ARE YOU A PLAYER in the Team of Five Million? For conservatives, this is a serious question. In the midst of a global pandemic, the internal contradictions of conservatism are cruelly exposed. The individualism which lies at the heart of the conservative ethos is pitted against the traditional (that is to say collectivist) values that supposedly inform individualist ethics. Conservatism only works when the individual wants to be a team player.
It is easy for conservatives to lose track of these philosophical issues when the party in power is not their own. National and Act Party voters chafe under the tutelage of a young, female, Labour prime minister. They don’t like being told what to do by someone who simply doesn’t measure up to conservatism’s template of effective leadership. Jacinda Ardern has never run a business. She has never had to meet a payroll. On the contrary, she is one of those intensely irritating people who appears to have “risen without trace”; started at the top; and is currently engaged in working her way to the bottom.
When “Jacinda” rhetorically gathers the entire nation into her embrace, inevitably a fairly large number of her fellow citizens squirm uncomfortably. It would never occur to them to hug a Labour voter, and they don’t see why they should have to put up with a Labour prime minister hugging them – even metaphorically. There is a strong temptation to mutter: “I’m not a member of your bloody socialist team, Cindy, so don’t you go around pretending that I am!”
A great many left-wingers reacted similarly when the National Prime Minister, John Key, suggested that New Zealanders adopt a new flag. For years all manner of lefties had railed against the presence of the “imperialist” Union Jack in the corner of their nation’s flag. What an infantile bunch we were, they sneered, to announce so plainly how happy we were to remain tied to Mother England’s apron-strings. Almost anything, they said, would be better than a flag foreigners confuse with Australia’s.
Well, “almost anything” was on offer, and a very large number of Labour and Green voters declined to accept it. Yes, they would have liked a new flag (many stipulated the Tino Rangatiratanga flag) but not a flag offered to them by a slick millionaire currency-trader who had, somehow, become New Zealand’s prime minister. As one of them expressed it, with considerable bitterness: “If Key wins the referendum, the new flag will always signify a National victory. It will be the banner of an occupying army!”
That National and Act voters should feel much the same way about Jacinda’s “Team of Five Million” is therefore entirely understandable. The ethical calculation facing them is, however, considerably more complicated. Those who voted against changing the country’s flag merely opted to preserve the status quo. Those who wanted a new flag were undoubtedly annoyed and frustrated, but nobody got sick: nobody died. Covid-19 is not a putative flag, it is a real and potentially fatal virus. Refusing to be a player in the Team of Five Million could cost lives.
In these circumstances, the genuine conservative has little option but to grit his or her teeth and follow the rules. Not because he or she is an ardent Ardern fan, but because the traditional values conservatives subscribe to – be they religious or humanitarian – require them to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and to their friends and families. There is no coherent ethical system, anywhere, which endorses individual action which carries the real threat of endangering the lives of innocent human-beings. Any “philosophy” which did tolerate such action would be, at best, socio-, and, at worst, psychopathic.
At this point, one might object that refusing to join the Team of Five Million is an entirely excusable course of action if the premise of the entire argument: that Covid-19 is a potentially fatal virus; is false. If Covid-19 is no more dangerous than the flu, then individual New Zealanders are under no obligation to act as team players.
Unfortunately for those who advance this argument, that proposition cannot be substantiated. Covid-19 is as real as cancer, and the Prime Minister’s “Team of Five Million” approach has proved to be the most effective when it comes to saving lives. Sweden, for example, pursued a considerably less coercive strategy than New Zealand’s. The upshot? In Sweden, a nation of 10 million people, over 14,000 died of Covid. In New Zealand, a nation of 5 million, the Covid death toll stands at 26. “Going hard and going early” to “stamp out the virus” by means of draconian “lockdowns” – works.
Foiled on the hard facts front, some conservatives opt for a classically liberal utilitarian solution to the problem. Focusing exclusively on saving those most susceptible to the Covid-19 virus, they argue, must, inevitably, put other members of society at risk of the harm that flows from a stalled economy, unemployment, bankruptcy, homelessness, mental illness, and the like. It is, therefore, disingenuous to talk about the Team of Five Million exclusively in terms of fighting the pandemic. There are other, equally urgent, ethical considerations. Lockdowns could end up costing the country more lives than Covid.
But, this argument also falls at the first factual hurdle. By ensuring that its lockdowns were savage but short, the New Zealand government actually made the economic bounce-back bigger and stronger than it might otherwise have been. New Zealand’s economy is going gangbusters, while others languish. If Utilitarianism is all about doing the greatest good for the greatest number, then Jacinda’s Team of Five Million metaphor wins again.
At this point, some conservatives just get off the train of reason altogether and begin behaving badly. There is no shortage of lurid conspiracy theories to choose from, and the paranoid style of politics has its attractions. Genuine conservatives will not, however, be in any hurry to follow these folk down the rabbit holes of sociopathic lunacy. In the end, the genuine conservative believes in community, believes in doing the right thing, believes in being the best person he or she can be.
Because, as John F. Kennedy told the students of the American University in Washington DC on 10 June 1963: “[I]n the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”