Category: identity

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The threshold of consent.

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is happening in many contemporary democracies may in fact be that moment, the moment where mass contingent consent is withdrawn and people cast their gaze over the “valley of transition” between the extant order and whatever comes next.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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Something on early life reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Media Link: “A View from Afar” on Systemic Change.

Selwyn Manning and I discussed some of the things that I have been thinking about recently in today’s podcast. I have written about these themes on these pages but this video format allows Selwyn to get his two cents in and expand the discussion. I hope that you find it of interest.

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An analogy and an axiom.

Some words to the wise.

Analogy: Trump’s war against Iran might be the geopolitical equivalent of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. Built on arrogance born of easy bullying in lesser conflicts, he has overestimated his capabilities and grossly underestimated his opponent. Iran may be Trump’s Sitting Bull, but the analogy holds only if Custer had a malevolent manipulator like Netanyahu leading him to his ignominious comeuppance.

Axiom: History shows that the side that prevails in war is not always the one that can deliver greater punishment to the adversary but the one that can absorb the most punishment and keep on fighting. Superior weapons do not always overcome determination and will.

Remember that “asymmetrical warfare” does not only refer to differences in weapons capabilities, kinetic mass and quality of forces brought into battle. It also refers to the motives and commitment that adversaries bring to the fight.

The US is an instant gratification, short attention span culture with a low social pain threshold and technology fetish, especially when it comes to gadgets, weapons and war-fighting (which feeds into the other cultural traits). Iran is the birthplace and seat of a 6000 year old Persian culture that invented chess and carpet weaving. Both of these endeavors require consummate patience, perseverance, imagination, complex multidimensional thought and extended foresight that sees the “play” several moves ahead of the current moment. At the behest of an international pariah client-state partner unable to “go it alone,” the US has launched an opportunistic expeditionary war of aggression against Iran during a midterm election year. Iran is fighting an existential defensive war of attrition in and from its ancestral homeland against the US and its regional (including Arab) allies, including the pariah state.

Given these differences, the axiom could well explain the analogy.

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Some comments on NZ politics.

I had some time on my hands the past few days so spent more attention than usual consuming news about NZ domestic politics. My interests tend to lie further afield, but recent government assaults on Maori rights, women’s pay equity, constitutional neutrality, environmental, health and safety regulations, equitable taxation policy, state sector employment, Labour’s pandemic response and assorted other lesser insults have drawn me, perhaps like a moth to flame, to seek some illumination on the local political scene. These are a few tidbits that I took away this week., translated into social media posts.

  1. Chloe Swarbrick’s remarks about the government’s cowardice on the issue of Palestinian statehood in the wake of Israeli actions in Gaza.:

First all, Swarbrick is correct. If only six coalition MPs had some moral-ethical courage, then NZ could join the majority of the international community, including three of the 5 Eyes partners, in condemning Israel’s collective punishment of all Palestinians for the sins of Hamas on October 7, 2023, including the IDF’s use of ethnic cleansing and mass starvation as a means to that end. For that she was told to apologise by the Speaker (and National MP) for using the phrase “if six…members had a spine” and when she did not, ordered to leave the debating chamber. and later “named.” This is my comment on social media: “Peters, Jones and Seymour voice ugly boorish insults against their opponents (including racist taunts) and are allowed to remain in the House. Swarbrick correctly points out the spineless behaviour of government MPs regarding Gaza and gets thrown out. So much for Speaker impartiality” (referencing routine remarks made by the NZ First and Act leaders).

Also, as an aside to the particulars of this case, I should note that in light of prior history by Brownlee and other conservative MPs when it comes to progressive female members, there is a whiff of misogyny in the ruling. As a relative said to me (paraphrased here), male MPs can be loud, rude, condescending and bombastic when speaking to the House, but women cannot get angry or raise their voices even in defense of universal values. Now, I realise that Brownlee fashions himself as “old school” when it comes to parliamentary ethics and protocols, but if these boy’s club unwritten rules are part of the “old school” way of doing parliamentary politics, I say that he and others of his ilk need to be woken from their Rip Van Winkle stupor and shown the door.

By way of a broader backdrop, we should be clear that for all of its talk about foreign policy independence and having stood up to the US and its Anglophone allies with the 1985 non-nuclear declaration, NZ is a diplomatic follower, not a leader. It waits until other States make a move or show initiative on sticky international issues or events, then coattails on whatever seems most beneficial over the short-term. It pays lip service to international rules and norms but sniffs the wind when foreign policy smoke is in the air.

