Category: elections

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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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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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Regime transition sequencing.

I was reading a recent article in which the author wrote that the US has actually made the transition to democracy in Venezuela more difficult than it could have been by removing Nicolas Maduro and his wife from the country but leaving the rest of his regime intact. In the author’s words, “they took the dictator but left the dictatorship.” He went on to write that the usual order of things is to embark on a political regime transition (presumably to democracy if the starting point is authoritarian) followed by an economic regime transition (say, in simplistic terms, from communism to capitalism) or at least significant economic reform. In Venezuela’s case, the US has pushed for US-investor friendly economic reforms in the extractive industrial sector but left the Bolivarian regime otherwise intact and has not bothered with broader economic reforms that promote market diversification, income redistribution, decreased dependence on primary good exports (including but moving beyond petroleum), and more value-added domestic commodity and service production.

That got me to thinking about one major theme of the first generation regime transition literature of the (late) 1970s-1980s, which focused on the transition from democracy to authoritarianism in Europe, East Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s and then the transitions form authoritarianism to democracy in the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. One theme that emerged was the sequence by which regime transitions occurred. We might call it a type of “chicken or egg” question.

Some argued that what was needed first for democracy to obtain was an economic transition from state-centric (e.g., Keynesian welfare or socialist) to free market models, which was believed would promote the civic freedoms needed for democracy to emerge as the corresponding political form (this was grounded in what was known as “modernisation theory,” which was a 1950s-era prescription for overcoming underdevelopment in the “Third World”). That was the “egg” answer, which was used as one justification for the US support for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. As with original modernization theory, the underpinning syllogism proved incorrect.

Instead, both in the PRC and in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) as of the 1990s, communist party leaders engineered the move from a state-controlled command economy marshalled along what might be described as Stalinist or Maoist lines to a state capitalist economy in which investment and production was incrementally opened to private (including foreign) investment while the State controlled overall economic management decision-making and kept a stake in specific productive assets (e.g., telecommunications in both instances).

In effect, capitalism came but democracy did not. In both the PRC and SRV change occurred within the political regime, not of it, regardless of economic change. Communist Parties still control both countries and staff the leadership of the State. Their respective leadership architectures and other partial regimes within the larger whole have been subjected to reforms of various magnitudes, including those deemed required to accommodate the economic changes undertaken by the national political leaderships in question. The same is true, in another variation on the theme, in Singapore under the PAP regime: the overall regime remains and reforms (in Singapore’s case by “liberalising” when it comes to political and civil rights without giving up ultimate authority) while the economy changes (from post-colonial trading to techno-finance capitalism). In other words, rather than a transitional sequence, in some instances economic change can occur under the aegis of a stable political regime (at least if it is authoritarian).

Others have disagreed with the economic–>political change thesis, noting that political regime change was required before economic regime change could happen because economic policy is ultimately a political choice made by regime leaders. This is the “chicken” answer. The 1948 Chinese, 1959 Cuban and 1979 Nicaraguan revolutions are considered emblematic in this regard.

In both types of sequence, the key issue is one of parametric change: the boundaries of political and economic life are fundamentally altered as a result of the major institutional changes that define regime transition as a social phenomenon no matter which way the chain of causality proceeds.

Among other subtopics, one part of the debate about regime transitions in the 1980s centred on the preferred “regime change sequence” leading to democratisation. It was a simple, perhaps crude measure, but it had the virtue of forcing scholars and policy practitioners to address the linkage between political change and economic development and reform rather than just one or the other. It also broadened the “chicken or egg” question with regard to the linkage between economic development and political regimes, Was there a correlation or causal relationship between specific regime types and certain levels of development? If so, in which direction and of what specific type in both categories? Capitalist to socialist, socialist to capitalist or somewhere in between? Authoritarian to democratic or democratic to authoritarian and if the latter, what type of authoritarian? The possibilities of political-economic regime change are not as straight forward as might seem at first glance.

There is a third type of regime change that is also theoretically possible> It is simultaneous rather than sequential in nature. This is a situation where economic and political regime change occurred simultaneously, as part and parcel of the same transitional dynamic. This alternative was particularly of interest to students of the fall of the USSR and Eastern bloc regimes grouped in the Warsaw Pact as well as of the revolutionary transitions such as that of Nicaragua and Iran in 1979. In the former the hope was they would transition to both democracy and capitalism in short periods of time. In the latter the expectation was that with revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, socialism as an economic model could be rapidly imposed. The 1979 Iranian revolution represented a variant on that model, with many hoping that the post-Reza Pahlavi regime would be a theocratic democracy wedded to an Islamic market economy rooted in traditional Bazaari social relations of production.

