There are any number of reasons why anyone thinking of heading to the United States for a holiday should think twice. They would be giving their money to a totalitarian state where political dissenters are being rounded up and imprisoned here and here, where universities are having their funds for teaching and research cut as punishment for hosting political debate, where scientists are afraid to talk about climate change, where the ABC news network and its parent Disney company are being investigated for having diversity policies, where foreign students get snatched off the street by plain clothes federal agents for writing an op-ed critical of Israel, and lastly…where innocence is no safeguard against being detained indefinitely by ICE, and/or against being deported to prisons in El Salvador.
Basically…not even seeing the Grand Canyon can justify propping up the Trump administration with tourism dollars.
Making the centre- left more electable
Talking of travel…as PM Christopher Luxon flies to London to see the King and Sir Keir Starmer, this is a useful reminder that political populism does have its limits. Luxon, Starmer and Anthony Albanese don’t bring a lot of charisma to the selling of their political agendas, thank goodness. The Luxon we have is not the PM anyone wants, and that goes for many in his party, and (probably) for some members of his own caucus.
All the same, opposition parties here and elsewhere are not gaining much traction, either. At best, they appear to be trying to make their opponents just as unpopular as they are. This is especially true of the United States, where Donald Trump’s favourability ratings are in decline, more Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction and more people are feeling pessimistic about how all of this will affect them. Regardless, the public’s perception of the Democratic Party remains as negative as ever. (Here, the Labour Party suffers only slightly less from the same problem.)
Basically, centre-left opposition parties that have recently been in government are struggling to find an identity in an era where they are still detested by many of the voters they need to win over, to be re-elected. As the veteran Democratic Party strategist Ruy Teixeira noted recently:
…For many working-class voters to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as un-enlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach, and Democrats have flunked it over and over.
That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook that they detest.
That doesn’t mean being nice to the MAGA fascists /extremists out there, or soft pedalling the response. Teixeira’s point has some validity though, and it isn’t an easy one to digest by centre-left partisans who feel that they’re on the side of the angels. At root, much of it probably comes down to a class issue. As he says, the educated and professions-dominated upper middle classes who hold most of the positions of administrative and cultural power tend to be centre-left in their cultural worldview, and political allegiances. Meaning: the “Bash the Rich” messaging may have all but passed its use-by date, given that is coming from people seen to be relatively privileged.
This means that the people who belong to the upper middle classes are seen to be legitimate targets of populist anger – “even if, in their imagination, they are sticking it to The Man and fighting nobly for social justice.” Clearly, it is not going to be enough to promise a return to the old normal.
On the polling, a clear majority of the US public wants social and economic change even more than they want stability. Yet in NZ, the UK and Australia alike, the mainstream centre-left parties seem fearfully reluctant to adopt any new policy directions not sanitised in focus groups beforehand. As a result, a change of government tomorrow would mean putting the Labour Party and its cultural priorities back in power even if – increasingly – that brand is felt to be an electoral liability.
To win over its populist antagonists, the centre left needs a change that more closely aligns with populist sentiment, without simply following along behind it. Such a change is easier said than imagined, let alone done.
Changing the brand, branding the change
So far this year, much of the debate on the centre-left’s tactical crisis has been sparked by the book Abundance, written by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic. The book’s central thesis is that progressive goals in housing, scientific innovation, energy and transport infrastructure (in particular) are being stymied by all of the barriers, bottlenecks and regulations that prevent these good things being achieved in sufficient quantities, and /or in a timely fashion, if at all.
The book is utopian, in that it requires taking a supply-side miracle on faith. Once the regulatory channels have been radically unblocked, the authors maintain, the subsequent supply stream will create an “abundance” of social goods that will bring down their price and make them affordable to all. By so doing, it will enable centre-left governments to reclaim their former mantle of being the provider of what voters want, and not the defensive, risk-averse obstacle standing in the way of changes to the status quo that people want, and arguably, need.
For obvious reasons, Klein and Thompson try to differentiate themselves from the kind of free market de-regulation that treats all environmental/ local/community powers and restraints as troublesome barriers to Progress and Prosperity. If anything, the authors’ vision of wise government is more hands-on than what we have at present. currently. In pursuit of the liberal ecotopia that the authors have in mind, abundance governments will be empowered to operate on a timetable comparable to any fast track process driven by corporate interests.
