THE LEFT IS ON THE MOVE, BUT NOT IN NEW ZEALAND

Claire Valdez

New Zealand politics is stuck in the quagmire of a suffocating centrism. But it doesn't have to be this way. The political imagination is not dead everywhere. In New York, socialist politics is on the move. Its rejection of status quo centrism contrasts sharply with the anaemic state of New Zealand politics. 

 

FOR THOSE of us on the socialist left, this year’s general election is an uninspiring proposition. New Zealand politics remains mired in the quagmire of status-quo centrism, with Labour and National jostling not to transform society but to become the next manager of the neoliberal economy.  It's little more than a contest to see who gets to administer the decline. The parties may trade barbs, but the underlying consensus — austerity, market discipline, and political timidity — remains untouched.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we lift our eyes beyond our borders, we can see that the political imagination is not dead everywhere. In fact, 14,000 kilometres away in New York, something remarkable has happened. This week, three candidates backed by the insurgent left defeated corporate Democratic incumbents. Behind them stood the organisational muscle of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is rapidly becoming a major political force in one of the United States’ most important cities. Two of the victorious candidates — Claire Valdez in the 7th Congressional District and Darializa Avila Chevalier in the 13th — are themselves DSA members, running unapologetically on a socialist platform.

It is not difficult to understand why socialism might appeal to Americans today. For millions of young people, crushed by the cost of living, student debt, and a political class that has failed to confront Trumpism, the Democratic establishment has offered little more than a defence of the status quo. They have watched as inequality has soared, wages have stagnated, and corporate power has tightened its grip on every aspect of life. Faced with this, many have sought out alternatives. Polling reflects this shift: a Gallup survey last September found that only 42 percent of Democrats held a favourable view of capitalism, while 66 percent viewed socialism positively. That is not a fringe sentiment — it is a generational realignment.

The United States was once regarded as a wasteland for socialist politics, a place where the left was marginalised, mocked, or crushed. Not anymore. As the Washington Post put it recently, “the left is on the move.” And it is on the move not because it moderated itself into irrelevance, but because it organised — block by block, workplace by workplace, campaign by campaign. It built institutions, trained leaders, and refused to apologise for its politics. It offered a vision of a society that could be different, and people responded.

Contrast that with New Zealand, where the political imagination feels anaemic. The major parties have spent years narrowing the horizons of what is considered possible. Labour, once the party of working-class aspiration, now speaks the technocratic language of fiscal responsibility and incrementalism. National promises competence and discipline, as if the country’s problems were merely managerial rather than structural. The Greens, despite flashes of radicalism from co-leader Chloe Swarbrick, has tethered itself to Labour's cautious centrism that rarely challenges the foundations of the economic order. The result is a political landscape where transformative ideas are treated as naive and where the electorate is told — implicitly and explicitly — that decline is inevitable and must simply be managed.

Yet the hunger for something different is palpable. Poll after poll shows deep dissatisfaction with the political class and the status quo. Voters do not believe the major parties can improve the country. They see the cost-of-living crisis worsening, public services fraying, and inequality deepening. They see a political system that tinkers at the edges while avoiding the root causes of the crisis. What they do not see is a movement willing to articulate a bold alternative.

This is where the lesson from New York matters. The left does not advance by waiting for permission from the political establishment. It advances by organising, by contesting power, by building structures capable of challenging the status quo. It advances by speaking to the material realities of people’s lives — housing, wages, healthcare, dignity — and by offering not just critique but hope.

New Zealand is not condemned to managerial centrism. The thin gruel on offer this election is not the limit of what politics can be. If socialism can take root in the United States — a country long considered hostile terrain — then it can take root here too. But it will not happen by accident. It will require courage, organisation, and a willingness to break with the suffocating consensus that has dominated our politics for decades.

The left is on the move elsewhere. It is time we moved too.