (via conventions, treaties and ratifications).

What is notable about the liberal international order was that it operated on the basic premise that nation-States and other global actors would enter into collective agreements that in essence were self-binding in nature. As Jan Elster so eloquently pointed out in his book “Ulysses and the Sirens,” (which has nothing to do with current adaptations of the Homeric Epic) democracies and their rules, and by extension international organisations founded on a system of rules and norms that are designed to mediate conflict and lend predictability and regularity to international interactions amongst equals, were akin to nation-States strapping themselves to masts so as to avoid the temptation of pursuing immediate self-interests that could result in deleterious longer-term results, especially when other actors do the same. The wreckage of the League of Nations and other failed international experiments in collective governance prior to WW2 served as vivid reminder to the architects of the Cold War and post-Cold War orders that unfettered pursuit of national self-interest in a world without rules was a recipe for disaster. But adherence was always voluntary and sanctions were limited, porous and few.

However, as enlightened as the liberal international perspective was (“liberal” in the sense of being based on a belief in the perfectibility of human kind and the “civilising”” effects of rules and norms on individual and collective behaviour rather than as a political ideology), it suffered from an innate flaw. The entire institutional edifice that supported it was, beyond various fines and sanctions imposed on violators in specific areas, dependent on voluntary national enforcement of universal rules. This not only is an infringement on national sovereignty (presumably accepted by those involved), but also meant that in practice many international institutions lack the enforcement capability that otherwise would compel non-compliant actors to adhere to established rules and norms governing their behaviour. It is therefore left to individual nation-States and non-State actors, occasionally acting in concert with one another, to punish transgressors. But when doing so runs contrary to perceived national interests or diplomatic and military ties that otherwise bind compliant and non-compliant actors together, then the rules become unenforceable because no state will be capable or wiling to do so.

Consider the case the International Criminal Court (ICC). It has issued warrants for several senior Israeli officials, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and assorted human rights violators from various parts of the world. Yet the US, Israel, China, India and Russia, among others, are not party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC. They offer various justifications for this stance, most often boiling down to their fear that their citizens could be targeted for malicious prosecutions for activities that otherwise should consider to be reasons of State (raison d’état). The US is very explicit in rejecting ICC jurisdiction (and in fact is working to have it disbanded) because it fears that US military personnel will be arrested and tried for war crimes committed while in the service of US interests. It argues that if criminal investigations and prosecutions are to happen, they should happen in US courts, including military courts if necessary because justice in the US is universal, neutral and blind. (although Trump’s pardon of convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher and many others puts paid to the notion of impartial justice for military and certain civilian defendants).

Whatever the merits of such arguments, in practice it means that the entire enforcement power of the ICC depends on individual nation-States and other actors willing to enforce its warrants and extradition requests. Besides various African countries that have surrendered former officials for assorted crimes against humanity, the Philippines recently agree to extradite former president Rodrigo Dutarte to The Hague for human rights violations when he was in office. He is now awaiting trial on those charges. In all of these cases, the political leaders that followed the accused in power made the decisions to permit their arrests and extraditions did so for what can charitably described as murky reasons rather than out of strong commitment to universal justice.

Conversely, although warrants are outstanding on them, Putin, Netanyahu and other Russian and Israeli officials remain at large because, well, who is going to arrest them? While it is true that they risk arrest if they travel outside their home States and allied countries (such as what happened to former Chilean dictator Agusto Pinochet when he traveled to the UK in the late 1990s), the truth is that they basically have impunity from prosecution. Putin has travelled to China and India and other states, including the US, and received red carpet welcomes. Netanyahu regularly visits the US. In fact, when New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani suggested that Netanyahu be arrested the next time he travels to the US, a chorus of indignation rose from across the political spectrum and civil society. To put it in personal terms: Friends do not let friends get hunted by the ICC.

