Perhaps they should listen rather than sneer

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, May 30.)

During a visit to Wellington earlier this year, John Podesta, a man described as a top American political adviser, gave a series of media interviews.

Among other things, he praised our “superstar” prime minister and said she had given hope to social democrats everywhere.

Jacinda Ardern’s election success in 2017, Podesta said, was a bright spot at a time when populist movements were winning political success around the world – a trend Podesta obviously saw as undesirable.

As a former chief of staff to US President Bill Clinton, adviser to President Barack Obama and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful election campaign in 2016, Podesta is an influential player in the US Democratic Party.

He would feel a natural affinity with Ardern, whose soft-Left politics are broadly aligned with those of the US Democrats. 

But while it was Podesta’s glowing remarks about Ardern that captured headlines, his warning about the supposed dangers of populist politics said more about the strange political mood of the times.

He talked about social media whipping the public into a frenzy, and about democratic values being placed at risk by politicians exploiting fear and unrest.

Predictably, he cited Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as examples. He also mentioned the success of anti-immigration parties in Europe – an obvious reference to Italy, Hungary and Poland, where voters have installed Right-leaning governments that resist policies imposed by the EU.

By implication, populism is bad. It is the opposite of the “progressive” politics embraced by Podesta, our Labour-led government and social democratic parties in much of the Western world.

But hang on a minute. If Podesta looked in a dictionary, he would see that a populist is defined as a person “who holds, or is concerned with, the views of ordinary people”.

It follows that there should be nothing shameful about the word populist. It comes from a Latin root word meaning “people”. Perhaps Podesta needs to be reminded about the origin of another important word, one that we got from the ancient Greeks: Democracy. It means “rule by the people”.

The words “populist” and “democracy” are joined at the hip. But “populist” has become a dirty word used by the political elites to discredit any policies they disapprove of.

They try to deride populism by equating it with extreme nationalism. But populism is on the rise for a very obvious reason: throughout the Western world, Left-leaning elites have grown distanced from the views of “ordinary people” whom they dismiss as ignorant and worthless.

Parties that once had a working-class base have been captured by inner-city ideologues and intellectuals. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of a new breed of politician who has known no career outside politics and had no direct exposure to the issues that most concern rank-and-file voters.  

The result has been a profound re-orientation of traditional politics, with blue-collar voters moving to the Right because they perceive social-democratic parties as being elitist and out-of-touch.

As far back as the 1980s, so-called “working-class Tories” supported Margaret Thatcher. The same class of voter had a decisive influence on the outcome of the recent Australian elections.

It was the blue-collar vote that got Trump elected (wealthy people overwhelmingly supported Clinton) and it was mostly working-class, Labour-held British electorates that voted in favour of Brexit. If that wasn’t proof enough, the clincher was last weekend’s EU elections – a triumph for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

Surely the solution to all this is not to sneer but to listen and respond. Yet blue-collar Trump voters, who would once have been natural Democratic Party supporters, were dismissed by Clinton in 2016 as “deplorables” – a remark that encapsulated the elite’s contempt for ordinary people and may have lost her the election.

Okay, so the Left hates Trump. But he won the 2016 election according to the rules, odd though they may seem to us; and until such time as the Democratic Party and the American media come up with proof that Trump rorted his way to victory, they should get used to it.

Brexit, too, was the result of a popular vote by ordinary people who, not unnaturally, wanted to be governed from London rather than by a largely unaccountable bureaucracy elsewhere. But because it ran counter to the Left’s grand project of a united Europe, the political elites insisted the majority of British voters got it wrong and went to great lengths to thwart their will.

The problem, clearly, is that ordinary people are stupid. They can’t be trusted to make the right decisions. They don’t know what’s good for them. They should have taken the advice of their political betters. Perhaps the solution is not to let them vote at all.

Milkshakes and mud: weapons of choice for the militant, inarticulate Left

(First published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, May 29.)

Who are the real haters? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself as the debate over so-called “hate speech” escalates to almost hysterical levels.

