Category: Democracy

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Post-election score sheet.

Since pundits are pontificating, experts are expert-ting and blowhards are bloviating, I figured I would add my 2 cents worth of commentary into the mix. I certainly do not profess to by any sort of expert on NZ politics, so what follows is more an impression rather than an informed opinion. Yet the goddess knows that this cannot be worse than what was displayed in the media on election night and generally since then. Here I will just tabulate a scorecard of winners and losers and leave it for others to pick through the detritus.

BIG WINNERS:

Big money. Billionaires and well-funded rightwing astroturf organisations. They worked hard to game the system and the succeeded spectacularly. Not only did they convince National to push out the voter registration deadline by two weeks, which effectively disenfranchised voters who for a number of circumstances usually waited until Election Day to register and vote (a new deadline that favoured the more well-heeled who live under less precarious/more stable circumstances and can plan ahead). They also found loopholes in Election advertising laws that, as Andrew Geddis and others pointed out, may have adhered to the letter but not the spirit of the law, and both the Electoral Commission and the Left opposition were slow to react when the advertising campaign in favour of giving party votes to minor rightwing parties was sprung on the public. National reacted negatively but half heartedly because although it did not want a stronger tail wagging its dog, the accompanying voter suppression tactics favored it and the overall effect would be to keep the dog as the Alpha in the government yard.

The Opportunities Party won big by getting into parliament. A Trojan horse party with a chameleon facade, it siphoned votes mostly from Labour while introducing tech-bro capitalism into the political equation. Behind its wonky appeal and PR curated look, OP represents a different capitalist fraction than farmers and traditional Northern and Rotary Club businesses, have a more environmentally sensitive and younger orientation, but are no friends of the working classes (blue and white collar salarymen and women). They are the Internet Party without the Kim Dotcom weirdness and a more technocratic orientation as they pursue profit “with a conscience” rather than via rapacious, visibly exploitative means. While an improvement over the Mowbrays and export protein-based and other primary good economic interests, they are not necessarily advocates for the general wellbeing of everyday people. Theirs is the individual agency of the well-to-do, not the collective solidarity of common people facing difficult circumstances.

LESSER WINNERS:

The minor puppet parties of the billionaire and astroturf-backed Right have in fact become stronger tails on the National dog. Given the incompetence of the current National leadership and its soon to happen post-election leadership changes, the minor party tail wagging will be more like a rudder for the National-led ship of state in its second term as majority government coalition partner. No wonder the ACT First leaders had drunken grins at Election Night parties.

National won by not losing but, for reasons that may have to do with the MAGA-ification of the party under a slow-moving Christian fundamentalist take-over or perhaps as a way of lancing the boil of incompetence infecting its senior cadres, saw the purge of key secularist members of its ranks in what was basically a “getting rolled by voters” scheme. Why these senior figures allowed themselves to be cornered in electorates where they were exposed, and who advised them to stay there, is unknown to me (and I welcome edification on the matter). But if there is a move rightward within National towards more fundamentalist-influenced “values” and policy, then this election served its purpose (the matter of incompetence remains an open question and will not necessarily be solved by burning in the likes of Simeon Brown to “big boss” positions).

The Greens solidified their claim to being the voice of NZ progressive forces and expanded their base. Te Pati Maori gamed the system the other way from the right-wingers, going for the electorate vote in Maori-heavy electorates where they won 5 out of 7 contested. This consolidates the current leadership and orientation even as it reaffirms their primary status as a separatist party.

LOSERS: The NZ voting public, which in a low turnout contest gave similar numbers of popular votes to the major coalitions (between Left 43> and Right <50 percent of the total of votes cast), but who were outmaneuvered by the clever strategic voting campaign waged by the Rightwing party sponsors. Money and voter ignorance speak loudly, and lack of public awareness about strategic voting schemes and the amount of big money poured into promoting them left the voters in a position of being less agents of their own collective destiny and more pawns in an elite contest to ensure that power was ultimately made to be seen as contestable but in fact was non-transferable.