Sadly, in both instances the 1979 revolutions eventually brought economic changes, but under a different type of authoritarianism than what existed before rather than the democracy that was promised. This may have been partially a product of the hostile reaction and pressure placed on the revolutionary regimes by the US and other Western states, but the fact is that be they simultaneous or sequential, the 1979 revolutionary regimes delivered something different than what was hoped (and fought) for.

The simultaneous transition possibility was also considered in the rise of Hugo Chavez and Bolivarianism in Venezuela in 1979 via electoral means, which presumably would have paved the way for a peaceful revolutionary change towards popular democracy and socialism, much in the way hope was previously raised along the same lines by the 1970 election of Salvador Allende in Chile. Alas, neither expectation was met: Allende was overthrown and killed in 1973 by a US-backed military coup d’état supported by rightwing forces while Chavez and his successor Maduro descended into authoritarian-kleptocratic rule culminating in the US military kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader in January of this year. As the author mentioned at the beginning of this post noted, the Venezuelan political leader has been forcibly removed but the regime has not.

As for former Soviet states, the record is very mixed. Russia has reverted to authoritarianism with a state capitalist/oligarchical hybrid economic model grounded in fossil fuel extraction and modernised Soviet-era industrial production.. Some former Warsaw Pact states have gone both democratic and (mostly) market capitalist. Others have gone autocratic and state capitalist/kleptocratic. Some have gravitated towards the European Union and even NATO. Others have remained within the Russian orbit on both political and economic grounds. This is especially true for Central Asian former Soviet republics (the so-called “Stans”), which have not undergone appreciable political regime change except to use elections as legitimation devices while economic control of extraction-based primary good production remains in the hands of nepotistic political elites and politically-connected interests.

It can be argued that simultaneous regime transitions cannot happen simply because of the turmoil and complexities involved in attempting to manage profound political and economic changes all at once. The cases cited above support that view regardless of what eventuated after the old political regime was displaced or the economic model substantially altered. But the issue of transitional sequencing remains an important one, not just conceptually but also as a matter of policy practice, especially if the goal is to restore or revive democratic governance.

As an example, my stay in the Pentagon in the early 1990s was based on a successful fellowship application that was centred on a proposal on how to democratise civil-military relations in post-authoritarian Latin America. I had noticed the difficulty with which new civilian elected governments were coping with entrenched authoritarian traditions in the (sometimes Prussian) military cultures of several Latin American nations, and so outlined in the fellowship proposal ways in which US non-lethal military aid, weapons sales and peer-to-peer training programs, coupled with legal and normative changes to the institutional relationships between the armed forces and civilian government, might help “democratise” the relations between political leaders and the military hierarchies of the time.

This was just one part of the political regime transition from dictatorship to democracy in that region–what was called “partial regime change,” where the sum of a number of reforms in the constituent parts of an electoral democracy (civil rights, election procedures, interest group intermediation systems, inter-agency accountability, policing authority, budget-setting agendas, federal-state relations, and even the relationship between civilian and military authorities)–were reformed, reconstituted or revitalised with the purpose being to provide institutional underpinnings that would support, then sustain and eventually reproduce democratic governance structures.

Again, the results were mixed but for the most part I am pleased to see that in places like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, the changes that my colleagues and I proposed seem to have stuck.

Getting back to the subject of Venezuela and now the attempt at forced regime change by the US in Iran, the folly of the move becomes clearer (as if it was not already). Not only were the “decapitation” strikes simply instances of state-sanctioned murder (by proxy, since the Israelis did the actual bombing of targeted leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei), the Islamic regime and its constituent partial regimes remain intact, albeit with a stronger military influence replacing a weakened clerical caste headed by Khamenei’s badly injured son Mojtaba (something that is more the result of Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) dissatisfaction with the cleric’s enforcement of theocratic social policy prior to the US/Israeli attacks rather than the US/Israeli strikes themselves). If anything, what political regime change might be underway is, by several accounts, one from a theocratic to a military-dominated regime, conveniently reinforced by the foreign aggression waged upon Iranian society.