It popped into my head as I watched a TV news report about the British protester who splattered Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage with a banana and salted caramel milkshake.

Milkshakes are the current weapon of choice for angry left-wing activists who are apparently too inarticulate or too consumed with rage to express themselves by legitimate means.

In the case of Farage, he’s seen as fair game because he represents a political position that’s labelled alt-Right, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Attacks on him are therefore seen as acceptable - indeed, even honourable in the eyes of many on the Left.

It makes no difference to these people that Farage’s party has wide popular support, as has just been emphatically demonstrated in the EU elections, or that it was founded for the legitimate purpose of insisting that the British government do what the majority of voters told it do in the 2016 EU referendum. Popular support and democratic legitimacy count for nothing to militant zealots. 

Of course we have our own righteous activists here in New Zealand – people so convinced of the correctness of their cause that they feel entitled to resort to oafish acts of thuggery against anyone who sees things differently.

John Key was monstered by two activists at Waitangi in 2009 – although in fairness, it should be acknowledged that they later had the decency to apologise – and the mild-mannered ACT parliamentary leader John Boscawen was humiliated by having a lamington rubbed into his hair while speaking during a by-election debate later the same year in Auckland.

Several years prior, also at Waitangi, then National Party leader Don Brash had mud hurled in his face. And of course there was the celebrated incident in which a dildo was flung in the face of cabinet minister Steven Joyce in 2016.

More recently, in Australia, a teenager was virtually hailed as a hero for breaking an egg on the head of Senator Fraser Anning. People excused it because Anning is an unusually odious politician, but make no mistake – the attack on him was an attack on the right of politicians in a democracy to take unpopular positions. It therefore became an attack on freedom of expression, which is the cornerstone of liberal democracy.

The purpose of such attacks is to intimidate and humiliate, and by implication to send a signal to others that they risk the same treatment if they dare to express ideas that the Left wishes to suppress.

It is, in other words, a form of bullying, and we should be just as intolerant of it as we are of bullying in school or the workplace.

The striking thing about these acts is that they were perpetrated by people on the Left, which is a reversal of the historical pattern.  We tend to associate political violence with right-wing thugs such as the Nazi Brownshirts, but increasingly it’s the Left that indulges in disruption and displays of intimidation.

Overseas, activists on the Left have developed a sophisticated repertoire of strategies for shutting down opposing opinions. These include threatening violent demonstrations on such a scale that police either can’t guarantee public safety or demand payment of outrageous fees from meeting organisers to cover the costs of maintaining order.

Another effective technique is to blockade events that the protesters object to – a tactic employed at a mining conference in Dunedin this week. It’s a denial of other people’s rights and therefore fundamentally anti-democratic. 

Oddly enough, we never see conservatives trying to prevent others from going about their lawful business. They accept that a liberal democracy accepts differences of opinion. 

To return to my opening question, who are the real haters? Who are the people whose actions and statements reveal them as hard-core bigots, rigidly intolerant of different views?

I was fascinated to learn last week that two years ago, the “comedian” Guy Williams (I put that word in inverted commas because it has become a synonym for tiresome prig) took a photo of Don Brash crossing a street in Ponsonby and posted it on Twitter with a comment indicating a desire to run him over.

Obviously there was no real intent to carry out the threat, and Williams later apologised. But the mere fact that he expressed the thought, even flippantly, is telling.

It becomes even more intriguing when you learn that Williams is the boyfriend of Green MP Golriz Ghahraman, who made a melodramatic pitch for public sympathy last week – supported by Williams – after ACT leader David Seymour upset her by calling her a menace to freedom because of her demands for tougher controls on what New Zealanders are permitted to say.

It’s interesting to speculate on what might have happened if the names were re-arranged here, and it was Seymour who had jokingly threatened to run Ghahraman down on Ponsonby Rd.  I think we can safely say the Left would have been up on its hind legs demanding that he be strung up. 

A wake-up call for the political class

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, June 4.)

 

Interesting things have been happening in British politics. And while there’s no obvious connection with trends in New Zealand, you don’t have to look too far beneath the surface to see parallels.

