The Haps
Sunday marked 40 years since the Bastille Day election of July 14, 1984. ACT’s founder Sir Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble burst Muldoon’s state of sleepy mediocrity. They painfully birthed the modern, multi-ethnic trading nation we call home today. If you’re interested in this period of our country’s history, The Spinoff have captured it in a superb podcast. We at Free Press are not keen Spinoff readers, but we predict they will win many awards for vividly bringing the period to life with archival audio.
Meanwhile, David Seymour is Acting Prime Minister for the week. It is something even Free Press readers could hardly imagine when we started a decade ago. ACT’s MPs are working their way through a three-week Parliamentary recess by greeting and hearing from members and supporters up and down the country. If you are not a member of ACT, and would like to be part of these invite-only events, please consider joining here.
A More Perfect Union
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump may be the story of the year. We say may be, because who knows what could happen next at this point.
Should we guess anyway? Elections can do anything. Back here in our 2017 one, Metiria Turei told the world she’d committed benefit fraud. Not usually a political winner, but she was running for the Greens. Their polling spiked to record levels and Labour’s tanked.
Then Andrew Little panicked and quit, seven weeks before an election. That’s not usually a good move either, but it worked for Labour. They elected Jacinda Ardern, and $100 billion later… you know the rest.
One odd footnote to that saga: it turned out what Turei claimed to have done wasn’t actually illegal under the laws of the time. Back then it seemed like the Greens couldn’t even be trusted to break the law.
We’re not saying that the Democrats should replace their leader like Labour did in 2017. We’re saying events can change campaigns in unpredictable ways.
The tone of the campaign may change to a race for unity and understanding. Trump would need to change his style, could he credibly do it? Biden’s grandfatherly figure could become a strength, his dithering forgiven. Would it save him?
At this point we’re just spitballing. We have no better idea than anyone else right now, but it’s going to be a great time for political tragics globally.
It got us thinking about the longer term. Is this the end for the United States? The New Zealand Left like to hope so. The big, messy, imperfect, but free society called America leading the world in technology and culture really rains on their parade. It shows they’re wrong in theory and practice.
At Free Press we’re more optimistic for our American friends. Yes, they’ve got a few problems at the moment. Yes, this latest political violence is very bad, but the U.S. has been here, and worse, before.
We once met a man who won a scholarship to study in there in 1968. The place was so wild he gave up a free education, turned around and left. Who could blame him? Assassinations of JFK and MLK among others had rocked the country. There were riots. Vietnam was a disaster. Inflation was out of control. It felt like the communists really could win the Cold War. The corruption and impeachment of President Nixon was still to come.
Long story short, Reagan came to power. A deregulated economy combined with the digital revolution won the Cold War. The USA had decades of awesome. Then the GFC, failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, new culture wars at home, and deindustrialisation were suddenly less awesome. Trump is the response to division and disenchantment, whether or not he can fix it.
The cycle goes around again. America will reinvent itself as the leading cultural and technological power. What the carping New Zealand Left do not understand about America is that it is a project in human living.
As the constitution says, and President Obama brilliantly riffed in his 2008 speech of the same title, it is a project to build A More Perfect Union. The project’s never finished, and sometimes goes wrong, but always reaches new highs after each setback.
The next year will be very bumpy but there is every reason to believe the United States will rebound, and that, for New Zealand, is not only a good thing but essential to our peace and prosperity.