Blame game behind Parliament protest
The confused medley of extremism on display at the 23-day protest in Wellington shows what can happen when blame-based ideas take hold in society.
The anti-vax movement began with vaccine hesitancy in response to alarmist claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism.
Recently, we’ve seen lockdown protests swell to include wackie QAnon theories of child trafficking, pro-Trump campaigners, 1080 opponents and a vocal contingent of white supremacist activists.
Social science specialist Professor Paul Spoonley says an unsettling number of Kiwis are commenting on, liking and reposting far-right feeds.
A study by the Department of Internal Affairs into online extremism shows we have twice as many far-right Facebook page followers as Australia and almost three times as many as the UK, Canada or the US.
While the anti-vaccine mandate movement includes groups with wildly differing agendas, what unites them is a belief that the individual is more important than the collective.
The protesters don’t like being told what to do by government or health officials.
As we move forward, it’s important to understand what lies at the heart of this drift away from the more progressive Kiwi values.
To find answers we need to look at who gains from peddling these divisive ideas. Language experts, Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff maintain that populist figures like Putin and Trump built their voter base by creating new constituencies from among the disenfranchised.
Chomsky argues that since the 1980s when free-market economics began to dominate the global order, right leaning politicians have exploited our most basic fears, prejudices and nationalistic tendencies in a bid to swing voters.
Trump used his Twitter campaign to lend credence to and even promote conspiracies, false claims of electoral fraud and Covid denial while, Putin is brazenly using misinformation to justify war against Ukraine.
Lakoff points out that this strategy serves strongman leaders well by co-opting the support of Christian fundamentalists, blue-collar workers, anti-vaxers and altright nationalists to support nationalistic policies.
Brain science shows that our fundamental way of seeing the world determines our political beliefs. Depending on our early childhood experience we identify with one of two moral frameworks, either the Strict Father or the Nurturing Parent, each being deeply embedded in thought and language.
In the arena of politics Strict Father values are an easier sell because they deal in black and white ideas about society - the poor being lazy and the rich hard working, the need for a powerful leader to protect against the evils of the world, the value of making it alone without society’s help or government interference.
The work of citizenship under the Nurturing Parent model asks us to exercise tolerance and empathy. But the progressive ideals of compassion, open communication and sharing of resources are harder to promote as they require people to balance their own interests with the interests of others.
As we navigate another year of global upheaval with war in the Ukraine and economies reeling from the continued impact of Covid 19, we would do well to consider which model of governance best serves our national aspirations.