CULT OF PERSONALITY

Dismissing the #TurnArdern social media campaign as the work of National Party lovin' reactionaries misses the point. It smacks of liberal arrogance that ignores the reasons that has led to the campaign taking off in the first place.

WHEN I WROTE about Jacinda Ardern's eagerness  to appear on magazine covers I was entirely unaware that a #TurnArdern campaign had emerged in the social media. The campaign involves the flipping around of magazines in the supermarkets and elsewhere which have Ardern on the cover.  Her new and appalling hagiography, Jacinda Ardern : The Story Behind an Extraordinary Leader, has also been receiving the same treatment.

While the campaign clearly doesn't have any political affinity with the Labour Party in general, it would be a mistake to simply write it off as the campaign of some right wing nuts. It obviously has tapped into a dissatisfaction with the performance of the Prime Minister and her government. The man behind the campaign, 66 year old Colin Wilson of Christchurch, expressed that dissatisfaction to RNZ:

'We've got a prime minister that hasn't got time to look into child poverty, hasn't got time to look into the housing crisis, and yet she's got time to go and do all these fluff articles that seem to be pulled out whenever she's in trouble....People are sick and tired of all the fluff articles - people want a prime minister and not a fashion model.'

This is a perfectly reasonable and legitimate comment to make but RNZ has still chosen to tag the campaign as 'bizarre'. 

Colin Wilson has certainly rattled the cage of the Jacinda Ardern Fan Club. Martyn Bradbury of The Daily Blog is one of media's biggest sycophantic supporters of Ardern so its entirely unsurprising he's not impressed with the campaign. Last week he wrote (spelling and grammatical errors included):

'What sort of spiteful prick has the time and energy to enter bookshops and turn magazines and books of Jacinda around and then have the immature audacity to share that online as if it’s some type of radical political action? Why National Party supporters are tis petty and malicious. The banality of evil laid out in all its provincial charm. These National voters give bookburners a good name.'

Michelle Duff

The author of the previously mentioned autobiography has also felt compelled to slam  #TurnArdern. Michelle Duff has described it as the product of men who hate women, although that doesn't explain why quite a number of women appear to be involved in the campaign as well. Writing on the Spin Off website Duff commented:

'"Throughout history, attempts have been made to silence women. We've been drowned as witches, denied the vote, gaslighted in relationships, had our ideas stolen in meetings, had our voices and views disbelieved and minimised. We've been done to, not done by. "Seen in this light, #TurnArdern is just another manifestation of this simmering hatred of women that lies just beneath the surface. It's the kind most of us don't even notice or have acclimatised to until it bursts into the public consciousness in ways that are impossible to ignore."

But there's nothing to suggest that Colin Wilson or anyone else involved in the campaign resent having a woman as Prime Minister. This campaign has not been sparked by a hatred for women but by a growing resentment to what its participants see as a Cult of Personality growing up around Jacinda Ardern and one that they think is being that  propped up by her acolytes in the media. Trawling through Twitter I noticed several journalists as various as Alison Mau, Lizzy Marvelly and  David Fisher were being lambasted as cheerleaders for Ardern.

The liberal milieu that revolves around planet Jacinda might dismiss this campaign as the product of National Party lovin' reactionaries but they do so at their own peril. A Prime Minister who defends economic policies that have led to nearly 250,000 children living in poverty while the rich have grown richer is not going to be looked upon kindly by people who think that her many media dalliances add insult to injury. They are the kind of people who have not been doing well economically and they have the ability to vote Jacinda Ardern out of office next year.