This syndrome has been accentuated in recent decades, particularly by National-led governments, and is now at rock bottom when it comes to NZ supination to other’s interests. The governing coalition’s current lack of resolve when it comes to denouncing the Palestinian catastrophe and upholding the right to Palestinian self-determination can be attributed to slavish obsequiousness to the US (Trump) position on the matter, perhaps abetted by the influence of the NZ Israeli lobby. Whatever ulterior ends the coalition of chaos may think that this approach may serve vis a vis the bilateral relationship with the US, they are sorely mistaken. NZ is just another squirrel looking for that elusive US nut.

2) On the decision to remove Maori words from schoolbooks :

I wrote “a main tool of cultural erasure is to remove all public references in a language other than that of the dominant social group. The CCP does it to the Uyghurs in the PRC. The excuse for doing so is usually to promote assimilation and social cohesion. The real motive is darker.”

I could go on about the attempts to erase indigenous languages and dialects in the public sphere is a host of places, particularly in Latin America, the region I am most familiar with, but also in Canada, the US, Africa and parts of the Pacific. The practice was so common in the colonial past that some linguists have written about the cultural genocide that follows erasing of a native language. When ti comes to identity and cultural preservation, language (and words) matter.

What is also remarkable is that it is well accepted that, rather than “confusing” in the Education Minister’s words, learning other languages at an early age promotes brain development and complex thought. Defending the removal of Maori words from children’s books is therefore doubly retrograde: it is the first step of an attempt at cultural erasure (at least in the public space), bookending similar attempts to remove te reo from public buildings and signage; and it is counter-productive (and counter-factual) as a pedagogical approach. Shame on Erica Stanford and her acolytes! And if a few Maori words are confusing, why not remove all non-English words from school books? Sacre bleu!

3) On the refusal of former Labour Ministers to front up to a public hearing of the Royal Common of Inquiry into the Pandemic Response:

“Why front up to a kangaroo court when the kangaroo judges are the political opposition? Especially after providing written answers to documented questions supplied by the kangaroos about events long in the public domain? Smacks of an ex-post political beat-up best avoided.” The fact that the Inquiry was instigated by ACT and NZ First as a partisan bludgeon after listening to conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers appears lost on the corporate media (partisan media like Plunket, Bridges and Hoskings just megaphone the anti-Labour lines). In fact, Labour should be pushing back harder at the political instigators, for example by questioning how they came to get involved in the witch hunt after actively supporting Labour’s pandemic response at the time, and who feeds them their talking points.

4) On a serving NZDF member is standing trial for espionage.

“The espionage charge against a serving NZ soldier is remarkable. The defendant is accused of working for, at the behest, or on behalf of a foreign State. Many questions arise from soldier’s court martial/trial. 1st: Which State? 2nd: what motive(s)? 3rd: what was compromised?”

Charging an active duty NZDF member with spying is remarkable because that charge–espionage– is only brought if the accused is suspected of working as a covert foreign agent. It does not refer to any domestic interlocutor., patron or client. I seem to recall at the time of the arrest that the soldier was detained for having objectionable material, presumably extremist literature (the military does not court martial people for having porn unless it is of the illegal variety). The soldier was also said to have links to right wing white supremacist groups. So it would be premature and very possibly wrong to finger the PRC as the puppet master (as the usual suspect). Given its other dark activities in NZ, Russia is a possibility. Or some other State. What should be clear is that it would not be an ally of the NZDF like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France or other countries that routinely share higher-level intelligence with the NZDF (say, on operations, deployments, capabilities and tactics) that the soldier could not easily access unless s/he was in a military intelligence billet.

There could be a mix of motives involved, including money, sex and ideology. The counter-intelligence aspects of uncovering the suspected spy are also worth considering. In that light the trial should be interesting and revelatory, assuming that coverage is not effectively shut down for reasons of national security (yeah, right).

Should it be your inclination, feel free to weigh in within the KP rules of discourse.







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The Green’s Identity Bubble Problem.

The scurrilous attacks on Benjamin Doyle, a list Green MP, over his supposed inappropriate behaviour towards children has dominated headlines and social media this past week, led by frothing Rightwing agitators clutching their pearls and fanning the flames of moral panic over pedophiles and and perverts. Winston Peter decided that it would be good to amplify the defamatory claims from his perch as Deputy Prime Minister and Party Leader, relying on rhetorical questions (where is the media?) and innuendo to megaphone the venomous narrative while avoiding legal liability for defamation. The pile-on is despicable.

