At the beginning of an American news podcast, I was startled to hear the voice of Winston Peters. “Our democracy is under attack,” he began, ominously. How? Why? He didn’t elaborate. But fear not. His party’s “common sense”, he went on, would combat “woke extremism”. And then he borrowed a slogan from that other great populist, Donald Trump. “Let’s take back our country,” Peters urged.
It’s the kind of signalling that works for Peters. We know he will go to great lengths to achieve relevance. We saw this during last year’s Wellington protests, when he walked among the fringe without a mask. I’d walked among them myself, in the interests of journalistic enquiry. They really weren’t fun to hang out with. They were aggressive; many had suspicious hacking coughs (but this was fine because Covid was a hoax.) They wanted to take back our country, to a time before science and modern medicine, before woke extremism led to a woman becoming Prime Minister.
Peters will flirt with anti-vaxxers; he will condemn signage in Māori; he will defend women against trans people lurking in women’s toilets. (Such a relief about the toilets, honestly.) He’s so much the cynic, he’s a parody of himself. His smile and his laugh are charming, but a lifetime of tactical posturing has made his rhetoric seem calculating and manipulative.
And here he is, relevant again. After a worried reading of the polls, National Party leader Christopher Luxon was forced to go on record: if he had to, he would give the Cheshire Cat a call. Hilariously though, during the second leaders’ debate, Luxon said, of the Old Charmer, “I don’t know him.” He went on insisting he didn’t know Winston, until the moderator pointed out everyone does, and the whole room laughed.
We all know him. Peters’ smile comes out like the sun until a cloud crosses, and now (tediously, yet again) he’s “remonstrating with the media”. Mr Sunshine-and-shadow, ruggedly telling it like it is.
The usual assumption is that he’s scheming. Perhaps the greatest trick Peters ever pulls is convincing the world he’s serious. His rhetoric has successfully set the trap for incumbents that Hillary Clinton fell into when she called a group of Americans “Deplorables”. If you condemn grievance rather than appearing to listen, you harden it.
His most entertaining feature is the grief he gives to his populist rival, Act leader David Seymour, the politician spoken of by some in his posh, mangrovian electorate as “the usurper, the ridiculous youth”. “What is it with the guns and pseudoephedrine, why can’t he bugger off?”
Peters echoes Trump’s fraudulent projection when he says our democracy is under attack. Ironically, the populism he’s channelling is a serious threat to election integrity in the US. There, the attacker is Trump himself. Academics, lawyers, commentators and historians are appearing on news broadcasts to sound the alarm. If the MAGA man wins in 2024, it could be America’s last democratic election.
Trump is dominating as the presumptive Republican nominee, and head of his authoritarian movement.
He’s also becoming increasingly surreal. He told recent rallies he’d won elections against Barack Obama and George W Bush, and he predicted President Biden could lead America into World War II.
On the American news podcast, Peters’ campaign advertisement was followed by audio of Trump continuing his weird war on windmills: this time he mused about windmills causing the deaths of whales. The danger he represents makes Peters’ use of his slogans especially unsavoury.
How about we take back sincerity? Let’s take back politicians who have a clear, open stance on policy. At least let them aim higher than imitating Donald Trump.
