New Zealanders, and union organisers, Ian Hoffman and Justine Sachs writing on the 2020 NZ election titled, “No Excuses: Historic New Zealand Election Challenges Labour Movement”, in Counter Punch, (30 October 2020) a US on line site: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/30/no-excuses-historic-new-zealand-election-challenges-labor-movement/ declare that Chlöe Swarbrick’s election in Auckland Central was an ‘AOC Moment, referring to US House of Representatives for New York's 14th congressional district, Democrat member Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and say:
“New Zealand even had its very own AOC moment as 26-year-old Green candidate Chlöe Swarbrick upset Labour’s Helen White in the Auckland Central seat… Swarbrick defied poll predictions—which had the moderate White easily winning the seat—on the back of increased youth turnout. This was one of many results that demonstrates the real appetite among the public for progressive change. It is important, however, to throw cold water on the idea that the Labour government will enact this change without being pushed.
After the 2017 election, the Labour-led coalition government promised to be a “transformational government” that would “lift up those who have been forgotten or neglected and … build a truly prosperous nation and a fair society.”
Unfortunately, the government’s actions did not match their [sic] rhetoric.”
Our very own AOC moment over states the matter and detracts from the obvious competencies of Chlöe Swarbrick. The mimicry of narrative clichés and slogans is in play. AOC occupies a liberal elite bubble that disdains the middle class as “chumps.”
The bubble mentality, in my view, is neo Marxian driven and has consequences for understanding reality and those who have not been beguiled by the ideology. Robert Trivers (an evolutionary biologist) cited by Charles Murray in Human Diversity says:
“Once you remove biology [read as reality] from human social life [politics], what do you have? Words. Not even language, which of course is deeply biological, but words alone that then wield magical powers, capable of biasing your every thought, science itself reduced to one of many arbitrary systems of thought.
“..,believing that words have the power to dominate reality, [with] social constructs…[verbal constructs?]
AOC
expounds the cant, jingles and
clichés and words of BLM, identity politics and
Democratic Socialism. As CBS news writer, Michael
Graham, noted in 2018 “Unfortunately, Ocasio-Cortez doesn't appear
to have test driven her campus socialism in the real world.”
Let’s take “defund the police.” Professor Allan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School, professor emeritus, a long time Democrat and liberal, on a recent podcast considers AOC, first, is a danger to democratic values; and secondly, her call, set out in a newsletter, appositely called, ‘Jacobin’ to defund the police “a dangerous cliché which should be rejected out of hand.” There are serious real world effects to de funding the police. Florida’s Latin voters were sensitive to the civil outcomes of defunding. In places like Colombia, Hondurans or Nicaragua, people live behind barred windows, locked patio grills and tall concrete walls embedded with broken glass bottles and barbed wire, guard dogs and, if wealthy enough, patrols by guards at night.
Yet also, it is immoral and unfair to reduce the salaries of poorly paid workers-police- which seems inimical to Democratic Socialism and is harmful. But it is the liberal belt way elite who despise and “snicker” at the middle and working class: Sam Siegel, The Revolt Against the Masses which well explains the mind-set and power of the elite political classes.
Politics by cliché, and the ambiguity of meaning and the deceit of ‘semantic over load’ (verbal Trojan horses) like ‘progressive’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’, which carry layers or penumbral meanings are not ones of substance or practicality- but are constructions of ideas and words merely connected to themselves: signifiers sans signified. Read any post- modernist/neo Marxist text and there are layers of interconnected quotes and authors names as qualifiers and evidence for argument.
AOC is central figure in the Democrat Party’s hard left Democratic Socialist and identity politics wing. The AOC Squad and Bernie Sanders have stated that they wish to advance a more progressive agenda. That progressive agenda must be read as Democratic Socialism or we might say, after Dinesh D’Souza, adding ‘identity socialism.’
They avowedly wish to pull Joe Biden, if President, further left. He signed up to the “Biden - Sanders’s Unity Agreement”- risibly described by Mark Levin as a ‘communist manifesto’. Biden has capitulated to the New Green Deal and to anti fracking. Pulling the plug on oil and gas will result in great numbers of unemployed in states already affected by the off shoring of jobs. It also means trashing oil/gas self-sufficiency, with the flow on of higher consumer costs across the board. California this summer had electricity supply problems resulting in black outs from having shut down two generation plants. Biden, should he win and survive being toppled by the radicals and Kamala Harris, has been characterised as a ‘transactional-dime store- politician’ but he might find this deal hard to skip out.