Besides the obvious partisan basis for the attacks on Doyle and the Green Party co-leaders for defending (in somewhat pedantic and condescending terms) their colleague, the Rightwinger’s alarm about what I will call “the kiss”–a chaste lip-to-lip “smooch” between father and very young son–betrays deep-seated heterosexual repression that is Barry Crump-ish in nature. It avoids the fact that in many cultures men kiss their children on the lips well into pubescence and that men and boys hug and kiss each other and even hold hands in public. I grew up in Argentina, and if one looks at how the World Cup champions celebrate their victories you will see a lot of male kissing and father-child lip-kissing going on and no-one thinks to impute untoward sexual intent to any of it. Not all countries are populated by repressed, insecure, heterosexual misogynistic transphobes.

The attacks on Doyle also could well be linked to the ongoing smears levelled against Golriz Ghahraman, the former Green MP who was convicted for shoplifting after an intense months-long public vilification campaign carried out in and echoed by the media and led by notorious Dirty Politics-adjacent actors. It turns out that Ghahraman’s brief detention in a supermarket earlier this year in what was initially described as another shop-lifing attempt was in fact an orchestrated set-up by malicious security guards with dubious connections to the police and social media personalities. The whole thing was a beat up, as are the Doyle accusations, done in part by the same crowd of Rightwing “usual suspects.” Truth be told, the guys–always guys–who disparage her the most seem to be the type of guys that she is not interested in, especially middle aged to elderly Pakeha male public figures. In summary: they hate her because she will never have them (and who knows how many have tried? Someone should ask Sean Plunkett or David Seymour about that because they carry on about her like spurned suitors).

That having been said, the Greens do have a big problem, and it is not just the non-conformist (some would say “weird” or “odd”) lifestyles of some of their members. It is not about their Morris dancing or their lifestyles per se, but about who they select and the way in which they get into parliament. As my former colleague here at KP Lew and other have written on social media in the past few days, the Greens problem is one of candidate vetting, not candidate lifestyles. In fact, I mentioned this concern previously ( a decade or so ago!) when Haley Holt of television fame was placed on the candidate list in a top ten spot. She did not get elected or make list selection due to the Green Party vote that year, but in retrospect she looks positively middle-of-the-road when compared to some of her recent successors!

As I see it, the Greens spend too much time living in an alternative identity bubble, trying to tick as many rainbow and alternative lifestyle boxes as is possible (Doyle claims to be a “pansexual,” something that can lead to many interpretations and in the case of the Right-wingers, the worst possible ones. He confirmed their worst thoughts by using language with sexual undertones in his private social media posts that included the photos of his son). I have heard that they wanted to add polyamory to their electoral platforms, which even Barry Crump may have found a bit rich if he was not in charge of the action. These are not the types of candidate and policy that appeal to the voting majority, and even under MMP that matters for coalition-building purposes.

To be clear: being “odd,” “weird” or “alternative” is not a crime and should not be treated as such (as happened with Doyle). But having those traits can prove detrimental to the Party’s overall fortunes, especially when opponents seize on them to hype their “deviancy” and other supposed criminal behaviour. In the words of the late French sociologist Robert Michels (in a book titled Political Parties), the first duty of an organization is to protect itself.

After all, being transgressive is not always a virtue in politics, especially in an era where culture wars about alternative lifestyles and non-conformity to “traditional” social norms is a cornerstone of Rightwing political agendas. In such an ideological climate, perhaps it is better to put other (non-identity based) policy concerns before identity (and here I respect the Greens stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which from a social justice standpoint is well within their purview even it opens them to charges of anti-Semitism either directly or via association while other parties equivocate and quibble about NZ’s position).

The Greens seem to have moved from being an environmental party with a social-democratic policy agenda under Jeanette Fitzsimmons, Sue Bradford, Keith Locke and Ron Donald to keffiyeh-wearing alternative social justice urbanite identitarians who, from an outside-the-beltway perspective such as mine, occasionally hug a tree, stop a logging truck or swim around like dolphins in sheltered coves before re-assembling at the nearest barista shop for mocha latte soy milk cappuccino-fueled social policy strategy sessions with other black-clad or tie-dyed and multi-pierced plural pronoun individuals who think very highly of themselves and stay up way too late at night, to the point that their countenances are as parlous as their personalities.

I am joking of course, and one hopes that the woke can take a joke on this one. Because this piss-take is not equivalent to the hate-speech supporting sociopaths in the Free Speech Union. The joke is not about letting harm be done to the multiple varieties of identitarians; it is about goofing on their self-absorbed lack of serious purpose and self-awareness, and why this does not make for good candidate and policy selection.