BIGGEST LOSER: The Labour Party. Although it won more of the popular vote than did National, the MMP framework is not a head-to-head race between major parties and unlike the rightwing strategic gaming, Labour did nothing to counter-balance what was happening out on that side with the party vote (say, by pushing for Green or Opportunity votes at the party level while focusing on electorate seats). In fact it failed to see what the rightwing strategic voting campaign was set up to do until it was too late. Worse yet, the combination of ideological stagnation (clinging to discredited and outmoded Blairite and 3rd Way tropes and shying away from re-affirming a class line of any sort), institutional timidity within the Party apparatus (no one apparently pushed for a a breakthrough policy platform that took advantage of the discontent with National’s arrogant incompetence and ACT and NZ First’s divisive and corrosive brand of MAGA-influenced politics), and individual cowardice (not just by mini-meek Chris Hipkins but his retinue of senior enablers and bootlickers as well), combined to doom its chances. Once again it snatched defeat from the jaws of victory–a victory that was all but handed to them as the default option before voting began –and frittered away its opportunity to close the door on the Ardern era of Labour politics and begin a new chapter out of the ashes of the obviously failed “neoliberal” (the term itself is a leftover relic from three decades ago) and market-driven precepts that have given us the current era of cowboy capitalism, one percenters, income stratification, wealth concentration, reduced tax revenues and public spending and the consequent declines in social services. Like elsewhere in the democratic world, the politics of greed and privilege were ripe for repudiation. Instead, Labour offered to stitch up a velvet glove for that iron fist.

To continue the analogies, Labour argued about the taste of the toppings on the socio-economic pie (maybe try a capital gains tax, but no wealth tax or significant changes to the tax codes) rather than on the distribution and core ingredients of its slices or the reduction in its overall size under the market-driven precepts. It refuses to address root causes but instead fiddled with cosmetic fixes to a model crafted by and for the benefit of capitalists (the propertied classes), not workers (the non-propertied classes). That is the sad fact of the matter. Labour is not a working class party and has ceded its vanguard role to the Greens, who after years of Morris dancing and participating in healing circles have begun to address the bread-and-butter concerns of non-propertied people (i.e., most of us).

That is my short-term impressionist synopsis. Perhaps things will change once special votes are counted at a pace more befitting Niger than New Zealand. But the failure of the election to result in a change of government given the context was ultimately caused by the combination of confusion, complacency and conformity among some voters and political leaders in the face of a well-planned manipulation of the rules as given by monied interests.

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The Iron Law of Oligarchy, revisited.

Of all the lessons learned from the Blue Wave Blowout in the US, an essential one has been largely missed: a political party should not subordinate its fortunes to the thrall of one person, i.e., “the duty of the party is to itself.” This is a core axiom of organisational theory.

The original take on this is from the sociologist Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911), in which he coined the phrase “iron law of oligarchy” to describe the organisational features of successful political parties in democracies. Mutatis mutandis, I have conceptually repurposed here.

The irony is that “vanguardist” parties organised by Lenin-inspired Marxists, Maoists and other “hard” Leftists are the ones who fully embraced Michel’s principles. They understood that in order to reproduce as a political organisation, the Party had to supersede the individual ambitions of the people within it, regardless of the ideological purity that they professed. That is why vanguard parties are in part identified by their regular use of purges and other casting-off or marginalizing measures to curb the enthusiasm for individual independence within the ranks.

The Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping is a good example of this, although the irony is that he is violating the iron law of oligarchy and vanguardist principles by attempting to perpetrate his control over the party rather than the other way around. In other words, he is more like Trump or Kim Jung-un because he desires to turn a complex organization like the CCP into a personalist dictatorship with dynastic pretensions. That violates the iron law of oligarchy but the reason Xi and Kim are able to do so with some success is that they are at the top of authoritarian regimes without the system of institutional checks and balances, electoral openness and representation of interests associated with democracies.

