The Rush To Blame “The Activists”
Activists are such easy scapegoats. The right and center have been conditioned for decades to roll their eyes at all protests. The left are easily aggravated over students leading movements they see as belonging to grownups, who have more important concerns like the economy and whether the trains come on time. And moderates too just want to get to their job each morning and are annoyed that the roads are all gummed up from someone gluing their hand to the ash felt, or they don’t care to understand why artwork would be defaced by climate protestors.
For the past two elections, the right have pushed a war of ideology onto the left and then blamed them for it. And it’s working really well.
The civil rights movement was the 60s. Women’s lib was the 70s. Queer rights was the 80s. All movements which saw Democrats take progressive action, but here in 2020, “identity politics” has taken over and the idea that Black people shouldn’t be shot in the street or that gay and trans people should be protected from hate crimes has become a step too far.
And now Trump has won, finally, finally this Economist Facebook ad that’s been dogging me all year has paid off.
If you want to read about how they think the gender divide is being caused by women, here’s the full piece. If you pay the Economist.
What’s been incredibly interesting to me is how the conversation of the left over the US election now echoes the exact criticism that was thrown at Labour after the New Zealand election… criticism that has already been disproven by the loud and vocal response to the New Zealand right’s incursion of the rights and privileges granted in recent years by the “social justice focus” of the left.
40,000 people joined a walk the length of the country to demonstrate outside Parliament the other day, just to say that actually, indigenous rights are important. Maori issues are important. The Treaty of Waitangi is not, as the right have spent seven years seeding on social media, a divisive document that most New Zealanders neither understand or agree with. It’s just out of sight; when politicians aren’t attacking it, only the racists give a damn about it.
Most people don’t have it in the forefront of their mind when voting. They didn’t last election.
But next election they will.
In his article, “Ten reasons why Labour’s support has halved”, written after the New Zealand elections, Dr Bryce Edwards gave exactly the same reason for Labour’s loss last year as he, and many US pundits, have given this week for the Democrats losing to Trump:
But if we’ve seen anything from New Zealand this week, it’s that voters do care about ethnicity, equality, the environment… all those things Edward’s has attributed to being “middle class issues”.
And if this idea of “woke” being the cause of Labour’s loss seems disproven by the pushback against National’s racist policies, wait until you see what he gave for number nine!
Yes, Labour lost because they “re-interpreted” the Treaty, that Treaty that 40,000 people showed up this week to demonstrate that we should honour it.
I’m not buying it.
The idea of leftist “reinterpretation” of the Treaty was, we now know, a dog whistle that has given Seymour what he assumed incorrectly was a mandate to reinterpret it personally himself, a cunning plan that has not worked out particularly well for him and is going even worse for Luxon. What there has been is a development of our understanding of the Treaty in line with developments in jurisprudence, in social and legal theory of Te Tiriti, and in conversation with Maori stakeholders — yes, including those political “bureaucratic elite” stakeholders who are using their power to push for racial reform without the hallowed blessing of the working classes!
New Zealand’s right-wing government and their actions while in power shows the extent to which the left-right conversation has degraded in the past five or so years. It‘s no longer that the right have a different idea on how to achieve racial equality, it’s that the right have an idea on how to achieve racial equality that will actively harm racial equality. Which makes you start to wonder if they’re actually interested in racial equality in the first place.
The same can be said for every issue the global left are tackling currently. The right in New Zealand don’t genuinely believe that hormones are being overprescribed to youth as their cornerstone philosophy on trans rights, but they’re being led by a cohort of people who believe (because they’ve been told) that local governments are paying pedophiles to perform unsupervised sexual displays for children (better known as drag storytime), and the resulting hysteria from them collectively has led to only a single issue being taken at all seriously by wider conservatives: that we don’t have enough high-quality studies that show puberty blockers are safe, only low quality ones.
This has now been twisted into presenting puberty blockers as unsafe, or presented as the evidence not showing that they’re safe at all, when the reality is that the funding to study the long term effects of this relatively new development has been scarce partially because of how controversial these exact activists have been making medical treatment for gender dysphoria, and studies to date do verify safety and effectiveness, even if they are “low quality”.