Lines of succession, promotion, policy and operational authority remain in place. So do the underlying civic structures, including the Bazaari social networks that even if now in opposition to most of the hard-line elements in the regime, remain fiercely anti-Western and Persian nationalist in orientation. In other words, the partial regime mosaic that when taken together constitutes the institutional edifice of the Islamic regime continues in place and functioning. Like in Venezuela, some former leaders are gone (dead) but the regime remains even as it evolves from within. Nor has the economy changed–although porous sanctions and the Revolutionary Guard toll booth blockade of the Hormuz Straits has strengthened the Islamic Republic regime’s control over it.

In effect, we have seen leadership change without regime change, little significant economic change other than a shift in beneficiaries in the Venezuelan case, and no real transitional sequence at all. This demonstrates the shallowness of what passes in the US for strategic thinking, comparative political analysis and foreign country expertise, to say nothing of the ahistorical ignorance of the MAGA elites in and outside of government who enable and support US foreign adventurism under Trump.

In fact, it might do well for scholars, politicians and economic interests alike to return to that literature on authoritarian regime demise to develop a US-focused idiosyncratic conceptual and practical framework for studying the late stage dynamics of the second MAGA administration. Because it is quite feasible that its demise will more resemble that of dictatorial collapse rather than that of democratic decline even if certain electoral trappings and procedural niceties cloak the entire process. The question for the US then is: if the transitional sequence begins with political change away from MAGA, will it a) result in its elimination from political society? and b) what if any economic and other partial regime reforms will come from the anti-MAGA political change if it occurs?

Without both, regime (or at least government) change in the US away from what exists today will not happen. Depending on one’s perspective, that may or may not be a good thing.

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A return to darkness.

In 1994 I was the lead author of the US National Security Strategy for the Western Hemisphere (in reality, the region below the US-Mexico border and adjacent waters). In that section of the Annual US National Security Strategy Report (which covers the entire globe), my colleagues and I focused on regional democracy promotion and cooperative security arrangements after years of authoritarianism and internal conflicts in Latin America, focusing on civil-military relations, conflict resolution and non-traditional security concerns like environmental degradation, drug production and so-called “human security” issues (e.g. poverty alleviation) that could be mitigated via international military assistance and cooperation programs. That section, as with other regions around the globe, was written with input from various other foreign policy agencies, including the intelligence community, State Department, NSC, Treasury, Customs and Immigration and various service branches, although the Office of the Secretary of Defense compiled and published the report under the Department of Defense banner.

An underlying premise of our work at that time was to try to end the history of US military and grey are/covert (and obsessive anti-communist) interventionism in the region, in particular by deliberately ignoring the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and 1904 Roosevelt Corollary that saw Latin America as the US “backyard” where it played the role of regional policeman via Gunboat Diplomacy and other Big Stick means.

It is therefore with profound alarm that I read that the 2025 US National Security Strategy for the Western Hemisphere explicitly bases itself on the Monroe Doctrine (which is neither a Treaty or sanctioned by international law), and adds a “Trump Corollary” to the Roosevelt Corollary. The Trump Corollary states that the US is the determinant of Latin American fortunes rather than these stemming from the sovereign exercise of a Latin American country’s free will.

Implicit in this strategy is the notion that the US will and can intervene I the internal affairs of Latin American states. It’s interventionism is not guided by support for democracy and/or opposition to autocracy. That is irrelevant to the new US strategic calculus. What matters is the age-old geopolitical concern with having “friendly” and pro-US regimes installed in and foreign competitions pushed out so that the US (or better said, Trump-connected interests) can maximise regional opportunities of an economic and political sort.

The 2025 National Security Strategy for the Western Hemisphere is an outright claim to unilateral US imperialist interventionism. Seen in that light, it  frames recent US actions in the region in sharper (and darker) relief and explains its recent meddling in the internal affairs of places like Argentina, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela as component parts of this new (neo) imperialist strategy.

That augers poorly for regional peace and security. The PRC is now the leading trade and investment partner of several LATAM countries and is unwilling to surrender its interests to the US (or better said, Trump-aligned economic interests). It has a satellite tracking facility in Argentine Patagonia and is heavily involved in port management in several countries (including a newly opened container processing port facility and transportation hub in Peru, the largest of its kind in Latin America). It is deeply involved in resource extraction and infrastructure development throughout the region. This is the type of soft power influence that the US used to wield, but which is now being replaced by crony capitalism, election meddling and Gunboat Diplomacy. Although there is much to dislike about its approach, the PRC “does business” with Latin Americans as partners and sovereign equals. The US rattles sabres and extra-judicially kills Latin American civilians under pretexts, regarding its Southern neighbours as nothing more than assorted lawn furniture that can be arranged at will or whimsey.