If that still sounds a little…risky…the authors do offer detailed case studies that demonstrate how various forms of bureaucratic inertia have delayed the delivery of socially desirable projects…such as for instance, California’s costly, decades-long and doomed pursuit of high speed rail. Not to mention the many and varied ways that Nimbyism can stall the provision of affordable housing on anything like the scale needed to satisfy demand.
Yet as several reviewers have also pointed out, there is a lot of magical thinking – and anti-democratic impulses – involved in advocating that many, many minority legal rights and regulations can and should be sacrificed to enable the greater good to be supplied in abundance, and on time.
Almost certainly, this approach would not unify the centre-left. It is just as likely to pit people, groups and communities against each other, as the bulldozers come in and the high rises associated with housing density go up next door, lowering the value of a family’s main (or only) economic asset.
This is an especially thorny subject in this country, given that the New Zealand economy has been accurately described (by Bernard Hickey) as consisting of “a housing market with a few bits tacked on.” Having been encouraged to invest in property by the lack of a capital gains tax, people understandably cling to the rules that protect the value of their housing asset, whether these be in the form of zoning regulations or height and density restrictions. Meaning: the greater good in abundance – far more housing, at far lower prices – will come with casualties, and a lot of pushback.
Similarly, the abundance approach to transport (as envisaged by Klein and Thompson) would see driverless cars, drones, tolls, congestion pricing and e-bikes featuring prominently in our cityscapes by 2050. That wouldn’t be a frictionless future, either. Fleets of driverless cars would lower the road toll, but create congestion, and emissions. A sky full of drones would be a mixed (and noisy) blessing. Ditto…tolls and congestion pricing sound good, especially to those who can readily afford them. Klein and Thompson tend to brush past these and other negative externalities.
By focussing so much of their attention to the failures of centre-left governance and electability – and attributing them almost entirely to excessive regulation – they also virtually ignore issues of corporate profit seeking, and the costly role that privatisation and outsourcing have been playing for decades in the inadequate provision of essential services and infrastructure. This includes the ways that IT is being rolled out, and is rolling through the labour force. Ultimately, all of these factors impact on affordability right along the supply chain- with an excess of regulation not being the prime culprit, and especially not in this, least regulated of developed countries.
On the upside though – as the authors also claim – the abundance approach would enable the centre-left to present itself as something other than the defenders of a status quo widely resented by the voters they are trying to recruit. Can centrism be populist? Derek Thompson seems to think so.
Footnote One: Not surprisingly, the de-regulatory messaging central to Abundance has been warmly welcomed by the political right, who already have their own de-regulatory plans up on the whiteboard, and who seem to be embracing Klein and Thompson as fellow travellers who have belatedly seen the light. Thoughtful reviews of Abundance can be found here, and here, with the later review focussing on the application of Abundance concepts to car culture and building transport infrastructure.
Footnote Two: Ultimately, would any centre-left government worthy of the name be able to deliver on what Arizona’s Democratic senator Ruben Gallegos wryly described to the New York Times as the dream goal of many of his constituents: “Every Latino man wants to own a big-ass truck.” At the moment, every centre-left party in the world has a Big-Ass Truck Problem.
S G Goodman, Jim Legxacy
S.G. Goodman is from western Kentucky, and this new single comes from her upcoming Planting by the Signs album, due on June 20:
While “Space and Time” remains Goodman’s masterpiece, this languidly lovely track from her debut album tends to be overlooked:
Jim Legxacy is a 21 year old south-east London rapper of Nigerian heritage. “Stick” and “Aggressive” are his two newest singles, and while more mainstream, they maintain the optimistic spirit of this early cut, “The Day I Broke My Bike.” She broke up with him, he’s now riding a lonely road, but he can still do it, with no handlebars…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y56ElHVOsmA
From six months ago here’s the “Aggressive” single, a song about trying to transcend the mindset of violence and response: “When you get aggressive/You throw words like frag grenades/You, you just get possessive/I try to fight the feeling”…Jim L is keeping up his resistance, and his evident love for the Blackberry phone: