Just as the 1980s were taking their final gasp of breath a family friend, a Christian, a lady of advancing years and a farmer’s wife from the back blocks, told my parents in all seriousness: you should not send your son to university in Wellington, because there they are all communists.
Of course, I was sent to university in Wellington. The leftists at that time – and by ‘leftists’ I really mean everybody of consequence – were working to get MMP enacted. The end result was a national politics not just of consensus, but of permanent left-wing unanimity.
This same trajectory has now led us away from a singular election day to the near-universal adoption of advanced voting. The setting aside of an appointed hour for adults to weigh up, with consideration, sobriety and objectivity, the policy direction of the country, has given way to a more ‘personalised’ balloting process without those pesky references to democracy as a community activity, or one with consequences, which tend to hamper the activities of progressive socialists.
While MMP gave the electoral vehicle much greater wheels on its left, advanced voting (which we can’t expect to ever go away) has given a traction to those wheels from which the more considered, conservative right will probably never recover. Both of these ideas came out of university think tanks. To say that academic hot houses are socialist is an understatement.
Despite the relentless grooming of students in Marxist causes, I was as yet unprepared when the Big Reveal finally came to me during an obscure third-year economics tutorial, taught by an eminent academic who is still a member of the faculty. After a long exposition on Keynes to the five or six of us duly assembled, this chap suddenly whipped out his Communist Party of New Zealand membership card and asked us whether we wanted to join. “The whole economics department is in it!” he declared.
Predictably, this elderly pakeha gent is still engaged in shunting the political consensus leftwards, and now specialises in expounding the climate religion. The capital’s university is full of such ‘policy people’ who lobby left-wing governments from an extreme far-left position, ensuring that the ‘centre’ of any debate appears pleasingly framed while in reality it is hideously skewed.
To this day when I mention my gentle Kiwi awakening to grassroots Leninism, many people prefer to believe that no such thing exists. The recent Labour landslide leaves us with a similar and almost palpable sense of false security, which has actually been arrived at through calculation and by sophistry. Jacinda Ardern is moderate, conservative even and borderline incompetent, we are told. She is kind and smiley in just the same way that doddery academics are harmless. What is there to worry about?
The 2020s will be the decade of feel-good communication in which individual perception has primacy. The policy agenda is therefore separated out and advanced independently, by stealth, in the background because nobody is interested any longer in the umbrella view, objectivity or detail.
This separation between appearance and the actual body politic has caused an epistemological fracture. Things look rosy, we believe, because of our focus on the conception/visualisation side of the divide, which is about ‘kindness’ and purported care for people and the environment; while we enjoy the fact that, ethically, anything goes.
The deeper reality is, in fact, a punitive and oppressive new polity of power consolidation, tending towards dictatorship along absolutist and globalist lines. And, of course, the ship which Ardern’s Labour party sails is, below the waterline, elitist, autocratic, stultifying, self-serving and actively integrationist.
I wrote in my last article about the Prime Minister’s reliance upon neuro-linguistic programming, which is really an advanced form of subliminal messaging used ordinarily as a coercive tool. NLP works through subconscious word placement, where words introduced in a mesmerising pattern are subsequently recalled as ‘triggers’ in order to manipulate the listener into giving the practitioner exactly what he or she wants – though with no knowledge of the underlying dark art of thaumaturgy (or wonderworking) which has taken place.
In the case of our recent election, Ardern repeatedly positioned the word ‘mandate’ until she got one. Although nobody acting rationally (and very few people are at the moment) could tell you what the mandate is for.
Labour has no discernible policy platform – only a list of things that they might do, subject to ‘captain’s calls’. And the people most likely to be hurt by Ardern’s carte blanche endorsement – those in middle class families, businesses and rural communities – are the ones who inexplicably ‘lent’ their votes to Labour simply because to do so ‘felt’ right.
Like a frog in a saucepan of slowly heated water, many of these vote lenders may not even come to realise their mistake. The left’s MO is always to start small and then grow the paradigm in imperceptible increments until, before we know it, the medium in which we all exist – that sustaining agency once known as society – is frothing and steaming.
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