On another front, it is now clear that the notion freedom of navigation is under serious threat. A cornerstone of the liberal international order institutionalised during the Cold War by the 1958 Convention on the High Seas and its sequels, it is now apparent that countries can and will interfere with commodity supply routes if and when they can. It is not just Iran that is flexing its muscle in the Strait of Hormuz, or the US replying with its counter-blockade, or the Houthis moving to close the Bab El Mandeb strait leading to and from the Red Sea. Chinese interference with shipping in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits are a regular occurrence, especially involving vessels from regional neighbours, and government officials in Indonesia have expressed interest in imposing trilateral “maintenance fees” (i.e. Iranian-style tolls) along with Malaysia and Singapore in the Moluccan Straits. Others could well follow, including in the Bosphorus Strait and the Northern Passage across the Arctic. So far, although there is more talk than action, the era of unrestricted freedom of navigation appears to be ending because there is neither the will or capability to bring littoral or even remotely-based transgressors to heel.

The point of these digressions is to illustrate how weak the enforcement mechanisms are in the liberal international. order. While voluntary self-restraint and adherence to norms may be possible during times of relative peace and stability, those conditions disappear in moments of international systemic transition marked by conflict. In other words and to bring things back into contemporary focus: what was possible then is no longer possible now.

There is another factor that must be considered. The liberal international order was created by and for Global North white men. It is a product of imperialism and colonialism by the North in the Global South that was a means to keep order in the post-colonial moment during a time of Great Power competition. Although it never lacked for lackey’s and proxies in the South (say, people like Kofi Annan), the institutional edifice that I mentioned above was created to serve the interests of a Northern and Western-centric status quo. The rules and norms were Western ones. The major beneficiaries of the outcomes these institutions produced were Northern ones. The entire combine was posed in contraposition to Soviet alliance networks. Think of the activities of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international “aid” and development agencies. They may have done some good but ultimately whose interests did they serve first and foremost? At best, their record is mixed.

That is where the rise of the Global South, encapsulated in the creation of the so-called (and now expanded) BRICs bloc of countries, basically heralded the death knell of that North and Western-centric institutional bias. If the international institutional order is to preserve itself it will have to accommodate, genuinely this time, the interests of the Global South. That means more fairness, transparency and regional, national, ethnic and religious diversity in their decision-making structures. The Global South is here to stay as an international “player” given that the revolution in telecommunications and capital flows in an increasingly technopolar systemic constellation no longer finds exclusive root in the North. It will take time for these trends to crystallise, but the era of Western dominance of the international order, at least as we have known it since the end of WW2, is coming to an end.

Regrettably, in my opinion, the New Zealand foreign policy establishment (including academics, government officials, civil society organisations and interest groups) overwhelming adhere to the belief in liberal internationalism. It makes sense at one level because small countries need protection from the “might makes right” logics of Great Powers. Self-binding international institutions, rules and laws offer that to them but constrain the prerogatives of the strongest actors when measured by hard power variables. Large states are prevented from applying their full weight against smaller or weaker states because of the buffering effect of international institutions that cannot be easily manipulated (although they have been and are in practice). That imposed collective restraint poses a problem for Great Powers in times of flux.

At another level there is a delusional aspect to this. Along with the fiction of NZ’s foreign policy independence (Malaysia says the same thing about its international position), NZ elites involved in foreign-policy making continue to speak of the liberal international order as if it was a universal good (when it was demonstrably not regardless of its many positive features) and is still viable in spite of the obvious challenges and changes that are undermining it. Some speak of “reform” of international institutions, while others nod towards Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney’s call for a compact of Middle Powers to balance Great Power competition and its trickle down, ripple or spillover effects (the US has outright rejected the proposal and instead asserted its unilateral America First “Donroe” Doctrine as the basis for its engagement with the world. Similarly giants like China and India prefer to exercise their power in a traditional self-interested way with or without international institutions, so their support for a Middle Power alliance network is lukewarm at best).