I do so in order to make a point. The Greens were episodically effective when they were watermelons–red on the inside and green on the outside. They were fairly effective as “teals”–blue on the inside and green on the outside. But other than people like Chloe Swarbrick, who is in fact a smart and effective politician, and perhaps Steve Abel as an environmental purist, the Green Party has become a hodgepodge of virtue signalling identitarian grievance and defence. It is increasingly not relatable to anything other than those in their identity bubbles and while individuals like Swarbrick may be able to carry the party on her election coattails, they appear to be enmeshed in a self-inflicted political death spiral due to the character of their caucus. Think of the MPs that the Greens have lost in recent years outside of the electoral cycle and who they have been replaced with. Think of the dramas associated with these departures and the behaviour of some of those still sitting on their benches. With some exceptions, they come across as unserious people pursuing unpopular agendas. No wonder they are seen as easy pickings for bullying political hyenas like Peters and Shane Jones.

Contrast that with Te Pati Maori (TPM). Whatever you want to say about them, TPM clearly know how to vet and select people who conform to their unified policy agenda. Their agenda may seem like a lot of symbolic politics without substance and with some buffoonery thrown in, and there may be some dodgy connections between them and people like John Tamihere and his Waipareira Trust (sort of along the lines of ACT and the tobacco lobby or NZ1st and the fishing and mining lobbies) but two things stand out in contrast to the Greens: 1) the TPM “bubble” is activist and united at its ethnic and ideological core (including a class line), not an disparate assortment of identitarians representing different socially marginalised groups; 2) party discipline is strong. The feet follow the head and the head knows what the feet are doing in the long march ahead.

It will be interesting to see how the Greens do in the next elections. I have a feeling that the gains that they have made in recent years will be reversed even if a Labour-led coalition is elected. I am also curious to see how TPM does, because it seems to be targeting Labour’s left and Maori flanks with its more militant and confrontational appeals. For the moment, however, and again repudiating the reprehensible attacks on Doyle, Ghahraman, Tamatha Paul and Ricardo Mendez-March (the latter for for being foreign-born), the main problem for the Green Party is that it is self-inflicted because of a lack of proper candidate selection criteria and process as well as candidate education as to what is expected of them (including their use of social media and other aspects of their personal behaviour) and how they will be treated by their opponents and media.

Benjamin Doyle haș gone to ground under an apparent barrage of death threats and has suspended the social media account that led to them. But such after-the-fact actions do not remedy what was an avoidable controversy in the first place. All that was needed was some good sense, a modicum of decorum, and a candidate selection process that is based not so much on ticking off identity boxes as it is about electing and/or listing serious people with a common policy agenda that transcends post-modern identity politics while retaining a common social justice focus that is centred in and on environmental politics with a (waged) class orientation.

After all, as the saying goes, politics is the art of the possible. What the Greens have been doing as of late is quite the opposite.

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Political societies and economic preferences.

Much discussion has been held over the Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB), the latest in a series of rightwing attempts to enshrine into law pro-market precepts such as the primacy of private property ownership. Underneath the good governance and economic efficiency gobbledegook language of the Bill is a desire to strip back regulations in order to give capitalists of various stripes more latitude of action.

The RSB is interesting for two reasons. One, it is the type of omnibus bill that is designed to supersede other legislation in the policy enforcement chain. It is a “mother of all laws” or foundational stone type of legislation that its proponents hope will serve as a basis for future legislative reforms and policy-making and to which all existing laws must be retro-fitted. Although it varies in its NZ specifics, it emulates the “Ley Omnibus” (later named “Ley Bases” (Base Law) pushed through by Argentine president Javier Milei last year, which basically allows for the dismantling of the Argentine State bureaucracy, reform of labor and environmental laws, slashes the public budget, and opens the economy to foreign investment.

As a result, although the inflation rate has been drastically reduced and some foreign investors have taken interest in the Argentine economy, the poverty rate now reaches nearly 60 percent, health indicators (and facilities) have cratered, pension and social welfare plans have been decimated, unemployment and crime have risen, and basic public services are on life support (including power and water provision in some areas). Despite these deleterious effects, Milei’s “chainsaw” approach has been celebrated by the ACT Party, sponsor of the RSB and its predecessors, so here again we see an example of NZ politicians borrowing concepts from similarly-minded foreign governments.

They are not alone: the incoming Trump administration’s Project 2025 and Project 47 copy aspects of Hungarian president Viktor Orban’s authoritarian-minded constitutional reforms (since it centralises power in the Executive Branch and restricts civil liberties and opposition rights). More ominously, because it is an omnibus bill that redraws the NZ constitutional map in a preferred image, it echoes the Nazi “Empowerment Law” that Hitler pushed through in the German parliament after the was named Chancellor in 1933, albeit without the repressive powers later confirmed upon him. As in the case with Milei and his Base Law (and Hitler at the beginning of his legislative campaign), the RSB depends on securing a slim parliamentary majority in order to to pass into law.