In recent elections for the European Parliament, the representative body elected by voters throughout the European Union, 33 percent of the British seats were won by the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip).

Ukip outpolled both the Conservative and Labour parties – the first time a third party has managed this in a British national election since 1910. The result saw Ukip win 24 seats in the European Parliament, up from 13 in the last EU elections. Labour won 20 seats and the Conservatives (the major losers) 14.

The great irony is that the majority of British seats in the European Parliament are now held by a party that is committed to taking Britain out of the EU.

This is a seismic shift in British politics, and it has left the two major parties reeling. In the past they – and the British media – have tended to dismiss Ukip and its leader, former Conservative Nigel Farage, as an extreme right-wing fringe.

Now they must take the newcomer seriously, even though Farage’s party still has only a tenuous foothold in the British parliament, where it holds three seats in the House of Lords.

There is a much bigger story behind this, and it has been unfolding over several years. It is about the growing separation between the political elite and the people they supposedly represent.

Ukip and its unorthodox leader, a populist who's not ashamed of his fondness for a pint at the local, are seen as having tapped into a feeling of disenfranchisement among voters – a sense that democracy has been stolen from them.

The party’s rise has coincided with the emergence of what commentators call the new political class – an elite of professional political operators that has taken control of the major parties and is seen as having lost touch with ordinary people.

Among Tory voters, in particular, there was frustration that the Conservative Party led by David Cameron wasn’t listening to their concerns about the intrusive influence of the EU in British affairs. You can bet it will be listening now.

Ukip has also tapped into mounting public concern about the level of immigration to Britain from Europe under the EU’s “open borders” arrangements. The party has positioned itself as anti-immigration, exploiting public resentment at recent arrivals from Eastern Europe claiming welfare benefits and placing further strains on an already wheezing National Health Service.

Labour as well as the Conservatives has dismissed Ukip’s concerns as racist and fascist, but some commentators are now suggesting Labour will have to revise its stance because it too is vulnerable to a backlash in working-class areas, where migrants are taking jobs and undercutting wages.

So where are the parallels with New Zealand? Oddly enough, they have nothing to do with immigration.

New Zealand is in the midst of an extraordinary demographic change – arguably far more dramatic than the one Britain has experienced. We are now one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the Western world. But although politicians are arguing about the stress immigration is placing on housing and infrastructure, the transformation has otherwise been remarkably painless.

Large-scale immigration always has the potential to create problems, especially where ethnic groups congregate in ghettos and refuse to mingle with wider society. Recent tension between rival factions in an Auckland mosque serves as a warning that the situation in our biggest city, especially, needs to be carefully monitored. Overall, though, we can pat ourselves on the back for absorbing the new arrivals almost seamlessly.

No, the similarities with Britain relate to the relationship between political parties and the voters – because here, as in Britain, we have seen the emergence of a new political class that is increasingly isolated from voters.

The era of big political meetings and street-corner campaigning is long gone. Membership of the major parties has reportedly been in decline since the 1970s. Election campaigns are largely conducted by the party leaders on television. Even senior cabinet ministers are almost invisible.

All this adds up to a public disengagement from politics and a vacuum between electors and elected. This vacuum has to all intents and purposes been filled by the new political class – the consultants, advisers, spin doctors, opinion pollsters, lobbyists, assorted insiders and even news media who live inside the Wellington bubble and only fleetingly make meaningful contact with real people in the outside world. Politics is largely conducted through opinion polls.

British political commentator Peter Oborne wrote about this phenomenon as long ago as 2007 in his book The Triumph of the Political Class, in which he argued that politicians had emerged as a separate interest group. He went even further, claiming that the people at the top level of the major parties had more in common with each other than with ordinary voters.

The same might be said of New Zealand, where Labour and National both occupy essentially the same social-democratic political space.

In Britain, Farage has deftly exploited this feeling of voter alienation. In New Zealand, his closest equivalent is Winston Peters. Now there’s a scary thought.