CHRIS TROTTER'S LONG MARCH TO THE RIGHT

Political commentator Chris Trotter has abandoned what remains of his social democratic politics and embraced the politics of the right.


CHRIS TROTTER has packed up his ideological kitbag and strode off to the right to set up base among his new friends at the National-led coalition government and at conservative media outlets like ZBPlus and The Platform. But he still seems determined to explain to a left that he has abandoned, just how wrong it is about mostly everything. That the left is no longer listening to him hardly seems to matter; it is as if Trotter is seeking to justify his lurch to the right by explaining to his readers how stuffed the left really is. But how many will be convinced enough to keep reading him?

In recent times, he has accused the left of 'self-loathing' because of its continuing support for the Palestine liberation movement and the people of Gaza. According to Trotter, this is nothing more than support for 'non-progressive religious/political movements' like Hamas.

Even the election of George Galloway as the MP for the UK seat of Rochdale has earned Trotter's ire. He has suggested that Galloway's victory is being 'hailed as a triumph by the sort of leftist who no longer sees white workers as a progressive force.'  The Canterbury Socialist Society says that comments like these are 'brain-dead' and I agree. The grossly racist and anti-Muslim sentiment expressed in such a view is also obvious. It's grimly inevitable that Trotter thinks that the slaughter of over 30,000 innocent men, women, and children in Gaza are merely the result of Israel acting in 'self-defence'.

Although Trotter likes to reference his role as a foundation member of NewLabour and his support for the Alliance as evidence of his left-wing credentials, that was many, many years ago. In truth, his recent politics have never extended beyond support for the Labour Party and the occasional flirt with the Green's. He has always been hostile to those (like me) who have argued that the Labour Party is a political dead end for the left. Ironically, and at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, Trotter's departure for the right confirms that people like me were correct in our view.

Trotter held out great hopes for Labour under the leadership of Jacinda Ardern. While some of us warned that Ardern had never exhibited anything other than the instincts of a centrist politician, Trotter fondly envisaged a bright non-neoliberal future for New Zealand under a progressive Labour Government. That it never came to pass has proven to be too much of a bitter pill for him to swallow. Labour's recent embrace of such thorny issues as Maori co-governance and gender ideology, has only confirmed to Trotter that Labour is no longer a political party he can identify with and support.

And the right has been all too ready to embrace someone that the Democracy Project still absurdly claims is 'writing from the left'. Trotter's new conservative politics means he has been welcomed by right wing outlets like ZBPlus and The Platform, who may of otherwise largely ignored him.  Now in his mid-sixties, Trotter wants to still engage with public life even if it is as a conservative commentator who frequently dumps on the left. And, as Scott Hamilton has observed, 'The right-wing platforms Trotter now produces work for are happy to call him the true voice of the left. But just as Kenny G is only seen as a jazz musician by people who don't listen to jazz, and Jim Morrison is hailed as a great poet by folks who don't read poetry, so Trotter is nowadays seen as leftist only by those hostile to the left. His story is sad, but also instructive.'

And, just as important for Trotter, the right offers him validation of his reactionary view that the possibility of progressive change is now only a forlorn hope. He remains troubled by 'extremists' like Chloe Swarbrick who are seeking to do more than just tinker with a failed economic and political system. The left, much to Trotter's alarm, is slowly moving beyond the old social democratic and incremental politics he is familiar with and has spent his entire political life defending. Like a grumpy old man, Trotter waves his walking stick at Chloe Swarbrick and berates the likely new Green Party co-leader for her 'revolutionary zealotry'.

Chris Trotter has found political solace with the forces of the right. Its strength - and weakness - is that it doesn't have to provide a manifesto for a new future. Instead, for Chris Trotter at least, it offers him a return to a past that no longer exists and cannot exist again. Listen closely to Trotter's new hero, the anti-socialist Winston Peters, and the message is 'let's go back to the way things were'.

But 'going back to the way things were' means, in reality, defending and enforcing the interests of capital. The culture wars may well prove to have been a disastrous distraction for the left, because it is the economic terrain where the new struggles are likely to occur. And that, inevitably, means a return to a class-based politics. Chris Trotter, though, has chosen to throw in his lot with those to who seek to enforce the interests of the ruling class.