Greens must reject ‘tokenism’ to connect with marginalised communities – Chloe Swarbrick
Swarbrick also addressed claims both from political opponents and parts of the left that “progressive” identity politics have contributed to a global backlash enabling the rise of right-leaning populist figures like Donald Trump.
Former Labour finance minister David Parker recently criticised the political left’s “obsession” with identity issues to the detriment of meaningful progress during his valedictory speech. In response, Swarbrick argued that representation initiatives and material outcomes for society are not mutually exclusive.
But she also noted the missteps of superficial diversity efforts that fail to shift power. “Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism.”
“People are right to be frustrated,” she said. “But some of these self-styled strongmen are punching down, scapegoating minority groups instead of confronting the systems that caused inequality in the first place.”
She pointed the finger instead at other political leaders inflaming culture wars. “If we’re going to talk about who’s inviting this inflammatory culture war, it’s the deputy prime minister deciding to bicker about what bathrooms people can use.”
If you watch a lot of the Democratic adverts in the last election, you could clearly see Democratic strategists and tacticians frantically to lean right on gun ownership, closing the border and ‘common sense’ approaches to gender.
And yet Trump won biggest and deepest with his ‘Kamal is in it for they/thems, Trump is in it for you’ advert.
It wasn’t the Democrats leading woke cancel culture anymore, it was the woke activist base themselves.
I’ve written a lot about ‘proxification’, the political cultural response many felt during the 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 woke Social Media lynchmob season.
For many of the wokeIdentity Politics activists, having 10 000 social media followers gave a power infect before, and like any disenfranchised group who seizes immediate cultural power, they went on an ideological purge.
The backlash to that cancel culture woke purge is Trump and the rise of incel manosphere kulture.
The Woke refuse to acknowledge their own activists and the call out culture madness helped generate the political ammunition the Right have harvested and shot back at us!
Pure Temple Identity Politics divides, Broadchurch Class solidarity unites.
If the Left wants to win the next election, we have to overcome the alienation much of our woke middle class identity politics activists have generated and bring men back to the fold.
We need to tell the Men of Aotearoa New Zealand – Brothers, Comrades, Mates & Fellow Blokes – there’s a place for you on the NZ Left!
I got sucked into the women-hating manosphere. Now I help others escape
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains references to mental health issues and suicidal thoughts.
Research shows 61% of young men in the UK regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Will Adolphy was one of them. He talks about how he was drawn in, what happened next and why he chose a new path.
While the ladies are arguing over can be more offended by the C word, a wee chat with the lads for a second, if I may.
Dear men of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Brothers, Comrades, Mates & Fellow Blokes
There is a place for you on the NZ Left!
Now.
I appreciate that some of our more woke fourth-wave-feminist-non-binary-activist-vegan-mummy-blogger-Spinoff-subscribing-militant-cyclist-Trans-Rights Comrades have been a tad alienating (from between about 2016-2020), with their woke social media Lynch mobs but I want to reassure my Brothers, Comrades, Mates & Fellow Blokes that there is a place for them on the NZ Left.
Identity Politic Acolytes followed the holy trinity of woke dogma:
1 – All white men are irredeemable racists
2 – BELIEVE ALL WOMEN that ALL men are rapists
3 – Anyone who supports free speech is a Uniform wearing Nazi who hates the Trans Community.
REMEMBER – there is no wriggle room in any of that, ANYONE who ever jokes about that Holy Trinity must be terminally cancelled!
Pure Temple Politics and the narcissistic social justice minefield of hashtag activism kills the Broadchurch solidarity of class and allows for arseholes like Trump and this terrible right wing Government to get elected.
Not one working family in New Zealand is sitting around the kitchen table cancelling each other for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills!
Brothers, Comrades, Mates & Fellow Blokes
There is a place for you on the NZ Left!
Just because you have a penis doesn’t make you toxic!
Don’t feel alienated by the more woke voices of the Left, you should not side with the corporations and the Billionaires and the speculators.
300 000 years of evolution that have gifted you the altruism to protect isn’t a sin!
As a man AND as a citizen, you have an obligation to protect everyone weaker than you, and you should stand against corporate interests, implemented because our anger and alienation have been manipulated by their social media hate algorithms.
Look.
We hate each other thanks to social media.
While we hate each other more than ever before, we are more lonely than we have ever been before.
We are lonelier, more depressed and sicker.
Our loneliness, our depression, our sickness are all fomenting the spin of social media hate algorithms which only further polarise our debate into All Tribe and No Village politics.
I think we are a clever ape who has evolved over 300 000 years. Because we have to compete against other sentient and self conscious clever apes and work with them as groups so our intelligence and ability to use tools could change our environment, we have had to bond and understand each other over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
When we meet in person, our bodies and brains and taking in millions of different details subconsciously and we are working each other out through facial cues, pheromones, gait, stance, smiles, eye contact, etc etc etc: we have taken those 300 000 years of evolution and replaced that with flat screen interaction where we lose all that unseen evolutionary advantage and instead become brainwashed and trapped in rabbit holes of demented reality.
