THE ILLUSION OF DEMOCRACY

The hollowing out of our representative democracy means that political leaders like Chris Hipkins and Chris Luxon can only scrape together low levels of support from a civil society that has seen a significant number of people disengage from electoral politics altogether. Welcome to the General Election 2023.

AFTER WATCHNG the yawnfest of a Leaders Debate on television last night there will be many who will agree with the observation of Bryce Edwards that 'The 2023 general election campaign must be the most hollow in living memory. There really isn’t much that is positive or attractive about the electoral options on offer. This is an election without inspiration.'

What we saw was a debate between two charmless and charisma-free political leaders who struggled to disagree on anything substantial. It is little wonder that people are, as journalist Julie Jacobson has commented, 'out of love with what’s currently on offer'. Maybe it's time for a complete divorce.

Of course, working class people have been unhappy with the state of our democracy for years. That has been most forcibly expressed by the number of people who simply do not vote. In 2020 some 670,000 voters stayed away from the polling booths. This occurred in the same decade when the two general elections in 2011 and 2014 saw the lowest and second-lowest voter turnout recorded since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1893. That prompted the Electoral Commission in 2014 to comment that ‘New Zealand has a serious problem with declining voter participation.' Former Labour leader David Cunliffe says he expects a record low turnout this year - and a record low vote share for Labour and National combined.

When asked why they did not vote the common answer has been that voting does not make a difference because politicians are 'all the same'. It's unlikely either Chris Hipkins or Chris Luxon have done anything to change people's opinion.

Bryce Edwards also observes that there is real anger out in the community, and he quotes journalist Mark Blackham who writes 'MPs are encountering angry people – a general anger about the state of affairs and paucity of political choices.'

But that anger did not just surface overnight. It has been there for years. It was most starkly evident last February when protesters occupied Parliament grounds.

But rather than actually listening and engaging with the protesters the reaction of the political establishment was uniformly hostile. The protest was dismissed as 'alt right' and even 'neo fascist' rather than as a legitimate expression of dissent against a democratic system that has denied working class people a voice. That same expression of political disenfranchisement expressed on Parliament grounds has continued through to this year's general election. 

The difference though is the Commentariat, mostly hostile to the protesters last year, has finally picked up on the anger and disillusionment abroad in the community today. There is a certain irony in a well -known 'progressive' commentator, who last year lambasted the Wellington protesters as 'lumpenproletariat' and urged the police to deal to them, now bemoaning the failure of the political establishment to recognise the mood for change. 

I recall writing, many years ago, an article headlined 'If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal'. That's a quote from the Russian anarchist Emma Goldman. I was writing, for a local Los Angeles audience, about the parlous state of America's democracy. My main point was that there was no need for capitalism to ban elections when the corporate sector controlled both the Democratic and Republican parties. The illusion of democracy could carry on apace.

While I don't wish to 'gild the lily' there has been some improvement since then. Despite the emergence of Donald Trump (or because of the emergence of Donald Trump) there has been a renewal of interest in left wing and explicitly socialist politics. America's biggest socialist organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America, has over 100,000 members and has succeeded in getting a healthy number of its candidates voted into office both on a federal and local level. Its most prominent and visible member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a US congresswoman and she uses her position as a platform to promote policies and views that would normally not be heard within the Washington milieu. It has largely been the work of AOC, for example, that has driven the momentum for a Green New Deal.

Nothing like this has occurred in New Zealand and it's high time that it did. One of the crucial lessons that the left needs to take from this general election is that simply saying that Labour is preferable to National is not good enough. And, post-election, claiming that the defeated Labour Party, without anything changing, will do better 'next time' is simply kicking the can down the road again. It plays into the hands of those who want to keep things just the way they are.