Sometimes the observations of old-time socialists are spot-on

By Chris Trotter*

It is fashionable among contemporary leftists to dismiss the critiques of left-wing traditionalists as hopelessly anachronistic. If ever there were candidates for the side-eye and the rolled-eye it is these unrepentant throwbacks.

Today’s “progressives”, or if you’re living in New York City, “democratic-socialists”, operate on the all-or-nothing approach. To be counted among the contemporary Left it is necessary to accept its ideological package; its whole ideological package, and nothing but its ideological package – even if that means signing up to the proposition that 2+2=5.

Preaching the virtues of that old-timey, unhyphenated socialism is just so, well, passé.

There are times, however, when the perspectives of those with a firmer grip on history than the Mamdani generation produce by far the best diagnoses of current political ailments.

Christchurch-based Steve Cowan has been running his blog “Against the Current” for more than a decade now, and his adherence to the verities of traditional socialism has never wavered. His latest post, “Shooting the Messenger Won’t Help National”, cuts to the political  chase as only an old-time lefty can:

“The problem for National is not Christopher Luxon’s personality or communication style. The problem is the government policies he promotes.”

That is indeed National’s – and the entire Right’s – problem. The Right sees the solution to New Zealand’s problems lying in the hands of its businesses. To smooth the path towards a sustainably profitable private sector is the Right’s whole plan. Anything that gets in the way of that plan must be swept away.

This right-wing project is admirable in its simplicity, but selling it to voters who aren’t businesspeople is bloody hard. In a democratic state it may not even be possible.

It is tempting to see Brooke van Velden’s surprise decision to step away from Parliament at the end of its current term because she realised that the full implementation of Act’s programme would require the wholesale revision of New Zealand’s democratic constitution. Fully aware that such radicalism is well beyond National’s and NZ First’s comfort-zone, and seeing no further scope for acceptable economic reforms beyond those she has already set in motion, van Velden may simply have decided to leave them to it.

Such clarity is rare in politics. Certainly National is unwilling to accept the implications of its own philosophy with van Velden’s sangfroid.

With very few exceptions, National’s leading politicians have shied away from the constitutional corollaries of a state apparatus dedicated to maximising private-sector profit. Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch did what was expected of them but the consequences were so dire electorally that the National Party balked at pushing the free-market agenda to its logical conclusion. Winston Peters defection and his subsequent creation of NZ First only made such a course more perilous.

Peters refused to accept that the grand Keynesian post-war consensus and the social-democratic institutions it had encouraged and sustained was incapable of being reassembled. National’s historic refusal was to embrace the “necessity” of dismantling the Keynesian settlement in its entirety.

Key elements of Keynesianism: generous pensions for the elderly; welfare payments to the jobless, the poor, and the disabled; publicly-owned and provided health, education, and accommodation services; along with the taxes and/or public borrowing required to pay for them; were beyond the power of any government to dismantle without being hurled from office.

The inevitable result of the Right’s political reticence to slash and burn was, and is, a rapidly growing mountain of public debt which must ultimately become unsustainable, and thus unrenewable. A fiscal day-of-reckoning looms ahead of New Zealand, resolvable only by the election of the Kiwi equivalent of Argentina’s President Javier Milei – the man with the chainsaw.

Pending this doomsday option, National and its coalition partners will continue to balk at the prospect of cutting out the great centres of state expenditure altogether. They are, however, quite prepared to reduce state spending to the maximum extent consistent with electoral survival.

With cold Marxist fury, Cowan describes the Coalition Government’s austerity programme:

“The Government has chosen to funnel resources upward, prioritising tax relief for the wealthiest while insisting that everyone else must tighten their belts. It has slashed budgets in health, education, welfare, and housing—sectors already stretched to breaking point—while insisting that ‘efficiencies’ will somehow compensate for the loss of funding. The result has been exactly what critics warned: longer hospital wait times, schools cutting staff, community organisations collapsing, and families pushed into desperation. When a government’s core economic philosophy is built on the belief that public investment is a burden rather than a necessity, the social fabric inevitably frays.”

Austerity is a difficult trick to pull-off successfully, but Christopher Luxon’s coalition government has somehow managed to do it – albeit narrowly and at the cost of his own and his party’s popularity.

Theoretically, this state-sanctioned immiseration of a significant fraction of the population should promote the political ascendancy of the Left. In Twentieth Century New Zealand an austerity programme as harsh as the Coalition Government’s would have propelled Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori well ahead of their electoral opponents in the opinion polls. It has not, or at least not consistently. Why?

Cowan’s answer is clear:

“[T]he real tragedy of this moment is not National’s decline. It is what fills the vacuum […] Labour has shown no willingness to break with the neoliberal consensus it helped entrench. It is not offering a transformative vision, only a softer version of the status quo — and a few ‘woke’ social policies to placate the Wellington liberal intelligentsia.”

But Cowan’s dismissive reference to Labour’s “few ‘woke’ social policies” indicates how little he appreciates the centrality of such policies to the contemporary Left’s ideological package. Were Labour to remove such policies from its manifesto, replacing them with policies aimed at reducing the influence of business and re-empowering the working-class, it would greatly alarm its crucial electoral support among credentialled public servants – Cowan’s “liberal intelligentsia”.

The central fact of contemporary New Zealand politics, obvious since the 1990s, is that National and Labour, bolstered by the smaller parties attached to them, are not true ideological enemies. The differences that divide them electorally are not strategic but tactical. Labour and its allies promote social cohesion much more forcefully than National and are less committed than the Right to the maintenance of fiscal discipline.

This left-wing commitment to spending is not, however, about challenging the power of business, whose interests Labour considers no less sacrosanct than National; it is about preserving and enhancing the power of the academic, professional, administrative, and caring professions upon whose votes the entire political influence of the contemporary Left depends.

Replacing Christopher Luxon would not change this duopolistic political arrangement. On this Cowan’s assessment is quite correct. Nor would a new National leader, beyond an initial flurry of excitement, lessen in any fundamental way the growing public disillusionment with the politicians of both major parties.

Significantly, Cowan’s analysis fails to demonstrate any serious appreciation of what is driving the surge in support for NZ First. Winston Peters’ numbers are being pushed upwards by the rising levels of anger at just how much National and Labour still appear to have in common – especially when it comes to those “few ‘woke’ social policies” from which so many New Zealand voters continue to recoil.

If Cowan, that old-timey socialist who continues to battle against the current of the times, is still in the market for a revolutionary party, then perhaps he should stop looking left. These days the biggest threats to the status quo are to be found bubbling away on the right.

*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.