CUDDLY CENTRISM

Jacinda Ardern Her  centrist politics represent no threat to the political elite.

The same media organisations that have praised Jacinda Ardern are the same media organisations openly hostile to left wing politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Why can't they just be cuddly, non-threatening centrists like Ardern?

THE AFTERMATH of the Christchurch terrorist attack has seen the sanctification of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. She has been hailed by her congregation for her warmth, her compassion and her empathy. Welcome to the Cult of Jacinda. 

The praying at the altar of Saint Jacinda has even extended to the international media. The Guardian has compared her to the austere and divisive leaderships of Theresa May and Donald Trump. She's not exactly up against stiff opposition so there are no prizes for guessing who was found wanting. Unlike Ardern, observed The Guardian, both Trump and May are 'emotionally distant'.

Inevitably, The Guardian has concluded that Britain needs a leader like Jacinda Ardern. Not, apparently, a leader like their own Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Of course the newspaper has been waging a campaign against Corbyn ever since he replaced Ed Miliband as Labour leader in September 2015. In recent times it has joined in the Blairite attempt to smear Corbyn as anti-semetic.

Last year the Media Reform Coalition said that inaccurate and misleading reporting by The Guardian about Jeremy Corbyn was 'especially pronounced".

In the United States Jacinda Ardern has been widely praised by such mainstream media outlets as the New York Times and CNN. But these are exactly the same media organisations that have displayed an obvious hostility for their own Bernie Sanders.

In January the New York Times published a front page article that claimed that Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was rife with sexism and discrimination against female campaign staffers. The article was headlined “For Bernie Sanders, Claims of Sexism in 2016 Campaign Hang Over 2020 Bid,”

 But the article is little than a series of unsubstantiated allegations , none of them involving sexual assault or any other form of criminal behaviour. All those accused have vehemently denied the charges, with some saying that the article was nothing more than a deliberate attempt to undermine Sander's campaign to become the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential candidate. They have a point.

Meanwhile, over at CNN, the cable network is busy pretending that corporate Democrat Joe Biden is the favourite to become the Democratic Party's next presidential candidate. CNN has started boosting Biden before he has even announced that he is a candidate - which he will - and despite the fact that all the polls continue to show that Bernie Sanders remains the most popular politician in the United States.

Jeremy  Corbyn : A socilist plan for Britain.

The source of the  obvious antipathy and hostility displayed toward both Corbyn and Sanders is because they both represent a real threat to the interests of the political establishment. Corbyn has an unashamedly socialist plan to transform Britain. At the Labour Party conference last year he said:

'People in this country know that the old way of running things isn’t working any more, And unless we offer radical solutions, others will fill the gap with the politics of blame and division.'

Similarly in the United States Sanders represents a threat to the one percent because he has helped build a movement of working-class people that crosses racial, ethnic, and gender lines. It is a movement that challenges both politics as usual and chips away at the notion that capitalism should never be questioned, let alone overturned.

It is little wonder that Jacinda Ardern should be embraced by the political establishment because, unlike Corbyn or Sanders, she represents next to no threat to its interests. As far as its concerned she can carry on talking about 'unity' and 'compassion', she can even wear flowers in her hair if she likes, so long as she continues to keep socialist politics off the agenda.

But with Jacinda Arden leading government still charting a neoliberal course and with the level of inequality and poverty continuing to widen, it can only be a matter of time before people start pointing to the discrepancy between Ardern's feel-good rhetoric and the grim reality for many of the folk she claims to represent.