Are We The Baddies?

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does.

THE DEMON OF UNREST documents the descent of the United States into civil war. The primary focus of its author, Erik Larson, is the period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861. These were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union.

Seldom has the evolution of an implacable political logic proceeded in circumstances where so few effective means of altering its direction lay to hand. Americans had become the prisoners of convictions that could not be set aside without incurring, to employ a key concept of the era, an irreparable loss of honour.

Only a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have won the American Civil War, but not even a president of Lincoln’s strength and steadfastness could have prevented it.

The most disconcerting feature of Larson’s historical narrative are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. There are Kiwis, today, as committed to the decolonisation and indigenisation of their country as Yankees once were to the abolition of slavery. Likewise, there is an answering fraction of the New Zealand population every bit as determined to preserve the colour-blind conception of what it means to be a New Zealander as the slaveholders of the American South were determined to preserve their own “peculiar institution”.

The key historical question arising from this comparison is: which of the opposing sides in the present conflict between “New Zealand” and “Aotearoa” represents the North, and which the South? The answer is far from straightforward.

Superficially, it is the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation who most resemble the Northern abolitionists. Certainly, in their moral certainty, dogmatism, and unwillingness to compromise, the Decolonisers and the Abolitionists would appear to be cut from identical cloth. Brought together by a time machine, one can easily imagine their respective leaders, so alike in their political style, getting along famously.

By the same token, the defenders of Colour-Blind New Zealand, in their reverence for tradition and their deep nostalgia for the political certainties of the past, would appear to be a more than passable match for the political forces that gave birth to the Confederate States of America in 1861.

These correspondences are, however, more apparent than real. From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.

Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.

These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. Like the election of Lincoln in 1860, the success of New Zealand’s conservative parties in the 2023 general election was construed by the Decolonisers and Indigenisers as a potentially fatal blow to any hope of sustaining and extending the gains made under the sympathetic, radical, and identity-driven Labour Government of 2020-23.

Just as occurred throughout the South in November and December of 1860, the fire-eating partisans of “Aotearoa” lost little time in coming together to warn the incoming government that its political programme was unreasonable, unacceptable, and “racist”; and that any attempt to realise it in legislation would be met with massive resistance – up to and including civil war.

The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the Act Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the “principles” of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own.

Another historical parallel is discernible in the degree to which the judicial arm of the New Zealand state, like its American counterpart in the 1850s, has actively supported the cause of ethnic difference in the 2020s.

In 1857, the infamous Dred-Scott decision of the US Supreme Court advanced the cause of slavery throughout the United States. Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the judgement found that persons of African descent: “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”. The Taney Court’s decision made civil war inevitable.

In 2022, the New Zealand Supreme Court’s adjudication of the Peter Ellis Case would add a novel legal consideration – tikanga Māori – to the application of New Zealand Law. The Court’s constitutionally dubious decision was intended to, and did, materially advance the establishment of a bi-cultural legal system in Aotearoa. It represented an historic victory for the Decolonisers.

It may occur to some readers, that the argument put forward here resembles the celebrated Mitchell & Webb television sketch in which a worried SS officer asks his Nazi comrade-in-arms, Hans: “Are we the baddies?” It’s a great line. But, over and above the humour, the writers are making an important point. Those who devote themselves entirely to a cause are generally incapable of questioning its moral status – even when its uniforms are adorned with skulls.

Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?

Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?

What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: “one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”?

When will the partisans of decolonisation and indigenisation finally notice the death’s head on their caps? That, driven by their political passion to atone for the sins of the colonial fathers, they are willing to subvert the Rule of Law, deny human equality, misrepresent their country’s history, and abandon its democratic system of government. Can they not see that the people they castigate as the direct ideological descendants of the slaveholding white supremacists of the antebellum South, are actually fighting for the same principles that animated and inspired the Northern Abolitionists?

Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does. The demon of unrest has claimed you for his own.

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Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.