It’s a new term, deployed as an ideological prophylactic across the entire Western World: 'Far Right'

By Chris Trotter*

"She's a pretty communist." Every election campaign produces an image that sticks. The placard, held aloft by a gleeful cocky, as Morrinsville prepared to welcome home its most famous daughter in 2017, is one such.

The claim that “Jacinda” was a communist rapidly became a staple of her conservative critics.

Of all the descriptions hurled in Ardern’s direction (and there were many) “communist” was among the silliest. In spite of a brief stint at the head of the International Union of Socialist Youth, during which she employed the traditional left-wing salutation “Comrades!”, Ardern’s politics were carefully attuned to those of twenty-first century Labourism.

Ardern drew her inspiration from the likes of Tony Blair and Helen Clark (neither of them conspicuous members of the communist pantheon). This should have protected her from being lumped-in with Lenin. That it failed to do so reflects the habit of right-wing New Zealanders to assail their opponents with the most emotionally-charged insults available.

That the Morrinsville placard raised more mirth than ire in 2017 bears testimony to the strength of the “Jacindamania” then sweeping the country. The impact of the charge would, however, increase as the exigencies of Covid-19 management began to resemble ever more closely what many New Zealanders’ believe communism looks and feels like.

Not that the Left is in any way innocent of or exempt from the temptation to associate their opponents with the worst of the worst. As long ago as 1913 the Left was branding the mounted special constables unleashed upon striking workers by the new Reform Party government as “Massey’s Cossacks”.

One-hundred-and-thirteen years ago, well before fascism was so much as a gleam in Benito Mussolini’s eye, the go-to exemplar of tyranny and state violence was Tsarist Russia. And the most feared defenders of Russian autocracy were the brutal Cossack cavalry responsible for enforcing the Tsar’s edicts at the point of gun and sabre.

To describe Prime Minister Bill Massey’s special constables as Cossacks was, therefore, about the worst insult the Red Federation of Labour could hurl at him and them. Like all good insults, it stuck.

Fast-forward sixty years and the headlines of the radical left-wing press (yes, there was such a thing in the 1970s) shouted out warnings against the “creeping fascism” of the recently elected National Government of Rob Muldoon.

By 1975 the charge of being a “fascist” had long since replaced references to Tsarist Russia in the struggle to blacken the name of one’s political opponents. In almost every instance of its use the charge was misplaced.

Among the most vivid political phenomena of the Twentieth Century, Fascism and Nazism possessed clear definitions accessible in scores of academic publications. They manifested themselves primarily in political circumstances where a significant victory for the Left was either imminent or had already occurred. Fascism and Nazism represented a beleaguered and faltering capitalism’s last and most brutal line of defence.

Engaging in political violence on behalf of the state did not automatically make the perpetrators fascists or Nazis. Nor did expressing strong anti-left-wing sentiments. Such behaviour has been a feature of conservative state institutions for more than two centuries. What’s more, a strong impulse towards authoritarianism is a baked-in feature of just about every political party – be it left or right.

All these objections made little difference to the Left’s propensity to damn any and all efforts to impede its victory as the work of fascists and Nazis. The terms fairly crackle with historical electricity. Everybody thinks they know what a fascist looks like and how a Nazi acts. It required the best part of humanity to destroy the global menace that was Adolf Hitler. Leftists didn’t really need facts to make the insult stick.

Rob Muldoon may have been a prick, but he wasn’t a fascist.

It didn’t matter.

The situation today is different. Though the habitués of social media still resort to twentieth century insults, freely labelling their political opponents Nazis and fascists (often without the slightest notion of what the terms actually mean) at a more elevated social level, reflective of the considerable power its users currently wield, the term in constant use as an ideological prophylactic across the entire Western World is “Far Right”.

The ready resort to the insults of “communist” and “fascist” made perfect sense when the principal antagonists were either bosses or workers. In the simple binary of capitalism versus socialism the battle lines were starkly drawn and the political insults broadly reflective of the participants’ location on one side or the other.

By and large, however, the people most fond of deploying the show-stopping epithet “Far Right” are neither capitalists nor socialists. They belong to the social formation generally referred to as the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) and they stand between the two.

Originally brought into existence to soften the mutual blows traded between capital and labour, the PMC has morphed into a social and political force in its own right, and like all such formations it has evolved its own ideology.

It’s a peculiar brew, composed in part of the progressive ideas of the early-twentieth century when the PMC was conjured into existence, but also incorporating the technocratic authoritarianism associated with the burgeoning responsibilities of the post-World War II welfare state.

The hybrid ideology of the PMC rejects with equal fervour the laissez-faire sentiments of neoliberal capitalism and the subterranean fury of anti-elite populism.

Aware of the immense social distance separating the partisans of the commanding heights from the tribunes of the lower depths, and of the inevitable antagonisms that gulf must give rise to, the PMC seeks to disarm both. Not by branding one side “fascist” and the other “communist” but by dissolving neoliberalism and populism into a single implacable enemy of all things diverse, inclusive and equitable – the “Far Right”.

Threatened by a National-led coalition dedicated to improving New Zealand’s fiscal position by reducing the size and scope of the state that sustains it, the PMC will mobilise all its resources to thwart the master-plan of these Far-Rightists-from-above – which is, to quote Grover Norquist, “reduce [the state] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Equally menaced by those deplorable denizens of the lower orders unconvinced by te Tiriti, transgenderism, and the sanctity of the Palestinian cause, the PMC’s shock-troops in the caring professions and the universities will be urged to borrow freely from the authoritarian remedies already resorted to in the EU, the UK, Canada and Australia.

Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori will be strong-armed into outlawing freedom of expression and required to maintain an unceasing cultural vigilance against populism’s Far-Rightists-from-below. (This mission will be made much easier by the fact that Labour’s and the Greens’ MPs are drawn almost exclusively from the PMC.)

That memorable Morrinsville placard owes its enduring notoriety to having so fundamentally misread what Jacinda Ardern and her “comrades” were really about. The government she led wasn’t dedicated to implementing The Communist Manifesto but to constructing something much more sinister.

A permanent conspiracy against the ambitions of the rich and the aspirations of the poor: a fiercely defended and parasitical intermediate class fattened by both.

*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.