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MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Sunday, 1 July 2018
Jacinda Ardern is the very hero the global left needs right now
Jacinda Ardern meeting the British queen wearing a Kahu huruhuru was a
representation of a New Zealand unafraid to show pride in its indigenous
past even as it engaged in diplomatic pleasantry with its colonial one.
Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images
As social media birth announcements go, Jacinda Ardern’s handheld Facebook Live of herself and her newborn Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford is charming.
New Zealand’s prime minister introduces her new baby with radiant
sincerity. She thanks her midwife and the hospital staff for their
generous professionalism, and New Zealanders for their kindness and
gifts. With a quick cutaway, she even jokes with the baby’s father about
his “dad jumper”.
But as a political communication, the video is matchless. In an epoch
overcast by growing shadows of reenergised rightwing authoritarianism,
Ardern’s public hospital nativity offers a luminous symbolic affirmation
of her leadership not just of New Zealand, but of the western electoral left.
Jacinda Ardern reveals name of baby daughter Neve Te Aroha – video
The leader of the first Labour government in New Zealand for a decade
shares the explicit left agenda for investment in health, education and
climate action, public housing, social justice. Ardern’s pledge to
build “a kind and equitable nation where children thrive, and success is
measured not only by the nation’s GDP but by better lives lived by its
people” is the ancient standard of our side.
Yet
while recent celebrity left leaders have failed to win elections, or
even nominations, Ardern gained the leadership of her party seven weeks
out from an election, and she won.
She nearly doubled the Labour vote, wrangled herself into office with a complex multiparty coalition, and just passed a social democratic budget.
Polls have held. The most recent gives her party and one coalition
partner, the Greens, enough votes to govern between them. Her personal
approval rating is a thumping 76%.
To understand why is to look beyond policy and into her
representation of it. What distinguishes Ardern is her active embrace of
what Walter Benjamin referred to as “the time of the now” and the
diverse and complex identities of a community that no longer sees itself
as by, for and of propertied, straight white men. Doing so shatters a
traditionalism that imprisons the left even as much as it inspires
today’s right.
Ardern is the first elected world leader to ever go on maternity leave. Of this, former NZ Labour prime minister Helen Clark noted:
“These are the kinds of practical arrangements working women make the
world over – the novelty here is that it is a prime minister who is
making them. The signal this sends, however, is that this is life in the
21st century.”
But the insight is enhanced by considering theorist Stuart Hall’s old
observation that “Politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs
them”. Local NZ commentator, Michelle Duff, lauded the events of Ardern’s maternity
as a national achievement, writing, “Let’s just take a moment to
appreciate that we, as a nation, have pushed the boundaries and created
an environment where this can happen.” Clark said for New Zealand, this
was merely “evolution”.
Observe, also Ardern – who is Pakeha, not Maori – meeting the British queen wearing a Kahu huruhuru:
a Māori feathered cloak “bestowed on chiefs and dignitaries to convey
prestige, respect and power”. It was a demonstration of a status
conferred, and not stolen, and a representation of a New Zealand
unafraid to show pride in its indigenous past even as it engaged in
diplomatic pleasantry with its colonial one.
Little wonder that “the prime minister’s empathy with and interest in
the indigenous people of New Zealand (is) improving relations between
Pakeha [European] and Māori faster than at any other point in history,” a
spokeswoman for Ngati-Haua, of the Tainui federation of tribes, has said.
In this case, the spokeswoman was responding to Ardern’s choice of
“Te Aroha” as her newborn’s middle name, which refers both to a mountain
where Ardern grew up an a Maori language word for love. “Everybody
knows what aroha means,” says Ardern in her baby video. Even
though“everybody” doesn’t, every New Zealander certainly does. Ardern’s
grasp of the local – from giving birth in a public hospital, to
announcing her pregnancy on Instagram – is exemplary. The town of Te
Aroha is planning a celebration of their namesake baby’s birth; plans
are to paint its buildings pink.
The achievement here is Ardern’s marriage of the old left economic
programme with the new explicitness of identity politics – and it
resonates because it’s sincere. Failure to bridge these positions will
doom all of us.
Theorist Wendy Brown explained this in her 1999 essay
of prophetic relevance to today’s particular political moment. Brown
writes of a “left melancholy” as a state of wilful, purist political
nostalgia, in which the left “has become more attached to its
impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at
home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and
failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic
attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past.”
It’s hard not to see this melancholy in the celebration of electoral
defeats as somehow moral victories, when across the world the present,
visible reality for women, indigenous people, the LGBTQIA+ community,
refugees and so many others is that electoral outcomes represent life
and death stakes.
The alternative proposition is to remember “that the people closest
to the pain should be closest to the power” – and they should pursue
power, without shame. This statement was quoted by the victorious
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, who delivered a shock upset to the established
order when she won a Democratic primary in New York this week.
In a party where the top three positions are held by septuagenarians,
commentator Dana Milbank saw Ocasio-Cortes’s election not as a
disruption to the Democratic trajectory but an event of happy augury.
“The emerging electoral majority that already dominates the party and
will soon dominate the country,” he observed “(is) progressive, young, female and nonwhite. It is no accident that Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Latina, is all four.”
If today’s left is going to stand a chance against an ascendant,
muscular right, my hope is that she and other avowed socialists emerging
within her electoral generation eschew the stale temptations of left
melancholy for energising examples of a visionary left that looks as
different to its past as a pregnant woman in a feathered cloak does to a
room of suited men.
“Strong men” of the right are now lining up governments from Italy to
Turkey to the USA. The times of the now are ones in which we can
construct majorities of a diversity they cannot – and do not wish to –
represent. We can hope the influence of Jacinda Ardern and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes spread, or we can ensure that it does. The stakes for the marginalised remain life and death.
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