Letter to the Editor
Wellington LIVE – One Network

Dear Editor,

HAVE WE MOVED past peak progressivism? Across the planet, there are signs that the surge of support for left-wing causes and personalities, exemplified by the election of the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) to the US House of Representatives in 2018, is fast losing momentum.

In the recent elections for the European Parliament, for example, the Green contingent shrunk from just under 60 MEPs to just over 40 – a drop of nearly 25 percent. Green economics would appear to be an acquired taste.

Then, less than 48 hours ago (25/6/24) there came another straw in the wind. Jamaal Bowman, a member of the so-called “Squad” of left-wing legislators who followed AOC into the House, was trounced in his Democratic Party’s primary election for New York’s 16th Congressional District, by George Latimer, a moderate backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Bowman had been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause. Keffiyehs, it would seem, cost votes.

It gets worse. As the United Kingdom counts down the days to its General Election on 4 July, electors are confronted by a Conservative Party straining to hold its position on the centre ground against powerful forces (led by Brexiteer Nigel Farage’s Reform Party) urging its supporters to move further right; while the Labour Party, with a 20-point lead in the polls, has spent the last five years emptying its ranks of the left-wingers who delivered Labour’s leadership to Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.

Now, it is always possible that Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, may prove to be another Clement Atlee – the Leader of the Opposition Winston Churchill described as “a modest little man, with much to be modest about” – and gobsmack the world by unleashing a second socialist transformation of the United Kingdom, but that is not an outcome upon which even a British MP would place a bet!

Not that the centrist political space is anything like as comfortable as it used to be. In France, where the centrism of President Emmanuel Macron has held sway since the implosion of the French Left in 2017, there is now a good chance that the right-wing populist “National Rally” of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella will soon command at least a plurality (and maybe even a majority) of seats in the French National Assembly.

By calling a snap parliamentary election, Macron hopes to see moderate and radical France unite to repudiate the National Rally’s spectacular gains in the elections for the European Parliament. But, France shows little sign of wanting to be reasonable. Not this time. “Marianne” is in one of her moods.

The most compelling visual example of the progressive Left’s fatal failure to fire, however, is the extraordinary rally organised in support of Jamaal Bowman’s doomed candidacy by AOC herself. Bouncing around the stage like a cheerleader on speed, as if she could roll back the influence of Latimer’s $25 million spend on television and social media attack ads through sheer physical exertion, Cortez, in her radical manqué phase, became the unwitting poster-girl of a political movement floating away on an ebbing tide.

As is so often the case, New Zealand anticipated the world’s direction of travel by several months – if not years. Jacinda Ardern became our very own AOC a whole year before the abbreviation was coined. And, if one is looking for surges, no party anywhere in the democratic world has yet delivered a “progressive” result as decisive as Labour’s 2020 election win. (Always assuming one can call the Covid-19 pandemic “progressive”.)

Chris Trotter