Hoffman and Sachs, to summarise, state that Labour will need to be pushed to effect the “transformational government” they desire. That had Labour done so that would “lift up those who have been forgotten or neglected and … build a truly prosperous nation and a fair society.” (emphasis added)
President Obama had stated his progressive aim was to ‘substantively transform America.’ He was adept with language exploiting the ambiguity in the words ‘progress’ and ‘progressive’, i.e. what we mean is not what we are saying. Clearly, Obama expected his progressive agenda to be ongoing past 2016. Both he and Clinton favoured progressivism, identity politics, along with affinities for the radical activist and community organiser- Thirteen Rues for Radicals- Saul Alinsky. Yet, most curiously, at the same time, they were elitist, and despicably disdainful and derogatory of the fly over class, who were truly forgotten during Obama’s presidency, with many dying of opiate abuse the consequences of poverty resulting from unemployment.
Transformation and transformational was a term used by Lenin in his coup of 1917. We should be then sceptical of ‘transformation’ in clichés and slogans. Hoffman and Sachs do note the gap between rhetoric and outcome. Perhaps Democratic socialism, in the present dominant – charlatan-Foucault academic discourse, is merely all about power for elitist liberals and not about Hoffman and Sachs’s workers.
It is striking how many socialists revolutions evolve from being ‘pushed’, ‘pulled’ or as Che Guevara said, plucked like apples and purport to be in the name of the workers or the people or the fictitious “General Will”, but then many of its leaders are middle class brats, like Robespierre, Danton, Lenin, Mao (transitioning to it from peasant origins), Castro, Che Guevara, Pol Pot and Hugo Chavez.
Hoffman and Sachs mention “..fair society..” is this another potential example of semantic over load ? Does fair mean equal as to opportunity or equitable as to outcome? Kamala Harris’ in an advertisement on Twitter “There’s a big difference between equality and equity”: pic.twitter.com/n3XfQyjLNe — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 1, 2020 has equitable meaning: “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” That has been seen as selling a neo Marxist agenda, as a concession to communism and as pandering to the ‘Justice Democrats’ (a progressive PAC with one of its founders, Saikat Chakrabarti, being the former chief of staff to AOC), and the Democratic Socialists- the AOC squad.
Finally a point on government control. From
Woodrow Wilson to FDR to LBJ and then Obama government for progressives a Holy
Grail. Hoffman and Sachs say:
“ For the first time [about Covid-19] in a long time, people
acknowledged the positive presence of government in their lives.
“
Did they mean those who lost their business, had turn over cut in half and beyond or those who are now unemployed facing mortgagee sales or older male workers seeking work and cannot get work because they have been displaced and labelled ‘pale male and stale?’ Or if there is a second wave of covid, as seen in Europe and the USA presently, will it voraciously burn through those who locked down?
They latter, add in relation to a comment of Ronald Reagan’s frightening words, ‘I am from the government and here to help you:
“If there’s a lesson to be learned from New Zealand in 2020, it’s that just the opposite is true: those could be the most comforting words.”
Therapeutic socialism aside, there is no comfort in dealing with MSD and its arbitrary system and thresholds if one is a household couple; there is no comfort in the government’s discrimination that a spouse cannot be entitled to MSD support; there is no comfort in government ruling on freedom of speech and thus conscience; there is no comfort if you are unemployed; there is no comfort if your business has been decimated and staff had to be let go.
“ Labour put people before profit” they say. Small business employ most people in New Zealand and “workers” are not a bankrupted theoretical axiom in a 19thC Hegelian dialectic that can be divorced from businesses, and profit is what pays employees. Mr Hoffman works as a PSA Organiser and deals with government employees; Ms Sachs works for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, whose members are predominantly public sector.
Is Chloe Swarbrick an AOC? Or are Hoffman and Sachs rehashing a constructed idea from words, clichés, cant and jingles to fit a progressivist narrative? Ultimately, facts and the human needs and experiences of human suffering may mean that words alone do not “have the power to dominate reality” through elite liberal Neo Marxist, and neo Platonically derived, ‘social constructs.’
We need the light of day and not Plato’s cave dwelling theory of ideal forms and the objects of detached and un-anchored words- unseen constructs.
Sometimes, it seems we are left with the thought that were being cajoled or fooled into taking and giving credence of voices in people's heads
Graham Hill
8 November 2020.
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