What is important to note is that such omnibus legislation is most often used in democracies by authoritarian-minded politicians who are afraid that they cannot get their policy reforms passed and accepted otherwise. It is a soft form of constitutional coup whereby the “rules of the game” are stacked via legislative reform in favour of a specific set of interests, not the public good. It is a “soft” type of coup because it uses lawful/constitutional means to achieve its ends. In a perverse way it is a sign of weakness that its proponents do so, as if they know that their preferred policy prescriptions will be rejected by the electorate in the absence of an overarching law forcing the public to follow them.

To be clear, here the focus is on omnibus or foundational laws, not more specifically drawn laws that follow from them. For example, commercial and environmental law cover aspects of social and economic life but are not “foundational” in the sense that they do not provide cornerstone underpinnings to civil and criminal law, which in turn address detailed and specific rights and obligations regarding various aspects of social life, including enforcement of those rights and obligations by an independent judiciary. “Penalties under the law” refer to this level secondary of judicial oversight, which in turn is governed by foundational principles enshrined in omnibus legislation (which is the province of constitutional law).

There is a second, more fundamental problem with this approach. It involves the distinction between political society and economic society and why they should not be intertwined.

Political societies are aggregations of people within given physical boundaries who agree upon or are forced to accept certain universally-binding rules regarding representation, leadership and collective decision-making. Because NZ is the subject of this post, we shall leave aside for the moment various authoritarian political communities. As a liberal democracy, NZ has a form of rule based on majority contingent consent to the system as given, formally expressed through elections but more granularly in the everyday actions of voters who accept their positions in the social order. People go to work, play, attend school, have relationships and generally comport themselves as members of society in accordance with commonly accepted notions of acceptable behaviour (e.g., “live and let live,” “due onto others as one would do onto oneself,” respect difference and the rules of the road, etc.). But that majority consent to any given democratic rule is contingent on public expectations being met, both materially as well as politically. Political and economic societies are formed to address (and shape) those expectations.

Economic societies are aggregations of people operating within a given productive structure, making things and generating surpluses from their labor and labor-saving inventions while exchanging goods and services. “Homo economicus” is non-political. S/he maximises economic opportunities in order to pursue material interests. The ways of doing so are many and can involve collective as well as individual effort, which is often determined by the type and modalities of production (industrial, agricultural, mixed, etc.) and the material goods being pursued.

Vulgar structuralist thought holds that the type of economic society determines what type of civil and political society emerge from it. To this day, proponents of things like (neo)modernisation theory adhere to this belief. But such views offer a simplistic read on the interplay between economic and non-economic factors, so claims such as “free markets lead to democracy,” and ” political parties are the political equivalent of economic agents in the productive process” are overdrawn at best. A more nuanced take is that civil and political life may have a grounding in economic life but are not reducible to or epiphenomena of it. In some instances, say in the cultural sphere, human behaviour is not a surface reflection of an underlying economic reality or framework.

Political society is about collective governance and civil engagement. In democracies it involves a “legal” agreement, compact, or contract about the way in which the political order should be governed, which involves ostensibly neutral institutions and processes, As such, it can co-exist with a number of economic arrangements and is not inherently linked to any one. For example, over the years democracy has coexisted comfortably with varieties of capitalism and socialism. Authoritarianism has also co-existed with capitalism and socialism. The particular combination of economic framework and governance structure defines specific variants of regime type: NZ is a “liberal” democracy because it is based on a capitalist economic foundation (first settler colonialist, now primary good export, real estate ownership and services dependent production). North Korea is a Stalinist country because it combines one-party authoritarian rule with State control of the mixed industrial/agrarian economy.

What this means is that laws in a democracy are basically a means of adjudicating disputes, avoiding collective conflicts and regulating individual and collective behaviour regardless of economic status (think of the “justice is blind” adage). Ideally, they should be agnostic or neutral with regard to economic preferences because it is possible that future generations of voters will elect to support different types of economic arrangements that they believe suit their collective and individual material interests better than current schemes.

But that is not what has happened. In NZ and elsewhere in liberal democracies, things like private property rights have been enshrined in law and thereby protected by the State. The evolution of this marriage of political and economic societies is complex but the bottom line is that NZ is a capitalist society governed by a democratic capitalist State that enforces the primacy of capital above all other things. To be sure, much lip service is given to civil liberties, human rights, equality before the law, even adherence to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. But the foundation of the modern NZ State is not based on a contract between interested parties such as the agents who signed the Treaty, or on respect for the rule of law per se, but on the structural dependence of NZ society on capitalism. The role of the NZ State is to help resolve the contradictions that inevitably emergence in a political system where a minority of voters control major parts of the productive apparatus but rely on the labour of others (wage labour) in order to generate the material surpluses (profits) that allow them to exercise (indirect) political as well as (direct) economic control in NZ society.

The RSB seeks to further deepen that structural dependence of NZ society on capital by giving certain capitalist fractions more leeway in the conduct of their self-interested affairs. When fully implemented it will atomise wage-labor both in and out of production while consolidating specific types of capitalist structural control. In that light the RSB codifies the State’s role (or non-role) in facilitating capitalists’ (aka businesses) self-interested pursuit of profit. From then on self-interested maximisers of opportunities, individual and corporate, will seek comparative advantages in the deregulated marketplace.

The problem, again, is that enshrining a specific set of economic preferences or biases in a political charter interferes with voter’s freedom of choice when it comes to their own economic interests and desires. Depending on their circumstances and structural location in the productive apparatus, not everyone may be a fan of capitalism or accept the primacy of private property rights. Some may even prefer socialism, however that is defined. Prioritizing and facilitating the pursuit of specific economic preferences contravenes the commonweal (public interest) basis of democratic political charters such as that governing Aotearoa. Instead, it rigs the societal “game” in fair of a select few.

Other, more astute minds have already voiced their opposition to the RSB on a variety of grounds. Here the point is to remind readers of why omnibus bills are inherently anti-democratic even if they are legally constitutional, and why democratic political society is distinct from and should remain “above” economic society however construed. The former deals with universal values and interests; the latter involves specific sectorial interests and their material objectives in a system structurally based on the pursuit of profit. Although they may be overlapped in fact because of NZ’s history of structural dependence on capital, the public good is best served when the political/legal framework is agnostic or neutral when it comes to sectorial interests. That is what democratic collective bargaining systems are for and why political lobbying needs to be tightly regulated. Instead, the RSB seeks to tilt the game board in the direction of a specific set of interests, not the public interest at large.

Alas, although it is not meant to be, the rightwing NZ economic and political twain have met, and the outcome is the RSB. For the reasons outlined above, that is why it should be opposed.

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US military-industrial-sports complex.

A US friend of mine wrote on social media about attending a Homecoming football game at her niece’s Red State university. Although the referees stunk and her team lost, my friend said that she enjoyed her visit, especially the halftime show that featured a tribute to veterans (it is approaching Veterans Day in the US). Because I have a self-righteous contrarian streak, I commented on her post by asking when did glorification of militarism and (by extension) war-mongering became a fixture US sports? I suggested that maybe it came from US military service academies (West Point, the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy) and somehow leaked into other sports institutions sometime after WW2. Not surprisingly given that my friend is a very patriotic and polite American, she declined to answer.

What I would have said to her had she answered is that I asked because cultural historians and sociologists have noted that although all liberal democracies have military ceremonies, displays, celebrations and commemorations on significant national dates and public holidays such as Anzac Day and Bastille Day, only the US has military displays at private sporting events from Little League to the professional level pretty much every week. American football, baseball, basketball, automobile racing (NASCAR is a patriotism fetishist’s delight), soccer, ice hockey, volleyball, lacrosse–these and more all regularly feature tributes to the military, with some including static and moving exhibits of death machines in the forms of warplane fly-overs, paratroop drops, assorted artillery gun salutes and even the occasional tank. Remember, this is not July 4th, Veterans Day or Memorial Day, which are genuine national holidays celebrated publicly with displays of patriotism, parades, picnics, pomp and circumstance even if the original, more sombre reason for them was about victory, sacrifice and service to the country, not the military per se.

So why and how did sports get turned into an adjunct to US militarism? Beyond the constant invocations of “fighting for freedom” (I guess “fighting for imperialism and “making the world more safe for Yanks” does not have quite the same ring to them), what normalised this practice?

Here is my hunch. At some point in the last half century a PR genius in the Department of Defense (DoD) realised that combining sports, especially “manly” contact sports, with militaristic displays and tributes framed as patriotic commemorations was a natural recruitment tool for the armed forces. The US military is already allowed to recruit in high schools and universities (some private schools refuse them but all public institutions receiving federal funding of any sort must allow military recruiters on campus). But sports, especially big-ticket sports like college and professional football, is a type of social glue that binds American society in a way that pretty much everything else does not. Race, class, religion, geographic location, now even gender–all bow before the alter of sports, with stadiums being the secular churches in which people congregate for common purpose. If you want to make friends and influence people by participating in the ritual, a sporting event is a good place to start.

(I use “American” here well aware that is is an appropriation of a continental name common to all of the Western Hemisphere simply because it has become normalised as a way to identify people from the US).

Partnering with sports is therefore way for the US military to get deeply involved in a core aspect of US society–the glue that holds together its social cohesion–by becoming an integral part not only of its sporting culture but also of its national identity. That perhaps is where US militarism is reproduced at its most basic level. If you can get people to adopt a certain favourable (and non-critical) mindset and predisposition regarding the military and its role in US society through sports, you pave the way for ideological reproduction of a military-aligned perspective. That in turn makes recruitment easier but also makes it easier to sell rationales for aggressive foreign polices, large military budgets and ultimately, war-mongering as a foreign policy tool. You can see the results in a number of popular culture artefacts: marching bands, camouflage apparel, guns, more guns and assorted accessories for guns (like bump stocks, silencers and extended magazines) in case the zombie finally arrive from south of the border, “tactical gear,” militarised local police forces, etc, to say nothing of the names of numerous sports teams themselves. You see it in the media, especially among conservative outlets. You see it in language, such as in the overuse of the word “heroes” to describe anyone who has served. You see it in oversized flags with Vietnam Era POW-MIA logos at car and gun dealerships, in the retail discounts offered to active duty service members and veterans and in the veneration of the military in churches. Militarism (I shall refrain from calling it military fetishism) permeates every aspect of US social life, and sports is at its core. I am not saying that there are no legitimate spinoffs and benefits from exposure to military culture and technologies, but in the US sometimes the crossover is a bit too much.

This occurs in spite of the fact that US in recent decades has not been particularly successful in war. For every victory in Granada, Panama or Gulf War One and in spite of overwhelming advantages in weaponry (courtesy of those enormous military budgets), most recent US expeditionary wars have ended in stalemates and withdrawal–sometimes chaotic–in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in a number of “low intensity conflicts” such as those in Niger, Somalia, and 1980s Lebanon. In fact, the US has been continuously at war, big or small, for the better part of my existence, and yet the world is arguably more dangerous today for the US than it was before it became the world’s policeman. Where is the national interest cost/benefit value in this?

That is where what former general and President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s phrase enters the frame: “military-industrial complex.” Ike warned about the emerging military-industrial complex in the 1950s, arguing that it was leading to distortions in foreign policy, particularly those associated with militarism for profit. Needless to say he was shouting into the dark because the beast that he was looking at then is now a Godzilla that through lobbying controls the Federal Executive and Legislative branches as well as those of most if not all states and even local districts. From the United Fruit Company’s backing of coups in Central America in the 1950s and 60s things have evolved into a conglomerate of blood-soaked profiteers ranging from Blackwater in the 1990s ((now rebranded and decentralised under shell fronts) to assorted outfits supplying staples, fuel, transportation, close personal protection, anti-piracy squads and even Halloween costumes to the troops deployed abroad. Godzilla is now too big too fail.

Godzilla is also very smart. By marrying the military-industrial complex to the sports-military complex it has created the prefect vehicle for the profitable reproduction of a permanent militarist outlook as a cornerstone of US society. I’ll say it again, bloodshed is profitable and if sports is means for the military-industrial complex to profit, it has found a welcome partner. It is therefore not surprising that sports moguls and big entertainment companies, including dodgy outfits like those that control cage fighting and staged wrestling competitions, have partnered with the armed services in order for both to sell their “product.” The arrangement works well for the synergistic (some might say “symbiotic”) enhancement of their bottom lines.

So what we have in the US is a military-industrial-sports complex that serves as an ideological and material war-mongering reproduction machine. Only in America!

And now, a digression.

I had my “Ike moment” in 1994 when the Zapatistas staged an uprising in Chiapas Province, Mexico. Initially overwhelmed by the guerrilla assaults, the Mexican Army sent an urgent request for helicopter gunships, armoured personnel carriers and special operations troops. This, in spite fo the fact that up and until that moment Mexico styled itself to be a leader of the non-aligned movement, one of the “old school” revolutionary regimes dating to the early 20th century and regularly gave the US the finger in international forums. Its authorities were not very cooperative when it came to the illegal drug trade, something that made some of them rich, made more of them dead, and which made all of them regret their indifference down the road.

Well as it turns out on January 1, 1994 I just happened to be the regional policy analyst for the InterAmerican region in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and got called into my office to consider the request before sending it up the chain of command on the way to the White House. I explained to a group of formidable civilian and military leaders (some of whom I still admire), that a rebellion/revolt like that of the Zapatistas (known by the acronym EZLN in Spanish and led by the much vaunted “Comandante Marcos”) was rooted in socio-economic inequality and broken government promises, not some global Marxist conspiracy. It was a symptom, not a cause of instability and therefore could not be solved via US military intervention (or any use of force, for that matter). I advised against agreeing to the request and instead recommended that the Mexicans tend to their internal affairs by listening to the EZLN demands and proposing a negotiated solution. After all, they were on the right side of history, only sought was was promised to the peasantry in the 1930s, and had no means or intentions of expanding their armed activities to make revolution at the national level.

