In 1920, US Presidential nominee, Warren G. Harding, promised the American people “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”. In 2020, Jacinda Ardern looks set to echo Harding’s unabashedly conservative formula.
YOUNG LIAM HEHIR is carving out quite a niche for himself as a small-c conservative commentator in the mainstream news media. His latest offering: “Jacinda Ardern – conservative”, posted on The Spinoff website, will likely rile as many on the right as it will outrage on the left. Both sides of the ideological divide will bridle at the suggestion that their darling/demon may not be everything she has been talked-up to be.
Hehir is not mistaken, however, in his characterisation of Ardern as a politician who is entirely comfortable operating in the status-quo. The views she espouses are the views shared by the majority of her fellow New Zealanders. On economic policy she is nothing if not conventional – even cautious – in her approach. On social policy she takes care to remain in tune with the sentiments expressed by her official advisers. Even when it comes to her political style, which has garnered plaudits from admirers all around the world, Ardern is doing no more than following (albeit with considerable panache) the core precepts of the communications theories she learned at the University of Waikato.
Yes, Ardern is young. Yes, she is tertiary-educated. Yes, she is a woman. And, yes, she won her political spurs within the New Zealand, British and international social-democratic milieu. But, none of these facts automatically make her a radical.
Youth is not and never has been (in spite of the endless screeds published about the “Youth Revolt” of the 1960s) a guarantee of radical or revolutionary political impulses. Act does not rely on the nation’s campuses for its supply of political recruits because all 18-25 year-old students are lefties! And even Churchill’s famous quotation, about people who were not socialists at 20 having no heart, is immediately balanced by “and those who are still a socialist at 40, haven’t a head.”
Nor is it axiomatic that a young, tertiary-educated woman is bound to be card-carrying socialist feminist. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham was a young woman when she studied chemistry at Oxford. Her experiences there, and later in the Conservative Party, may have given her a measure of sympathy for feminism, but they most certainly did not make her a socialist!
Waikato dairy farmers brandishing placards calling her a “pretty communist” notwithstanding, Ardern’s political apprenticeship in the social-democratic institutions of the early-2000s in no way turned her into a fire-breathing Bolshevik. Her key political mentors were Helen Clark and Tony Blair – Labour prime ministers praised for their pragmatism and moderation by capitalists forever thankful they were not required to deal with real “democratic socialists”. As for Ardern’s use of the word “comrades” during her brief stint (2008-09) as President of the International Union of Socialist Youth. No more attention should be paid to that traditional left-wing mode of address than is paid to the term “Honourable Member”. In obedience to long-standing institutional conventions, people say all sorts of things they do not mean!
One of the lessons I learned at Sunday School was that the best way to ascertain the true worth of human-beings is to look at what they do, rather than simply listen to what they say. Or, as Jesus put it: “by their fruits ye shall know them”. By that reckoning the Jacinda tree is productively indistinguishable from the Key-English tree.
Hehir gets this in a way so many of his conservative brethren do not:
“Labour is handed a healthy balance sheet and the biggest economic crisis since the great depression and instead of implementing the UBI it was talking about a few years ago, the response is a budget so conservative that Bill English could have delivered it.”
As befits a person who grew up in Morrinsville, Ardern has a pretty good feel for the tolerances of the average New Zealand voter. She certainly doesn’t need to be told twice that a policy simply isn’t a goer – as she proved with the Capital Gains Tax. Although she is most unlikely to use the late Bob Tizard’s earthy language, while her arse points to the ground (and for as long as she remains Labour’s leader) a CGT is off the agenda.
It’s precisely this attitude that leaves so many old-fashioned leftists seething with frustration. In their eyes, Ardern is letting the COVID-19 crisis go to waste by refusing to expend her vast stock of political capital on a comprehensive programme of left-wing “transformation”. “When will Labour have a better chance to actually get some radical runs on the board?”, they enquire plaintively.
All they prove by voicing such demands is how ill-equipped they are to declaim upon matters political in a time of COVID. Ardern did not garner record levels of support for her party by foisting policies acceptable only to a minority on the rest of the electorate. She faces the prospect of leading a Labour Government unencumbered by coalition partners, purely and simply on account of her doing what the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders wanted her to do.
Rather than be guided by the dwindling devotees of Lenin and Trotsky, Ardern is much more likely to offer the New Zealand voter in 2020 what the US Presidential nominee, Warren G. Harding, offered the American voter in 1920:
“[N]ot heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”.
On the strength of that unabashedly conservative formula, Harding – a Republican – won 60 per cent of the popular vote. Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s “small-c conservative” Labour Prime Minister, will spend the next few weeks doing everything she can to achieve a similar result, by offering voters a very similar set of promises.