This scrutiny hormone blockers are now receiving is not coming from a place of genuine concern for trans youth, it is coming from a desire to prevent any youth, or any person, from transitioning in line with what society (or as the right would put it, the left) have developed as current best medical practice. Some months ago, I wrote that the MoH had paused their review of hormone treatment in order to hear from Dr Cass, who headed the UK’s infamous review that has seen treatments for trans people banned in the UK. Yesterday they released this report and, as I suspected, this pause was used to take on board the biased and questioned findings in order to recommend that trans youth be treated with the sort of comprehensive medical care our stretched system struggles to offer, as a sort of compromise or prescribing slow-down that will result in less trans youth having access to what trans people consider to be life-saving medicine.
It is not that the left don’t care about trans issues, or Treaty issues, or disability issues. It’s that they don’t see the need to care deeply about things beyond themselves until these groups are actively under attack by a radical right government with an agenda that extends well beyond their stated aims. People care enough to be angry, to protest, to vote over these things; they just don’t care enough to vote pre-emptively. They don’t care enough to put potential issues of minority rights or “identity politics” ahead of the chance of their own economic betterment— in New Zealand’s case, those sweet, sweet tax cuts.
National didn’t run on a platform of “We will defund disability services”. People don’t like that they’re doing it. They’re just not paying that much attention to political policy. While Winnie may actually have run on a platform of transgender intolerance, that’s not why over 5% of the country voted for him. They voted for him for the same reasons they’ve voted for him on and off for the past 40 years.
On one side, you have the left promising to make meaningful changes to social equality and the economy without the funds to meaningfully do either (for reasons that are their own fault). On the other side, you have the right promising to make visible, decisive changes that will make people’s finances better in the short term while severely sabotaging them in the long run. This makes it very easy for the right to take elections every 6-8 years over “general economic dissatisfaction”.
Are people wrong to be dissatisfied?
No, we’ve been living 40 years of neoliberalism and the system is has been absolutely rorted. The economics have been well established and we are truly living the free market dream these days — how are you enjoying it?
But people are wrong to see that overall dissatisfaction and then blame immigrants. They’re wrong for failing to understand that Trump’s policies will increase pressure on illegal immigration from Mexico whereas Harris had previously worked to reduce this pressure at the source. They’re wrong for seeing kids in cages as the solution, instead of social betterment and humane policy solutions.
But they’re also not wrong, because social betterment isn’t really on the table at the moment. Not meaningfully. Attempts are being made, sure, and the Dems will do their best. Maybe. But you can’t fix a problem caused by 300 years of North American supremacy in a four or eight year term. Certainly not when the other side keep undermining you, and definitely not when you have the same budget and structures at play as ever. To fix problems, it takes time and money — and Republicans love that, because the public hate politicians taking time and spending money.
I’m very curious where pundits like Dr Edward’s and John Halpin see their suggestions for the left taking us. The Liberal Patriot today recommended for Democrats to not just abandon identity politics but to openly disavow them in a piece called “Throw the groups under the bus!”.
While I’m sure this title was meant humorously, I don’t find a lot of humour in watching commentators doing exactly that — positioning “identity politics” as the enemy, exactly as the far right have been doing for a decade, in rhetoric that places class against all other forms of oppression.
Have I become overly cynical? Am I coloured by my “university education” over the fact that I’m mentally ill and on social welfare? Is my income at odds with my disability? Is my current financial state not informed by my “identity politics” that see me identify with disabled people, people of colour, trans people, women, and children alongside that of the spurious “working classes” (who themselves all have their own identities that their experiences and their vote is informed by)?
Is this not just another example of minorities being forced to choose which aspects of themselves to champion within wider leftist movements because “we can’t do everything”?
Is this not just scapegoating identity in the same way Republicans have been doing for decades?
The Democrats’ failing is their lack of serious economic change, and their absolute refusal to put forward candidates who will work for it. That was their choice, the establishment choice, to push Hillary over Bernie in 2016. That wasn’t a conscious decision to go with “identity politics” over economics, it was a decision to protect their donors and protect the status quo.
But like with everything else wrong with the world these days, including the decisions of white men, somehow that’s become women’s fault.