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.
