An article posted in early December last year by Karl Du Fresne is worth noting now as we move into the new year, Why social cohesion should be the key issue in 2023.

Karl notes a few of the bad things that have developed under this Labour government’s headlong and headstrong rush where only fools run, seemingly on a leash held by the Maori group inside Labour, led by Willy Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta.

But it seems that it’s an article by Victoria University politics lecturer Bryce Edwards, that has greatly increased Karl’s concerns, especially compared to the last great upheaval in the form of the Springbok Tour in 1981, which was over a single issue, which wounds began to heal when the tour ended and ended a decade later when Apartheid ended in South Africa:

But in 2022, there are multiple social cracks spreading in all directions, and no promise that the fractures will heal.

Where Bryce Edwards and the respondents to the survey he reports may be wrong, I suspect, is in identifying inequalities of wealth and housing as the key factors “tearing the country apart”, in Edwards’ words. I think there’s much more to it than that.

Well of course; Edwards is an old-style Leftist and you can find ones similar to him like Chris Trotter and “Bomber” Bradbury expressing the same concerns and locating to them to the same sources of traditional Marxist analysis. You’d think they’d know better after sixty years of the Counter-Culture revolution and the likes of Herbert Marcuse and his fellow travelers of the Frankfurt school, plus Antonio Gramsci, who believed that Communist Revolutions in the West required more than the scientific inevitability of capitalist collapse but also the destruction of Western cultural institutions.

Du Fresne actually throws a bone to those economic determinists by admitting the obvious fact that the post-1984 economic changes in NZ made big changes, even as he supported them:

… there’s no denying they fundamentally re-arranged New Zealand’s social furniture in ways that I don’t think were foreseen. What we thought of then as an unavoidable but temporary social dislocation ended up becoming structurally embedded.

But he’s right to be worried that there’s a lot more to our current divisions than this:

Identity politics promotes a neo-Marxist view of society as inherently divided between the privileged – for which read white and male – and a plethora of aggrieved groups struggling against oppression and disadvantage.
…
We are told these perceived disadvantages are the result of structural imbalances of power that can be remedied only by a radical reconstruction of society. It’s effectively a zero-sum game in which power must be transferred from those who are perceived as having it to those who feel excluded.

To which Gramsci, Marcuse and company would simply say “of course“, as do their contemporaries in the comments sections of places like The Standard and The Daily Blog. But of course revolutionaries have never worried about the side-effects of their maniacal pursuits:

This creates conditions in which society runs the risk of going to war with itself. Even traditional liberal democratic values that most of us thought were unassailable are under attack. These include freedom of speech, which the proponents of identity politics condemn as a tool of oppression and an instrument of hate against vulnerable minorities, and the principle that no group of citizens should enjoy greater rights than any other.

Karl points out that while all this has been developing for some time it has accelerated under this Labour government, with inflection points provided by the Christchurch mass shooting and of course the Great Chinese Lung Rot Pandemic.

The MSM can take blame as well because of their programmed need for Doom News (“If it bleeds, it leads”) for which divisions, victims and oppressors, trouble and strife are the perfect foil for stories – compared to a past where the MSM formed a public square where issues could be debated civilly. He also takes a shot at the number of leading voices in academia, bureaucracy and politics who did not grow up here in Old Zealand:

… vociferous, highly assertive relative newcomers – in academia, the bureaucracy and politics – who see New Zealand as a perfect ideological blank space on which they can leave their imprint. I suspect they can’t believe their luck in stumbling on a country with a population that’s either too passive, too naive or simply too distracted by other things – jobs, mortgages, sport, bringing up kids – to realise their country is being messed with. We have always been suckers for articulate, confident voices from overseas; it’s part of our national inferiority complex.

All too true – but of course that includes all those voices from Britain and the USA that lauded this country during the last revolutionary government, the Fourth Labour administration, and as one of his commentators noted:

I also think Karl underestimates the influence of local actors. Critical Race Theory – a nonsense US academic theory – has been adopted en masse by local Maori activists (and their “Pakeha allies”) as a tool to reek revenge and division.
…
It is a national gaslighting suffered upon the passivity of New Zealanders. Whilst not naturally Right-Wing or conservative, I’ve come to realise this thought-virus of identity politics and critical justice theories won’t be defeated by appeals to the centre and compromise. National (under Luxon) simply don’t have the committment or inclination to fight this and if you think a NAT/ACT coalition will be much better, you are dreaming.

In any case the real problem with pieces such as this – much as agree with him – is that unless there are alternative answers that can be pushed across all parts of our society those “vociferous, highly assertive voices” will carry the day, as revolutionaries have often done before.

The result is that what was previously a unified and, by world standards, generally contented country is now a sour, rancorous babel of competing voices. Distrust, fear, resentment and sullen anger have displaced the broad consensus that sustained New Zealand for decades regardless of which political party was in power. Where all this could lead is impossible to say and frightening to contemplate.

I saw no answers from Du Fresne, only fears. But perhaps that is asking too much of a mere blogger. More sadly and worryingly I don’t see answers from anybody else, beyond ACT’s plaintive call to push back against all this. But by what measures, for this seems to now be beyond mere politics, let alone the dull mechanics of legislation?