The Project Begins

I've been reading Jordan Carter's often-excellent blog, Just Left for roughly four years, on and off. Now, I'm no social democrat, and to my shockingly biassed eye, he's wrong more often than he's right. But he's smart, and his posts are generally well-reasoned. He's at his best when in big-think mode, and engages very well with political oppenents.

What I find most interesting are his near misses. Like almost everyone who actually cares about policy and politics, he's emotionally invested. Sometimes, this means he trips over his strongest arguments and onto his strongest assertions. An example is Tuesday's post, The Project Begins.

It's a little bit early to be declaring that National "won't be values based. The only value it seeks to serve is power itself" and Jordan knows this. But beneath the reductive and overheated rhetoric, he has a point.

A circumlocution: what strikes me is just how similar this criticism of National is to one that was aimed squarely at Labour for, well, nine years. The Fifth Labour Government always had a populist streak that seemed at odds with social democratic principles. The foreshore and seabed legislation was as close to a modern-day land-grab as we'll ever see. PM Clark's callous attitude towards the Alliance, then the Greens, and then the Maori Party—all straightforward populist wedge politics—probably had short-term gains for Labour, but ultimately sealed its fate in last year's election.

Now this inversion, this petty swipe at Labour, achieves nothing but illustrate Jordan's point: to the extent that National is—or is widely construed to be—interested only in holding the treasury benches, that's bad for the country, and will soon see Labour back in government. To the extent it's true, then indeed, "the task for Labour is to uncover that moral bankruptcy, expose it, and persuade the public of its reality." I endorse this comment, and hell, I'm a card-carrying National member.

But here's where I think Jordan's wrong: I don't think the Nats have gone down that path yet. I certainly don't think that National's failure to spring a quixotic campaign against minimum-wage increases on an unsuspecting New Zealand public is evidence that they're anywhere near that path. Maybe it's just pragmatism of the sort that Jordan's praised before.

My own attitude is "wait and see." I'm a fan of National, and I like to believe that most politicians have noble aims. But political power comes with some pretty perverse incentives, and Jordan has correctly identified an old and popular trap for politicians to fall into. I just think his announcement that National has fallen into that trap is... premature.

Reaction on the right-blogs was frustratingly defensive, and even more reductive than Jordan's post. Why? It's possible that the post hit a raw nerve. More likely, for those who are emotionally invested in National, the overheated style and innaccuracy of the post made the attack seem unfair.

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A couple of quick notes.

The quixotic argument against the minimum wage is laid out here.

Jordan's post was more a call to arms for the left than a critique of National, and it's perhaps a bit unfair to be treating it as if it were the latter. Just Left is now a group blog, including two of my favourite left-bloggers, Tony Milne and Michael Wood. With Jordan, I reckon these three are the most intellectually ambitious of all the partisan bloggers in NZ. It should be fun reading them.

The tagline: "A National government with power at the heart of its ambition for New Zealand", is magnificent. Rubbish, but magnificent.