That is where Trump’s admiration for dictators failed him. He failed to realise that what works for them cannot work for him, at least in equal measure, because of the institutional apparatus in which he is inserted. He may rail against the “Deep State” and to an extent he may be correct in that it is the ongoing historical institutions known as free and open elections and their accoutrements that, despite MAGA /GOP efforts to gerrymander and engage in voter suppression and intimidation, proved to be their and his undoing. Perhaps they should have read their copies of Michels’ famous tract more closely because the worse thing that they did, contrary to the wisdom embedded in the iron law of oligarchy (which in spite of its name is not a defense of authoritarianism), was and is to not only ride Trump’s coattails during his first term, but then morph into a cult that transcended politics and become a cultural flash point in his second term.

Interestingly, the organisations that have most assiduously followed Michels’ dictums are labour unions and business associations. There are many reasons for this and a dedicated literature that explains them in detail, so I shall not attempt to do so here. What is relevant here is that in the democratic political realm, many parties such as Labour and National have attempted to adopt types of vanguardist approaches to internal party organization, whereas other like the Greens have tried, with very mixed success, to adopt anti-vanguardist principles when it comes to leadership selection and decision-making. As for others such as Winston First and ACT, the personalist nature of leadership is both their immediate strength and eventual Achilles Heel.

The case against subordinating party fortunes to the fortunes of one person applies to all complex organisations, but in politics it is especially true. Even Obama, Kennedy, Roosevelt or Reagan understood that Party came before person. If we add in the corruption, racism, bigotry, cruelty, vanity and assorted other pathologies contained in the persona known as Trump, then the makings of the 2026 Blue Wave disaster began long before this week. It was only a matter of time before he took the GOP down with him.

Two early signs of this was, first, his purge of “moderate” Republicans from Congress during his first term and during his stint out of office. He used forced resignations and primary election targeting to remove from office all those in the GOP he considered disloyal or not supplicant enough. The second indicator was the drop in Fox News viewership in his second term, which in the last fiscal year fell 27 percent compared to the previous year, which itself was well below the historical average for that network. Trump claims that viewership fell because they started criticising him, but the reality is that his claim is the mirror version of the real reason: it was because of their blanket platforming of his lies and stupidity in the face of deteriorating economic and social conditions caused by his actions that even conservative people stopped watching Fox News.

Now even the freak show talking heads on the network are barking at each other about who is to blame. The larger point is that it is clear that Fox News was transmitting from a different reality–the MAGA bubble, as it were–that ran counter to the lived experiences of his most ardent supporters. And because everything was about him, his administration and GOP supination to MAGA excess on a variety of fronts, both viewers and constituents eventually voted with their eyes and feet. Blue Wave Tuesday was the result.

As an aside it should be mentioned that one of the risks of prioritising personalist loyalty over all other traits is that the effect obeys what I will call Pablo’s Law of Personnel Appointments: “The degree of loyalty is inversely proportional to the level of competence of the individual involved.” With a retinue of grossly incompetent yes-people, grifters, opportunists and charlatans surrounding him (including in the media), Trump’s violation of Michels’ axiom and Pablo’s Law have become fatally egregious for the GOP.

Now the knives are coming out within the GOP. The sharks sense blood in the water. The rats are looking to jump ship. The fleas are leaving the dog. The roaches are running for cover. Think of scum like JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, who went all-in with Trump and Trumpist cruelty in the midterm campaigns. Or Ken Paxton and Greg Abbot in Texas, two Trump toadies now looking for honest jobs that they are singularly unsuited to hold. Or closet Queen Mike Johnson, yesterday the Speaker of the House, tomorrow just another bum in seat on the GOP side of the aisle and soon likely to be out of politics altogether. Or, speaking of closet Queens, Lindsey Graham, who even in death is now being brutally outed as the hypocrite that he was in service of his Trump master and whose sister became a living symbol of political nepotism at its finest (and Pablo’s Law). Then there is the low-hanging impeachment fruit waiting to be picked: Hegseth, JFK Jr., Sean Duffy and others. It is only a matter of time before the floodgates open and the moment of serious reckoning begins.

In the end, for all of the talk about the Iran War, gas prices, candidate quality and reverse coattail effects, along with the changing voter demographic (younger, browner, more secular and cosmopolitan than 20 years ago) and the old saying about “its the economy, stupid,” the truth of the Michels dictum remains above all other lessons learned.

