I note that today, in a period when the PM is being challenged on his negotiations with a casino to build a convention centre in Auckland (It revolves around poker machines) the most recent poll shows… despite being hosed in the media… his ratings have gone up.
I wrote this over at In Mala Fide about a year ago when Will S and I used to discuss things Canadian there. Despite Ferd hating the Canucks. But it was true then, and it is true now.
The left basically are rooted. They have NO, NO options left. In NZ, Oz and Canada (at various times) the tax rates have been ramped sky high — I recall 68 c on the dollar if I worked a weekend when I was a young man — and we still almost went bankrupt.
In all three countries, the elite has misread the population. When I go to Wellington, they are still mourning the loss of that malevolent bitch Clarke: Ottawa wants the Grits back, and Canberra wants a tame leftie (of any party in charge).
None of the people inside the corridors of power were aware of how angry people are. They hate the denigration of their way of life in the name of multiculturalism. They dislike the games that are played and the money wasted playing them while their food bills go up. They hold the family and human rights courts in contempt.
The left has betrayed the working and middle class man: the loyal man, the man who used to vote tribally Labour or Liberal because that was what one did. And once that person has gone, they won’t come back.
The state cannot be our shield. We need to find it outside — locally, either in community banks, trusts, churches or lodges: but the government will not be able to insure us. Because they are bankrupt. The right see this. The left NEED to see this — and resurrect the union based health and insurance systems that used to exist. (In the elite they still do — University Health, University Superannuation, and the Senior Common Room are “nice” shelters if you have managed to weasel tenure. I am such a weasel).
The neo feudal politics of identity have failed: let’s see if the modern mandarins can adapt, or if they will be made irrelevant.
Chris Trotter, who is the last standing Socailist in my view, can still analyse the situation well. And be pointed out what Ferd noted: that the poor, the young… have disengaged. The Left are the new Tories. Like the Lords of old. They do not work for you, they do things to you.
IN THE LAST ELECTION just over three-and-a-quarter million New Zealanders were eligible to vote. On the day, however, only just over two-and-a-quarter million Kiwis actually made it to the polling booths. Or, to put it more precisely, only 69.6 percent of eligible voters participated in the 2011 General Election – one of the lowest turnouts on record.
Now, there will always be a hard-core of the more feckless sort of citizen who’ll just never be bothered taking their civic responsibilities seriously (a statistician friend of mine reckons the figure hovers somewhere around the six percent mark). There’s another group, however, whose refusal to enter the polling booth is a conscious political statement. These abstainers, and their number has been growing steadily since the mid-1980s, have a blunt message for the political parties: “You don’t know me. You won’t help me. You don’t understand me. You can’t even speak my language.” A significant minority add: “You betrayed me.”
Overwhelmingly, these abstainers are young (18-25 years) poorly-educated and unskilled workers and beneficiaries, and most of them reside in electorates that, historically, have been Labour strongholds. “Politics”, if it means anything at all to these youngsters, is generally construed as the sum of all their fears, and “politicians”, far from being regarded as people they elect to do things forthem, are seen as the people others elect to do things tothem. They couldn’t tell you how they know, but they do know, and deep in their gut the knowledge festers like a malignant tumour: they are the ones who are being blamed; they are the ones who are being punished; for economic and social sins they can barely pronounce.
You simply do not win people by saying that is their fault. You win people, in today’s times, by being an anti politician. By telling the truth. By treating people as responsible, using words they can understand… and by not living above those who you are there to serve.
The Left used to live in working class suburbs: Otahuhu, Mangere, South Dunedin. The new left live in the leafy suburbs: Mt Eden, Epsom, Maori Hill. And the left continue to speak as if we can afford this huge edifice of paternalism… while not actually protecting workers from the winds of international change (their boss is no longer local and can no longer be picketed). We need to look back.
This is why the Left, though loud at the moment, are lost. They will lose. We are moving back to an older manifesto. It is going to collapse. If we are lucky, we will get the Scenario that Alte suggests:
The political center is so far to the left that only a full-scale economic collapse will facilitate a true, wide-ranging reform. What traditionalists can do now is to make the unspeakable speakable, to make the immoderate sound moderate, to make the far-right the center-right, by shifting the center and establishing a new extreme.
Here are reforms I hold tightly to, and wait for the center to move in my direction.
- An end to divorce. All legal divorce should be abolished, to be replaced by legal separation (i.e. no remarriage) only. In the event of legal separation, sole paternal custody should be the default. There should be no alimony or child support granted, other than what the couple has predefined by contract. No child support outside of marriage. Barring that, marriage should be moved completely into the private sphere and handled under contract law.
- An end to all domestic violence laws. Severe instances can be handled by legal separation or criminal assault charges. Everything else… suck it up and deal. We need to get out of the habit of meddling in people’s homes. No more family courts.
- An end to public schooling, including public universities. All education should be selected and directed by the parent, with the public providing vouchers as needed.
- An end to female suffrage. I’m not sure yet what I’d like to replace it with, or if I’m even sure I wish for voting to continue. All I am certain of is that it is an abomination for women to rule the country through the ballot box.
- An end to abortion, and severe restrictions on artificial birth control.
- An end to bloated government and a return to subsidiarity. The government should be cut down to about half of its current size, and a tax-overhaul should rid us of the vote-buying and coercion rampant in the current revenue system. Power should be devolved down to the male heads of family, the community, the state, and only then the federal government.