Historical Note: The EZLN were acting on historical campesino (peasant) grievances about having their communal (State-owned) land holdings (known as ejidos) taken over by large private land owning entities in spite the promise made by the post-revolutionary government of Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s. After years of dispossessions and usurpation by Cardenas’s political heirs working hand in glove with landed agricultural elites, Maoist and Guevara-inspired guerrilla forces emerged in the 1980s and finally began the forcible reclamation project on New Year’s Day 1994. Talk about starting that year with a bang!

My comments to the Pentagon brass fell on deaf ears. To their credit the uniforms in the room were more sympathetic to my view than were my civilian counterparts, but the overall response was silence. A day or so later I was passed an interagency memo signed off by the NSC, CIA, NSA, JCS, Treasury, my bosses in OSD, the department of the Army and various other lesser agencies authorising a limited provision of the requested items subject to the condition that they “respect all national and International humanitarian conventions and the laws of war.”

Yeah, right. I may not have known it at the time, but a Yanqui Tui ad was in the making.

I was young and stroppy at the time so in response I fired off an interagency reply denouncing the decision, pointing out the few of those who signed off had expertise In Mexican history history and affairs, much less the history of Chiapas (the poorest state in Mexico) or the nature of the rebellion, and some did not even speak or read Spanish. I received no replies and the project was approved.

A few days later I was summoned for a private lunch by a very senior DoD official. That was unusual because a mid-level C ring analyst like me did not usually get a 1-on-1 invitation to meet with an E ring heavyweight (the Pentagon is divided into five rings running five stories high and five deep on each side, connected by internal corridors and with the service branches controlling three sides of the Pentagon and the Office of the Secretary of Defence for which I worked controlling the side that faces the Potomac River from the West. With the best views and largest offices, the E ring was where the civilian big boys and girls played. Among a lot of source on the building, see: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pentagon)

The official complimented me on my knowledge of the region, the detail and energy that I brought to my job and the good work that I had done while serving in OSD/DoD. But he suggested that when my initial term expired I should return to academia and eventually write (once my security clearance lapsed) about my experiences there (subject to review and approval by DoD compliance mechanisms). Since I was hoping to extend my tenure in OSD I asked if the memo had something to do with his suggestion, to which he replied “yes.” I said that I thought that my job was to protect the US best interests in Latin America, balancing hard reality with as much idealism on human rights etc. as could be mustered under the circumstances (remember this was in the first couple of years of the first Clinton administration, when the US was pushing a so-called “Cooperative Security” doctrine based on confidence and security-building measures (CSBMs) as a replacement for Cold War “collective security” agreements based on credible counter-force). Since the Cold War had ended, part of my remit was to write the Latin American component of the new doctrine given the changed realities in my area of responsibility (Latin America and the Caribbean, which at the time meant that narco-trafficking and guerrilla warfare were the main concerns). His reply was to say “yes, that is true and commendable but you must understand that in this city corporate interests prevail.”

I left a short while after that conversation and a couple of years later emigrated to NZ. In the 25 years since then I have never once been asked by anyone in NZ government, academia, and the private sector about my experiences in that role, although when I was an academic I did illustrate to my students objective examples of foreign and security policy problems based on those experiences.

Instead, after 9/11 I got branded by the NZ (and now foreign) media as a security or terrorism “expert” when it fact those were just routine aspects–but not all of–what I did at OSD (TBH, I cringe when I am referred to as a security expert because those are people who install and maintain home and commercial alarm systems. And since terrorism “expertise” has become a cottage industry since 9/11, mostly directed at Islamicists (including in NZ), I would prefer to not be associated with those that currently embrace the label. Remember: terrorism is a tactic in unconventional, irregular and hybrid warfare (and sometimes even in conventional warfare if the laws of war are deliberately violated, as has been seen in recent times), but not an end in itself. Focusing on it is to consequently misses the forest for the trees (much like the US approach to the Zapatistas), something that just might have contributed to NZ being caught off-guard by the March 15 rightwing extremist terrorist attack in Xchurch. Just saying.

I will simply end this anecdotal sidebar by noting that even if the US sports-military-industrial complex does not deliver ” victory” in recent times, in the days when I associated with them the special and covert operations communities, with much more limited and specific mandates, did a very good job at solving problems for the US when nothing else could.

And as far as I know none of those that I worked with back then were recruited via sports.