Chris Trotter reflects on the outcome of an extraordinary US election, and delves into the cautious approach from Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson in NZ despite their big mandate

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

 Charles Dickens – A Tale Of Two Cities 1859.

Those words, written by Charles Dickens 161 years ago, still stand as the definitive description of a revolutionary epoch. That they resonate in our ears almost as loudly as the shouts of joy, ringing cow bells, beaten pots and pans and blaring car-horns of Americans celebrating the election of Joe Biden, strongly suggests that we are living through another epoch of great change.

What makes Dickens’ opening sentence so powerful is the stately progression of its contradictory clauses. They capture perfectly the impulse to both change, and not change, that grips a population confronted with challenges that are overwhelming in their magnitude.

Contradiction certainly describes the United States of America in 2020. The electorate may have rejected Donald Trump, but it has not done so emphatically. It has certainly not done it in the way that the US voters rejected Herbert Hoover in 1932, George McGovern in 1972, or Jimmy Carter in 1980. Yes, Biden has received the greatest number of votes ever cast for a US presidential candidate, but Trump has racked-up the second-largest vote.

True to his disruptive character, Trump has decisively demolished the conventional wisdom surrounding big turnouts in American elections. For years, US political scientists have declared that a bigger than usual turnout is bound to deliver a bumper crop of ballots for the Democratic Party.

Not true.

The most effective Republican campaigner since Teddy Roosevelt, Trump mobilised enough Republican voters to destroy the Democrats’ hopes of a “blue wave” sweeping them into a commanding position in both houses of Congress. When all the votes are counted the Democratic Party is facing a sharply reduced majority in the House of Representatives and – at best – a tied Senate where Vice-President Kamala Harris’s casting-vote will be needed to pass even the most timid reform legislation.

The biggest turnout in 120 years (currently estimated at approximately 70%) was enough to give the Democrats the White House – but very little else.

Without the House and the Senate, President-Elect Biden faces an enormous struggle to meet and resolve the challenges and contradictions currently producing such ominous creaking and groaning in America’s Eighteenth Century constitutional foundations.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the American result by New Zealand’s newly-elected Labour Government is what a huge privilege it is to have both the electoral and constitutional mandate to effect urgent and comprehensive change.

The final result of the 2020 New Zealand General Election, announced by the Electoral Commission on Friday, 6 November, reveals a House of Representatives in which the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, can count on 77 progressive votes out of 120. To find a centre-left majority as big as that in US history, you’d have to go back to Lyndon Johnson’s massive landslide of 1964, which gave birth to the “Great Society”. Or, even further back, to Franklin Roosevelt’s big wins of 1932 and 1936, which delivered his “New Deal” to Depression-ravaged Americans.

It is, therefore, extremely baffling why the Prime Minister and her Finance Minister have set their faces so firmly against anything remotely resembling the Great Society or the New Deal.

The explanation offered by most political pundits centres on the estimated 250,000 voters who switched their allegiance from National to Labour in 2020 – largely in response to the Prime Minister’s handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic. This block of votes represents roughly 17% of the nearly 1.5 million votes cast for Labour, and just 14.5% of the 1,703,932 votes cast for the Centre-Left as a whole. And, herein, lies the mystery: with 58.4% of the votes cast, why is the Centre-Left tailoring its policies to the prejudices of 14.5% of the electorate?

Now, the hard-boiled political campaigners who cobbled together Ardern’s astonishing 50.1% of the Party Vote will simply invite their critics to deduct 17 percentage points from Labour’s tally and ask themselves where that would leave the Government’s chances of re-election in 2023? Their contention? That any coalition – be it of parties or voters – can only ever be as radical as its most conservative elements. If the Left forgets that, then it is simply inviting the sort of catastrophe which overcame the Third Labour Government of Norman Kirk and Bill Rowling.

The counter-argument advanced against these advocates of incrementalism is equally straightforward. Upsetting voters cuts both ways. A government given a strong mandate for broad and meaningful change by its most loyal supporters is likely to suffer an electorally fatal loss of political traction if the expectations of those voters are simply set aside. Moreover, if they subsequently discover that this is being done to retain the support of voters historically hostile to their interests, then the disaffection will be huge. One of the reasons Labour lost in 1975 is because a critical number of Kirk’s “battlers” were convinced that “their party” was moving away from them.

The irony of Labour failing to learn from the mistakes of the US Democratic Party, even as the latter demonstrates the efficacy of reconstructing and mobilising its traditional support base, would be considerable. To employ an epidemiological metaphor: imagine the reaction of citizens who discover that their government, having amassed a huge stockpile of vaccine, nevertheless refused to authorise its use for fear of incurring the wrath of anti-vaxxers. When the diseases in question are poverty, homelessness and climate change; a government which refuses to take decisive remedial action – even when it quite clearly has the votes to do so – is unlikely to be forgiven.

It is almost as if, at the upper levels of the Labour Party, there is a deeply ingrained belief that its right to govern is derived not from the votes of ordinary New Zealand citizens, but from some sort of special dispensation granted to them by business leaders, senior public servants, media personalities and other members of the ruling elite. A dispensation, moreover, that is instantly revokable the moment a Labour Government attempts to put the interests of the majority of New Zealanders ahead of the elite. If that alarming perception is allowed to grow over the next three years, Ardern’s stunning victory of 2020 will be reversed in 2023 – and rightly so.

Dickens’ wonderful sequence of internally contradictory clauses matched to perfection the perils and possibilities of his times. Our own times: the years of Trump; have caused the words of another writer, the Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci, to take on an equally prophetic cast:

 “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Americans are celebrating what they earnestly hope is the end of the Trump Interregnum’s morbid symptoms. Many New Zealanders will be hoping, with equal fervour, that their new majority government will allow the old order to die; and that it is ready to act as midwife to the new.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.