I assume that the support base for liberal internationalism in the 21st century is comprised of constructivists (those who believe that institutions shape behavior and when reproduced via norms, rules, laws and procedures create a form of bureaucratic inertia that make some behavioral outcomes unthinkable, much less acceptable–say, like genocide), and idealists who believe that appeals to the better angels of human nature can be encouraged via institutional means. There is also a more darker interpretation of intellectual motivation behind the liberal internationalist worldview, which is to cloak Western post-colonial dominance in a web of “enlightened” organizational networks self-ratified as legitimate at the global level.

The majority consensus in support of liberal internationalism in NZ is led by Professor Robert Patman of Otago University, many of his students in government and academia, and people like former PM (and Patman associate) Helen Clark. Professor Patman is erudite and knowledgeable, and is conscious about where his strengths lie. To his credit, he knows his stuff and also knows what he does not know (which is a sign of intellectual maturity, in my opinion). But he seems to be loathe to see, or at least admit, what sits before him: when it comes to liberal internationalism, the thrill is gone. Recently he has shown signs that he recognises that there is a problem with the “rules based system” and has added that angle to his analytic repertorie, suggesting that institutional reform (rebirth?) is not only possible but necessary. A gaggle of other pundits echo and megaphone his thoughts without the analytic depth or breadth that he displays, but the effect is magnified. Most of those who talk and do foreign policy New Zealand remain in the liberal internationalist camp.

There are two exceptions to this rule when it comes to local foreign policy expertise (as I see it). Dr. Rueben Staff (a Patman student) is a realist who decamped to Europe when opportunities for academic advancement in NZ got limited. He accepts Great Power competition as given and has a pro-Western “bias” that dovetails at times with the local liberal internationalists. But he is more focused on hard power rather than soft power and the need for small countries to make hard choices rather than straddle the fence between opposing Great Power orientations. He is not naive about what happened when voluntary consensus and mutual self-restraint break down. Although he and I differ on various things, he is very worth reading and listening to when he does feature in the NZ media (Patman is ubiquitous on that score).

The other “contrarian” or “non-conformist” (my labels) is Van Jackson at Victoria University of Wellington. I do not know him personally but I understand that he held a position similar to mine (different regional focus) in the Pentagon during the Obama years (my tenure happened under Clinton), and he has been quite prolific turning out academic publications, opinion pieces, policy reports, videos and sub stack essays since he entered academia. He also has a progressive activist orientation, something that is rare in any foreign policy circles, much less those in NZ. If I had to pigeonhole him I would call him a neo-Marxist globalist. It is a clumsy term and he may not approve of it, but to me it captures his working class orientation and big picture comprehension. As with Steff and Patman, his is a voice worth listening to.

Beyond them and not including defense specialists, regional and area studies or intelligence/security analysts who do not focus on the theoretical and conceptual bases of approaches to foreign policy and international relations, the bench gets thin when it comes to comparative foreign policy and international relations analysis. Although the corporate media has a habit of featuring lesser lights, it does not matter because all in one way or another embrace liberal internationalist mantras and parrot the rationales offered by more notable defenders of the liberal international status quo. The trouble, again, is that with the exception of the likes of Steff and Jackson (coming from different perspectives), they live in a world that is more magical realism than realistic and where things are assumed rather than critically evaluated. I have not asked Patman and his liberal international colleagues this question directly since I no longer travel in their professional or social circles, but I wonder if their ongoing faith in and and support for liberal internationalism is more an aspirational expression of hope rather than a recognition of real time fact.

In any event, the international system does need re-ordering. But like alcoholism, there has to be a recognition of the problem of before a solution can be soberly offered. For the moment we are stalled at denial, and when not that, at the stage where cosmetic changes are thought to suffice if people would just coalesce round the wish that it be so.

Alas, that is not to be. As The Raven quoth in E.A. Poe’s 1845 poem,

“Nevermore.“