KEY POINTS:
I have a morbid fascination for the psychology of left-wing politics. By that I mean not the tedious conceptions of people as prisoners of their employment class, resentful of others' wealth, helpless dupes of money and marketing, but rather the way that intelligent minds can believe these things.
Invite me to a university seminar and I'll be there like a shot. It is another world.
A couple of weeks ago, I shared a platform with Professor Bryan Gould, once a leading Labour MP in Britain, more recently vice-chancellor of Waikato University.
We and several others were offering conjecture on the state of the Labour Governments at Westminster and Wellington.
Gould would have been in the British Cabinet if Labour had won an election in 1992, which it should have done because the electorate had tired of Margaret Thatcher after 11 years and John Major had proved a pale substitute. But Labour lost because it wanted to raise tax rates and still looked too much like the Labour Party of old, the one that bargained power with trade unions.
Labour did not win until it had a leader who had come to terms with Thatcher's Britain, purged the party constitution of socialism and presented it as "New Labour".
That at least is the conventional explanation. Gould has a different one. He believes the British people woke up after the 1992 vote to realise they had made a terrible mistake and were determined to elect Labour next time for some serious redistribution of wealth.
The character of the Blair Government, Gould sadly remarked several times, could be summarised in a comment by one minister: "We don't mind if some people become filthy rich."
Gould is personable, intelligent, lucid and interesting, as is another prominent socialist, columnist Chris Trotter, whose book, No Left Turn, has landed on my desk.
It is subtitled "The distortion of New Zealand's history by greed, bigotry and right wing politics".
The thesis appears to be that the popular will has been regularly frustrated by these dark forces. I've skimmed the later chapters to see how he explains the result of just about every election in our lifetime.
Take 1951, the year of the waterfront clash. Like all retrospective accounts, his treats the watersiders as heroes ranged against an unholy alliance of the first National Government and a compliant Federation of Labour.
Plainly that was not how most New Zealanders saw it at the time because the Holland Government called a snap election and was returned with an increased majority.
Trotter attributes the result to fear whipped up against the militant unions for the threat they posed to the social order. And fair enough, they did threaten the social order; Trotter celebrates them for that.
But somehow he cannot make the connection that a fearful election campaign worked because the vast majority of New Zealanders rather liked that social order.
Of the next election, 1954, he notes the advent of Social Credit cost National votes in small towns, returning the Government with fewer votes than Labour.
With a third party in the mix, no Government was to represent a voting majority until the adoption of MMP.
Trotter co-opts Social Credit to the cause of frustrated socialism.
"It reminds us the class struggle wasn't confined to the working class of the main centres ... It was the FPP system, not mass support, which permitted the wealthy farmers and big businessmen to go on governing the country."
My Social Credit-voting father-in-law would have been surprised to learn he was in a class struggle. Social Credit was a distinct mix of social conservatism and financial socialism. In 1983, they cast votes for the Clyde Dam to keep National in power.
Politics has had two distinct phases in our lifetime. The first, in Britain as in New Zealand, dates from the 1940s to the 1980s.
It was a period of negotiated power, begun by Labour Governments with their national union leaders, to run protected economies with restricted business competition, compulsory unionism and state-sponsored industries.
During those 40 years, New Zealanders usually returned National Governments. They never gave Labour a second term until the sheltered economy was creaking under the strains of its inefficiencies and a Labour Government began to change it.
This, it seems to me, is not the record of a socialist people.
It is perhaps the behaviour of balanced people who distrusted the power of unions in the previous economy and preferred to elect National to deal with them.
The same balancing instinct in the electorate may be operating now that an exposed economy has given employers the upper hand.
Helen Clark is leading the first three-term Labour Government since the founders of social security and the electorate has been as content as it was with National in the heyday of the welfare state.