- An end to mass immigration and liberal immigration policies. A country should only take in as many immigrants as it can assimilate. Anything else is to welcome a conquering horde, which goes beyond the bounds of neighborly generosity.
- An end to affirmative action, quotas, unequal entrance qualifications, etc.
- An end to feminist criminology, and the rampant injustice that results from it. All felonies must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, including sex crimes.
Whether the center does move or not, we shall see. Perhaps it will simply fall, and we will sink into anarchy. Perhaps they will swamp everything remaining, or devour it like locusts. I only know that it won’t move further left on my account, that is for sure. I am not giving an inch, for they will surely take a mile.
What the current elite forget is that the old system was sustainable. Marriage has never been a perfect institution… but it worked well enough. Churches and charities could be used as tools of oppression … but the stigma associated with taking charity meant that those who were desperate got help and freeloaders where shunned.
The Leftist and feminist experiment has failed. It is time to move back — to what worked. And that will look quite a lot like Alte’s list.
Hi Chris,
Here are two of the many problems I see with Alte’s man-ifesto: 1) There’s a contradiction between holding the view that women are unfit to vote and successfully finding a woman to share your life with. Only a tiny percentage of women would tolerate such a lack of respect and, statistically speaking, the odds of finding them must be pretty low. Which leads to 2) Wouldn’t holding such views effectively take a man out of the gene pool – thus derailing the trad-con strategy of seizing control of society through higher-than-average breeding rates? My advice – start encouraging men to respect women (and vice versa). Everyone will be much happier.
All the best, Grant
“There’s a contradiction between holding the view that women are unfit to vote and successfully finding a woman to share your life with.”
As long as the idea, that a woman is only respected to the extent that she can be one of 125mm people voting for a corrupt person to run a corrupt country, is the dominant frame, you aren’t going to fix the problem. I respect my mother because of what she has sacrificed for the good of her family, not because she voted for Ike in the 50s…
Alte’s a girl. A very traditional catholic girl. There is a group of female writers who are quite radical — and her post is one of them. She mainly writes at Traditional Christianity,
@chrisgale:disqus
Goodness! I admit to being very surprised (and intrigued) to discovering that Alte is a woman. Does she tell her back story at some point – how she got to where she is now? That would surely be very interesting. Anyway, this discovery adds a further contradiction to the list – if women’s political thinking and activity is invalid (an abomination even), why should we listen to her political agenda? Shouldn’t she be silent and wait for a male head of the family to speak?
@facebook-18602725:disqus
Agreed – a woman shouldn’t be respected because she participates in voting. It is the other way around. Because she is respected, she should share the right to vote. Note – this stance doesn’t force us to assume voting is the most important thing about her.
Anyway, I’ll have to disagree with Alte’s overall manifesto (even if I might agree or partially agree with some of the concerns raised). And I’ll also have to disagree with the idea that we would be lucky if society had enough of a collapse to allow Alte’s agenda to be implemented.
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Hmmm… went looking Grant. She used to run a site called Traditional Catholicism, but she has taken that one down. That had quite a bit about her conversion.
Try
http://traditionalchristianity.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/the-tyranny-of-happiness/
http://traditionalchristianity.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/bring-back-duty/
And her comments on how societies collapse
http://traditionalchristianity.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/a-model-of-the-collapse-argentina-2001/
Chris.
I’ve argued for a long time we need a much smaller central “gummint” (even in NZ) and a more local network of caring.
I do agree “The Leftist and feminist experiment has failed” it may not come as a sudden collapse, like the ’30s depression. It may be a slow spiral over the next to decade or two.
The future may look similar to Alte’s list – more so in the U S of A than here(NZ).
Because:
They have the conservative base (population) to carry out said change. Which thanks to a high birth rate is incresing more as time goes by.
Immigration and liberalism over the preceeding generations have stuffed us in NZ – we just don’t have the clout to enact a list similar ( I don’t agree entirely with Alte – but generally she’s heading in the right direction.)
I have heard it said somewhere in the conservative blogs/manosphere that “the future belongs to those who show up for it.”(hate to use a phrase without referance, but it slips my mind).
In Nz, I doubt if there is enough of us (conservatives) to show up and change things to a traditionalor conservative based society.
what say you?
p.s still smiling at the phrase “that malevolent bitch Clark”
Hi Nathan.
Helen Clarke used to be Grant’s and my MP. I moved down to Dunedin before she was removed from office. I’m less angry with her now than I was when I wrote that, mainly because, with time, things are shifting and the party she led is now becoming irrelevant. The true left are subverting the Greens.
I agree NZ will never end up with Alte’s list. We never had it in the first place. Neither will Canada, nor Australia. We have different traditions about caring for our neighbours on one hand and a suspicion of people who get to high and mighty on the other — which we see most readily in times of disaster.
We do not wait for some federal agency. Instead, someone invents a student vol. army and gets on with cleaning things up — Happened in Christchurch, happens in Queensland and in NSW and VIct. when they have bushfires and floods, and happens in Canada, where you have to look after people stranded because of the cold.
But the edifice of social welfare in NZ will probably look much more like something Mickey Savage or Julius Vogel would have designed: smaller, with more need for qualifications and testing, and with less generous benefits. If we are lucky.
If we are unlucky the state will not be able to run social welfare… it will just have enough money to run the courts. We will be back to church charities, the friendly societies, and unions. The Victorian or Edwardian social service network.
Because only rich countries can have 15- 20% of working age adults on benefits.