Cannibalism Alive and Well Amongst the Left

Succeeding to Self-Destruction

A few commentators have called attention to the bare-knuckle contest underway in Australia.  Sections of the Labour Party have decided that their coalition partner, the Greens are the enemy. 

Labour has gone into a governing coalition with the Greens.  In order to maintain the coalition, Labour has had to cede policy leadership to the Greens.  Extremist policies have been pushed through that are out of kilter with the wider, broader electorate.  Upshot: Labour has plummeted in the polls.  As things stand it is facing electoral decimation next year. 

There is a reflexive kinship between Labour and Green political parties.  We see the same thing working in New Zealand.  Both Greens and Labour belong to the same ideological world-view.  The Greens just happen to be more consistent.
  Both believe in the primacy and efficacy of government to create, rule and redeem human society.  Government is not just primus inter pares (first amongst equals)--which represents the position of centre-left--it is the first and original power, period.  This latter position represents the more extreme left. 

The Greens always, therefore, orientate to the more extreme left.  The reason is that Greens believe a higher public power is required to save the world from the follies of humanity.  People need to be saved from themselves.  People are their own worst enemy.  Without constant government intervention and planning people will self-destruct, destroying  along the way most other forms of sentient life.  Green ideology requires government control to be exerted over what we ingest and excrete, over how we live, move, and have our being.  Consequently, implicit in all Green ideology is a latent totalitarianism.  A government that can legitimately control what you eat, drink, and wear has sanction to exert total control over human action and society. 

When Green parties are in opposition, their prognostications appear amusing, even diverting.  But over time they attract hard left volunteers and the hard left vote.  Traditional left-of-centre Labour is cannibalised.  This process has been underway in New Zealand for some time now. 

Not only that, the Greens are so extreme they can only enter government via coalition with left-of-centre Labour parties.  But the Greens speak the language that instinctively appeals to Labour colleagues. Labour colleagues are easily sucked in. Greens are part of the socialist family.  Coupled with the reality that in coalition Greens usually hold the balance of power it is relatively easy when Greens enter government to run government policy to a significant extent.  Very quickly the electorate becomes aghast.  The Labour parties cop all the electoral enmity.  They risk ceasing to be an electoral force at all, facing extinction. 

This is what is playing out in Australia now.  Labour stalwarts are complaining that the government has been dominated by extreme Green policies, for which Labour is copping all the electoral enmity.  Labour has few places to go.  If it moves to the centre, it risks more and more cannibalisation of its more hard-left volunteers and organisation to the Greens.  If it moves further to the Greens, it risks being voted out of Parliament all together. 

Of course the day may come when the majority of the electorate adopts the ideology of statism.  Then we will learn what suffering and deprivation is all about.  In the meantime, it is a mercy that a vestige of fear and suspicion remains about the destructive and oppressive threats implicit in all state power within the electorate.