A few days ago, my fellow blogger, The Veteran, drew attention to protests on the West Coast against the Labour-Green-NZ First government in this piece: YOU DIDN’T SEE THIS ON TV:

The rally heard speakers from all sectors of West Coast industries; mining, farming, tourism, forestry, plus lines company Westpower and Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Waewae.    They railed against the freshwater action plan, the ban on new mining on conservation land, the Indigenous Freshwater Fish Bill, the rejection of windblown timber legislation, the canning of the proposed hydro dam on the Waitaha river all of which were seen as doing ‘irrevocable harm’ to the West Coast economy.

Ye Olde Classic Lefty, Chris Trotter, has now joined the fray in yet another of his almost endless paens to a lost world in The Message From Messenger Park:

It’s precisely this widening gulf between those with actual experience of things like guns, chainsaws and drilling machines, and those who regulate their use, that accounts for the angry crowd at Greymouth’s Messenger Park. In the rarefied atmosphere where decisions to shut down whole industries are made, hands-on experience is not only rare – it’s despised. What do workers know about anything?

For a start, they know that human-beings have been changing nature for millions of years. From the moment some brave ancestor pulled a burning branch from the edge of a blazing forest, our species ceased to be just another mammal. From chipping flint to smelting steel, humanity’s relentless drive to innovate and alter has granted it, in the solemn language of Genesis: “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

You don’t truly understand this truth until, using your own strength and skill, and the strength and skill of your workmates, you collectively transform your world. And that sort of truth: the knowledge you gain down in a mine or felling a tree: you won’t find in a book anywhere.

Good solid Working Class stuff! Salt of the Earth. The sort of thing laughed at regularly by university graduates for decades now, whether they were Lefties in the Humanities Departments or Righties in Commerce and Management Studies.

But what really cracked me up was the following comment from one “Sanctuary“, familiar to most readers here for his always-angry rants on blogs like The Standard and Kiwiblog about the failures of the Left and the evils of the Right.

Wah wah wah, cry me a river. I am heartily sick and tired of the whining exceptionalism of coasters and farmers. Plenty of people work hard for sweet f**k all, try being an all night cleaner in Tamaki’s industrial sprawl.

The world is changing. Coasters seem to think they have a right to do what they want because, reasons. Nobody forces them to live in that rainy and dreary place. Yes, their way of life is out of date. So stop whinging that the rest of us have some sort of obligation to support a dying way of life, like some sort of giant outdoor paean to the 20th century and accept it.

I had a bit of deja vu as I read that, for it could have come from the pen of any Rogergnome in the 1980’s that one cares to name as they wrote about the dead and dying world of the Polish Shipyard that was the NZ government-economy.

So much for all the criticism heaped on the “Labour Party Traitors” and the Right for crushing and destroying the outdated world of Sanctuary and his friends.

Turns out that his only real objection was being the target. It’s rather like his Leninist forebears in 1900’s Russia whining about the cruelties of the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police – only to set up a vastly more evil secret police, the Cheka, as soon as they got hold of the levers of power.

Similarly, now that the boot is on Sanctuary’s leafy suburban foot it’s time for that boot to stamp on the faces of the Coasters – forever.

It also reminded me of a present-day argument presented in this article written in March 2016:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too.

The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

That’s hardline Rightie, Kevin Williamson, writing in the classic Right-Wing magazine, National Review.

It could be Sanctuary writing about the West Coast of NZ.

Incidently the title of that NR article is The Father-Führer, where Williamson raged against the populism of Trump as he appealed to save these American places that can’t be saved.

Perhaps like the 1980’s we are about to see a new “Rightish” realignment within the Labour Party between the likes of the Sanctuary’s and the Williamson’s, as we’ve seen between elements of the “new” Democrats and WTO Republicans in the US.

By the same token, in the USA we’ve seen a “Leftish” realignment with Working Class Democrats voting for the GOP – well, specifically for Trump in 2016, much to Williamson’s disgust. Or the “strange” realignment that seems to be taking place in Britain since at least the Brexit referendum, where a polling trend shows the Working Class increasingly supporting the Tories.

The continental plates of Western democracies appear to be cracking and shifting. In the case of the West Coast I doubt that voting National will change anything for the Coasters, given that National are equally in thrall to the urban voters who know little of the provincial-rural world and care even less.

Still, Sanctuary’s words, coming as they do from a hard-core Labour Party man, should be sent to every West Coaster along with the message:

This Is What You’re Voting For