Memo to Labour and Green supporters
Subject: options for dealing with past alignment with Winston Peters
MEMORANDUM
To: Supporters of the Labour and Green parties
From: Liam Hehir
Date: 26 October 2023
Subject: Distancing yourself from prior Winston Peters support
This memo discusses the recent behaviour of Winston Peters and the potential strategies for you, as supporters of the Labour and the Green parties, to adopt in response.
The problem is that the current situation, in which Winston Peters seems likely to enable a National government, needs to be reconciled with your own past decisions to align with Winston Peters.
While those past alignments may have been based on shared policy goals or political strategy, they are an obstacle to your current desire to declare Peters to be so objectionable that responsible political parties must refuse to work with him on principle.
This is indeed a tricky situation. However, we have identified three workable strategies that consider the potential implications for both current political standing and future alliances. Each presents distinct ways to respond to the situation.
Here are the three potential approaches:
Revisionism: In this strategy, you simply sidestep past alliances with Peters by forgetting they ever existed.
This strategy is possible if you can rely on significant thought control and a strong willingness to selectively remember or forget certain aspects of political history. This rewriting of history allows you to distance themselves from Peters without having to directly address or justify past decisions to align with him.
However, it's important to note the main limitation of this strategy - it can realistically only be implemented by those who are unwaveringly partisan. Those who are so committed to their political affiliation that they would willingly ignore or distort past events for the sake of maintaining loyalty to a narrative.
Temporal Shift: This approach would involve arguing that Peters was acceptable as a coalition partner in the past, but his recent behaviour is divergent and unacceptable.
While this allows us to maintain your past decisions, it has its drawbacks as a justification.
The weakness of this approach is that it can be easily countered with evidence of Peters' past attacks on ethnic and religious minority communities. Supporters would have to argue that his recent anti-vaccination stance is somehow worse than his past stoking of racial division, or that his ridiculous claims about Jacinda Ardern having advance warning of a terror attack is somehow more egregious than statements that appeared to blame the Muslim community as a whole for Islamist terrorism.
This position requires a certain level of mental gymnastics and can strain credibility. While it may require less thought control than the Revisionist approach, it still largely depends on an audience that won't critically examine these inconsistencies.
Therefore, this approach is most likely to be effective in environments where critical examination of these issues is less likely to occur. Accordingly, this strategy can only really be recommended for those working in a university setting.
Humility: You could acknowledge past decisions to align with Peters but express a change of heart. This approach would involve admitting past errors in judgment and pledging to do better. This path is grounded in honesty and encourages growth but it does limit your social media posts about National to the issuing of warnings rather than admonition.
This is the big weakness of the humility approach, because the ability to lecture and hector others about their political choices is the very reason most of you are interested in politics. By acknowledging past mistakes, supporters may lose the moral high ground from which they have previously criticised others.
In the same way that some of you are unable to commit to a fully revisionist approach, many lack the required levels of self-reflection and acceptance of past mistakes to commit to this course of action.
Summing up
In conclusion, given the diverse viewpoints and values within the Labour and Green supporter base, it is unlikely that one approach will be satisfactory to all.
Therefore, some latitude should be allowed for individual supporters to choose a response that is tailored to their own needs and political goals.
It's also crucial to consider the future political landscape. Politics is a fluid and ever-changing field. Therefore, for those incapable of committing to complete revisionism, there is a need to exercise caution. Leave room for potential future alignments with Peters, should it become convenient for him to become a left-wing hero once more.