From that comes a pretty straightforward prescription for political success in democracies: parties need to first read the electoral demographic terrain, then factor in as a priority economic conditions translated as wallet concerns in that demographic, and apply iron law of oligarchy principles to their campaigns and policy objectives given the ideological bases that they adhere to and the institutional frameworks in which they operate.

For the MAGA/GOP during his second term so far, Trump’s overwhelming presence ensures that no such prescriptions are considered. Perhaps that will now change.

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End of a Political Septic Fever.

In the interest of transparency, here is another quick take from my other social media accounts.

I do not know about the rest of you, but I feel as if a septic fever is about to break in the US (and perhaps in NZ, although the latter is not yet as severe). The boil gets lanced today, the MAGA purulence oozes away over the next couple of years, the body politic begins to gradually clear its system of residual pustulent agents, and like a deeply embedded rusty nail, the largest source of the infectious rot known as MAGA is removed in 2028.

This is more than a Blue Wave moment. It is the beginning of a Blue Biospleen cleansing (https://hms.harvard.edu/news/blood-cleanser-sepsis) of the US body politic. One can only hope that the same happens in Aotearoa, beginning with a strong dose of anti-rightwing election virals on November 7.

Let’s get the treatment going!

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When “secular communions” become contested.

I may have said this on previous occasions, but the Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi remarked about the foundational election after Pinochet was voted out of the presidency by referendum in 1989 that democratic elections were a type of “secular communion” between the people and political leaders of a nation. Elections are both a ritual and an agent of change or reaffirmation as well as an indicator of public satisfaction with current political policy and socioeconomic affairs. In 1989 Chileans voted to say enough of the military dictatorship and welcome to a democratic government led by a Christian Democrat, Patricio Alwyn.

If Tironi’s remark is true, then I have been lucky to have received communion twice in recent weeks. Last Friday I received notification that my ballot was accepted by the Palm Beach County Board of Elections for the November 3 US midterms. Today my wife and I went down to our son’s soccer club, which doubles as a polling station, and voted in NZ’s general election. In both cases I voted for progress, enlightenment and fairness over the forces of darkness, division and evil.

In Europe, Hungary and Serbia have undergone electoral shifts to the Left after years of rightwing, increasingly authoritarian rule. Brazil re-elected left-leaning Lula in the face of overt interference by Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in favour of the neo-imperialist son of a seditionist former president with ties to organised crime. In NZ the race is tight between a Labour/Green-led coalition and the incumbent MAGA mini-me’s. Tomorrow Israel votes on whether Netanyahu and his genocidal cohort should stay or go. And then a week from today the US decides whether the MAGA experiment is working or not in making “America Great Again.”

I don’t know about you, but I sense that change is in the air.

Because of that, for the first time in a while I feel pleased about participating in these secular communion rituals. I sure do hope that they make a positive difference this time around.

Casting my NZ vote today also gave me pause to reflect more broadly.

Generally speaking, there are two types of democratic elections: 1) the tension-release model; and 2) the contention model. In stable democracies and historically in the West, the tension-release model predominated: campaigns built up voter enthusiasm, elections were held, results were announced, people accepted them and returned to their routines. Institutional continuity prevailed and political stability ensued.

In contrast, many recent democratic elections have been of the contested sort: campaigns are divisive and polarising, elections are viewed with suspicion and bitterly disputed, results are not accepted in defeat. Institutional legitimacy and continuity are challenged and political stability is threatened.

This leans closer to civil war than stable governance, something that should be of concern to all of us. Ironically, both of these models derive from historical analyses of social revolutions (a scholar by the name of Charles Tilly in particular), so draw your own conclusions about what the move from one to the other implies.

Remember that the hallmark of democratic elections is that all contenders agree to play by the same set of rules and losers accept defeat in exchange for getting to “play” again at specified, institutionally guaranteed intervals. Once that basic premise is disputed, then the very procedures of democracy (as supposedly neutral arbiters of electoral competition) are undermined. Once those are undermined, then, as I mentioned in the previous post, the threshold of mass contingent consent may be crossed, with the latter withdrawn and the political future made more uncertain than what is already embedded in any electoral contest.

At that point Tilly’s original analyses comes into play.

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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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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.