It’s not just the damage he is causing now, it is the damage he has done to the entire political environment. By lowering the standards so much for the baying masses, he has radically reset the political landscape for the next Trump and the next one after him.
The blue wave turned into a weak trickle. The Dems lost 2016 by calling all Republican’s racist, it looks like they squandered 2018 by calling them all rapists.
With so much happening overseas and the likelihood of a major market correction looming, the Wellington Mandarins and top bureaucrats know the vast majority of sleepy hobbits have no concept of what might hit and are busy re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic so that when the panic kicks in they can point to the very little they did as justification for the salaries.
File this under ‘needs a cup of a tea and a lie down’.
There is a fascinating debate happening right now around Māori health. The WAI 2575 Health Service and Outcomes Waitangi Tribunal hearing at Tūrangawawae marae is critically analysing the institutionalised racism embedded within Pākehā health providers and the outcome stats make for dire reading.
Culturally the woke left ban any debate about Chinese influence in NZ because it’s racist and xenophobic, and even when Chinese business interests are caught red handed trying to buy two MPs inside the National Party, the MeToo political media decided to focus instead on anonymous allegations of harassment of women by Jami-Lee Ross rather than a direct attempt by Chinese interests to buy political influence.
At some point in the near future, voters incandescent with rage at the snails pace reform will demand radical reform that will be unforgiving in its revolutionary nature. If this vast anger is tapped into and harnessed, a vengeful green populism will swamp the pale lime middle class identity politics obsessed incarnation we currently have and wipe aside Labour Party incrementalism.
Who woulda thunk a Czech drug smugglers and lime scooters would dominate the news cycle in a way environmental apocalypse, China buying MPs and state house meth hysteria couldn’t?
If 100 000 ‘affordable’ houses are to go to the children of the middle classes, then 100 000 also need to go to the state tenants and renters and Millennials and Gen Xers who have been locked out of home ownership by a 30 year neoliberal economic model that has punished the user pays generations while insulating the cradle to grave subsidised generations.
Bridges can’t survive this, not because what’s been released is any more damning than anything else that has been released in this pus pit of a Game of Thrones meets House of Cards meets Jaws meets Nightmare on Elm Street meets Saw meets #MeToo pantomime of the grotesque, but because his total inability to provide any control or cauterisation of this makes him powerless and a powerless leader in a shark pool of vicious power hungry National Party MPs is about as stable as Donald Trump at a feminist folk festival.