HOW DO YOU LIKE IT SO FAR?

As house prices and rents soar into the stratosphere and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rejects widespread community calls for an increase in benefit levels to alleviate the country's growing level of poverty and social distress, its worth reflecting that this is the 'lesser evil' Labour Government that the Labour-aligned left promised us....they should be ashamed of themselves.

HOW ARE YOU liking it so far? How are you enjoying the 'lesser evilism' of this second term Labour Government? As the country's level of poverty and inequality continues to rise, are you basking in the comforting  knowledge that it could have all been happening under a National Government? Think about that for a moment. Unemployed. Homeless. Under National. Ugh.

Are you eternally grateful that it has been Jacinda Ardern rather than Judith Collins who has rejected the widespread community call for core benefits to be increased?  As house prices crash through the stratosphere and rents continue to soar, are you at least comforted by the fact that at least it isn't happening under a government led by Collins? When's the last time she appeared on the cover of a women's magazine?  When's the last time she had her 'empathy' described as 'almost supernatural' by the editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury? These are crucial issues which, no doubt, will be explored by The Standard.

The premise of lesser evilism, the strategy employed by activists slightly to the left of Labour - can you really tell the difference between a right wing and left wing social democrat? -  has plagued the left  for the past three decades. Back in the day, it was the argument that the now-defunct and not missed Socialist Unity Party used to justify its support for the fourth Labour Government of David Lange, even as Roger Douglas was unleashing his monetarist 'reforms' on an unsuspecting nation. The SUP has long disappeared but there have been other groups and activists down the years who have happy to carry on its legacy.

Lesser evilism has always argued that, given the constraints of our election system, the best  strategy is to support and vote for the least damaging option. But the problem is as the policy differences  have continued to narrow between Labour and National, to the point that  former National Party voters are now happy to vote for Labour,  lesser evilism has become not so much a 'progressive' strategy but a convenient and cynical  defence of the status quo and often masking some cosy organisational ties between 'lesser evil' advocates and the Labour Party. The supporters of lesser evilism time and time again forget they  chose not to advance the progressive cause but chose to vote for more evil.

While its automatically accepted by Labour supporters that the purpose of the National Party is to advance the interests of capital against the interests of the working class, they can't quite accept the reality that Labour too exists to advance the interests of capital against the interests of the working class. So we now have a Labour-aligned left either defending a thoroughly centrist and neoliberal Labour Government or arguing that it can still be 'reformed'. It leads to political commentators anguishing over Jacinda Ardern's centrist politics as if they are some kind of  unfortunate aberration when she has never been more than a centrist politician at any point during her political career. It is other people who have constructed and portrayed her as something else altogether.

But Jacinda Ardern's facade of public charisma has begun to fade away as she has continued to resist calls to be something  more than just a defender of the status quo.  Her charisma was always skin deep and the product of a public relations campaign, but if there's no affirmative  case for Jacinda Ardern then there is no affirmative case for the Labour Party itself. 

With the politics of 'lesser evilism' you never get the government that you actually want. Maybe its time that 'lesser evilism' was dropped in the dustbin of history where it really belongs.