New Zealand’s leading public intellectual of the Left, Chris Trotter, seems to have been genuinely unsettled by the defeat of Labour in 2008. Toys have been thrown, and targets targeted.
In an initial attack of post-election spleen Chris railed against those voters who brought in National as ” . . . the men who just couldn’t cope with the idea of being led by an intelligent, idealistic, free-spirited woman; the gutless, witless, passionless creatures of the barbecue-pit and the sports bar (and the feckless females who put up with them); who voted Helen Clark out of office.” (Sunday Star Times, Sunday, 9 November 2008 )
In the same article, Chris then grew left wing horns and charged the corporate media and class society (” . . you can read it on the pages of the right-wing media: the smug certainties of our genteel suburban fascisti – regurgitated to order by publications long-used to dripping the oleaginous phraseology of “responsible journalism” all over the jagged edges of their readers’ class-advantage”) and then rounded up by saying “many of us simply refused to believe our fellow citizens could be so dumb – or so mean.”
Ouch!
The question that remains though is why should the result have been so surprising? Defeat was on the cards, and was hardly a landslide of the type that threw Labour out in 1990 and National in 1999. More an accumulation of errors and the old idiocy of “it’s time for a change” in a two horse race. The “genteel suburban fascisti” were there for the last nine years and did reasonably well out of Labour’s tax cuts, as they will do slightly better under National’s tax cuts. Continue reading →

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