At some point push may come to shove. The US currently has the strategic advantage over the PRC and other extra-regional competitors, but they may only be temporary as the MAGA administration hollows out the federal government and sows partisan political and social division within US society. In a weird sense, the US could wind up like the USSR at the end of the Cold War: a bloated military machine standing on a fractured society and skewed oligarchical economy where the interests of a connected  few prevail over the needs of the many.

Whatever happens, born of ignorance and hubris, this year’s US National Security Strategy is a retrograde turn in its relations with its Latin American neighbours.

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Mamdani’s monster move.

The shouting about communist/socialist/Marxist/Islamist by the US Right when it comes to Zohran Mamdani suggests they live in a 1950s McCarthyite time warp and/or an ideological ignorance bubble. Besides a social democratic being none of the above, the operative term in the phrase is “democratic.” He was elected in a landslide on a working class focused platform that was well known and well received across the electoral demographic (age, gender, religion race, etc.)”. Although the Right did its dishonest best to smear him with the usual culture wars and “Reds under the beds” fear-mongering, it may be the case that after years of corrupt NYC machine politics-as-usual that catered to the interests of the corporate and oligarchical classes, voters are willing to try something new. 

“New” means a move to the center-Left. Mamdani is no radical extremist no matter what the rabid Right mouth-frothers say about him. NYC has never had a social democratic mayor and given what has come before, especially recently, perhaps voters decided to not listen to the troglodytes and try something different when it comes to a governance approach.

Mamdani still has to deal with a city council, borough governments, state government and people within his own party who will force him to compromise in order to be effective. But shifting the starting point to the policy Left after years of the city government maintaining a corporate-Right bias could just break the hold of embedded vested interests when it comes to how the public purse is distributed. That can only be a good thing, especially if working and middle class socio-economic wellbeing is a major focus.

Best of all, even if NYC is not representative of the entire nation (far from it), Mamdani is an absolute nightmare for the MAGA morons in and out of government at all levels. That is because should he be successful and cast his eyes an even higher federal office, there is bound to be a lot of bed-wetting in Red States and in red parts of DC as a result.

That should be fun to watch.

On a personal note, the rightwing hysteria about Mamdani’s “Marxism” brought back memories of when I underwent my first Top Secret US security clearance interview and polygraph test (in the early 1990s). I was asked if I had ever been a member of a Communist Party or advocated for the overthrow of the US government. Although I had affiliations with left-wing groups in Argentina and then elsewhere as a teenager and young adult, I could honestly say that I was never a member of any Communist Party (basically because most CPs of that era were pro-soviet Stalinists and I was and am not into Stalinists). I could also honestly say that I did not advocate the overthrow of the US government, although I certainly advocated for the overthrow of US client dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere.

So I said “no” to both questions and passed that part of the exam. In the long form interview I explained to my interviewers from the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) that I was a Peronist symnpathizer-turned-neo-Gramscian analytic Marxist whose political sympathies tended towards what was then called the “Eurocommunist” line. I tried to be helpful and told them that they should try to be more specific in their questioning, since there were significant differences between Maoists, Leninists, Trotskyites and other Marxist derivatives. In response (and I kid you not, dear readers), the interviewers literally rolled their eyes, looked at each other, shook their heads and mouthed the letters “W-T-F?” After a long pause, the lead guy said to me “we do not care whatever you were and are so long as you are not a commie.” That was the state of play when it came to official Defence Department understanding of Marxism in the year Bill Clinton came to office.

They then moved on to ask me if I “liked” men. What ensued was an interesting discussion about the meaning of “liking men” and in what context. Their basic line was that they did not care whether I “liked men” or not, but that they simply had to know in the event that I was blackmailed given my new job. My then Navy Officer girlfriend was highly amused by this when I told her about the interview and offered to vouch for my, er, “proclivities.”

Anyway, I passed the test and headed off to the Pentagon with my clearance secured. I met a fair amount of closet commies and man-likers once there.

Mamdani was not among them.