Flat screen interaction is warping our human capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t because we don’t have that sense of the person in front of us and all the million ways we asses each other in our evolved brain.
We have become an ocean of spite and resentment in an All Tribe No Village politics distorted by social media hate algorithms because 300 000 years of evolution can’t work in a flat screen interaction loneliness.
We need got fight against this anathematizing of our hopes and aspirations.
Turn that flat screen interaction into a platform where we can challenge this empty intimacy!
Brothers, Comrades, Mates & Fellow Blokes
There is a place for you on the NZ Left!
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I have just listened to Chloe on the radio talk of her Green budget. I find it hard to believe anyone would find it credible in a real World .Lots of nice to haves and free things for people paid for by borrowing 45 billion dollars and taxing the rich and those companies that remained here .
‘I find it hard to believe anyone would find it credible in a real World .’
Feel the same way about your pontifications Trevor. ( 2024 Everything will be better soon 2025 Everything will be better soon )
I Haven’t been here for a while but is Trevor the National Party apointment tasked with getting a negative comment in first?
Still finding it hilarious btw that people think National is good at economics, this is the 3rd National led government in my lifetime that has got in power and immediately engineered a recession by drastically cutting expenditure.
Aaron,
That is their primary purpose.
Engineer a recession, put small businesses into liquidation, collapse economy, increase unemployment, cut government spending, decrease wages, reduce interest rates, buy discounted property, money floods into mortgages and property prices boom, voters sick of years of austerity vote in Labour who increase spending fuelling the boom.
Boom and bust is the neoliberal dream and there is only one winner.
Unless you wear a tie or dress with the CNUT label it probably ain’t you.
nailed it mate .
Chloe has seen the enemy and the enemy is they/them?
To Chloe it’s now about “what bathrooms PEOPLE can use” which seems to be a softening of the more extreme woke view that the issue was around Trans use. Perhaps this is her new strategy to appeal more to the more to a potential supportive base but it’s just rearranging the deck chairs. As ‘Im right’ says it can’t be stopped. The beast has been unleashed and she has no control over it.
The two major parties each grew from their own single seed into broad-church parties representing their core constituencies with room for other minority interests. Trying to sellotape a collection of single-issue interest groups into a coherent whole is, in my opinion, doomed to failure, followed by irrelevance.
Good luck to all!
Oh I love you right wingers being in panic mode.
On my poll on the ACC REFORM Debate from over 200 votes 58 % says yes 29% say more info and only 12% no.
So there is a large chunk who want the Greens Acc reform and reform of Medicines and Primarycare systems.
The Greens are the only party with a plan to make it happen and fully costed.
So the next polls are going to be very interesting and folks are definitely talking about a red green split vote by traditional labour voters.
Yes even Hooten believes the Maori party have good common sense policy and the best economic policy but were over looked due to rampant race based hate from the right .Green and brown looking good to me .
As an original supporter of the Greens predecessor, the Values Party, I’ve been saddened by the lurch into identity politics that has sucked in the majority of Greens. After Donald and Jeanette were gone, I was hopeful that he the adoption of leftist policies, in conjunction with the ecology based policies, should have put the Party into government, albeit with the Labour Party. Didn’t happen. Solution: start a new party, this time with an expressed proscription on adopting any policy on gender or identity. That means keeping a Proscribed List of people forbidden from joining.
Rainbow have got a bit out of control really. 3% of population tops (Australian figures), but wildly over-represented in parliament. That tail wagging the dog is a guaranteed vote loser. Meanwhile economic social justice (your job, Labour) and the environment (your job, Greens) languish.
Much like ACT and NZ FIRST .NZ first have no elected MPS yet get to call the shots on fucking the environment and calling for the assasination of Jacinda and Neve .
I think the interests there are more specific – identifiable funders each with their own specific pathologies – just as Atlas drives the superficial inanity of Nicky No-boats.
You can rightly point out that the obsession with identity politics needs to go, but there will never be any justification for being stupid enough to vote for Donald Trump. How the f anyone could listen to him and say ‘yes that’s the man’ is beyond comprehension. He was a total con artist in his first term and now he’s a fascist con artist. Listen to him dribbling on about Harvard, while ignoring the fact that his dipshit son in law, who wasn’t bright enough to get in, had his convicted Father donate shitloads so he can get in. How much Jewish money has gone to this supposedly antisemitic institution? You can’t make this up.
I fully support the Greens. Anyone who can trigger and out the cry babies in society gets my vote.
It’s not the Green Party that’s the problem? That’s a generous statement. What is a political party but for its representatives, its political candidates – a couple of constituent winners but others on the list elected as MPs under MMP – and of course the political machinery that supports the party. I cant speak for all, but the record of many on the list speaks for itself. Still, we live in an age of diversity where minority perspectives are now legitimized so those of us who grew up in a different world with different values need to be more compromising. Yet I still do have an issue with some of the list MPs. Seems to me they’ve hijacked the party – but that’s another tale.
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