John McLean: The Liberal Progressive?

In search of an alluring hybrid political animal

“Liberal” has become a pejorative term that conservatives use to label Lefties, with negative connotations of laziness, ideological incoherence and Utopian derangement.

But let’s use “Liberal” in the positive, traditional sense. Our old-fashioned archetypal Liberal believes that the central role of Government is to enhance the freedoms of the citizenry, including to protect us from being harmed by others and from the threats to liberty posed by Government itself, as well as the Courts and the Police.

In similar vein, conservatives use “Progressive” to deride activists who look to the State to radically transform society by seeking equality of outcomes, curing perceived societal unfairness with “social justice” initiatives and generally dictating what citizens should do and what opinions they can hold.

However, let’s use “Progressive” in a more literal sense to simply describe someone who believes that the State has a defensible role to play – above the Liberal ideal of enhanced freedoms - in fostering improved societal welfare and equality of opportunity.

Regressive Illiberal Wokery

Inherent, insoluble flaws and contradictions are the beating heart of Woke/Postmodernism/Identity Politics…(call this Western scourge what you will).

At Woke’s kooky core is profound rejection of aspirational hopes for societal peace and progress. According to Wokesters, societies are irredeemably locked in eternal, zero-sum wars for societal ascendancy between oppressors and oppressed, with the oppressed battling to become oppressors, in endless cycles of conflict. The Woke primacy of subjectivity (“feelings”) extinguishes any promise of shared values and universalism, or common conceptions of a peaceful and prosperous collective future.

The dark hopelessness of Wokery is intimately associated with a destructive repudiation of the marvelous science that has enlightened and enriched us. In the Aotearoa version of New Zealand, water has become possessed of animist Māori life forces.

And our Department of Conservation funds the concoction of potions from sperm whale bones and spermaceti (a waxy substance found in sperm whale head cavities). The potions are applied to kauri trees in futile attempts to cure trees of phytophthora agathidicida, a fungus-like disease that causes kauri die-back. Sperm whales are even said to be fatally beaching themselves in order to save their Kauri kin. Ancient Rongoā Māori practices to fight Kauri dieback are part of a broader revival of indigenous medical practices in NZ | Newshub.

Woke takes us back to the Dark Ages. It’s a poisonous anti-democratic soup of performative righteousness, intolerant moralizing, enforced sacralizing of select groups identified by race and sexual/gender “identity” (brown, homosexual and transgender citizens) and Luddite distain for science and technological innovation.

Neither is Woke in any sense liberal. Wokesters hate freedom and pluralism, love Big Government and are intolerant, censorious and addicted to trying to cancel people they disagree with from public discourse. They’re fascists in the true sense; constantly looking to coopt and exploit the apparatus of State and media channels in order to control the narrative and exclusively promote their Identitarianism.

Progressive liberalism

So, what might the antithesis of Woke Regressive Illiberalism look like?

My Progressive Liberal archetype is a hopeful and sensible soul who considers that, through robust debate and science, we can together make positive progress, nudging ourselves in positive directions. There’s no End-Of-History. For my Progressive Liberal, societal improvement is an iterative process without the menace of Utopian dreams or eschatological End-Times.

But can Progressive be combined with Liberal, without creating a Frankenstein Monster of ill-fitting parts? Can liberal advancement of freedoms be reconciled with progressive, modulated use of Governmental machinery to make our world a better place, without creating bloated Governmental bureaucracies operating mainly to mop up the otherwise unemployable?

Who is New Zealand’s classic Liberal? I’m going with Lindsay Perigo, world-renowned authority on Mario Lanza, founder and first leader of the Libertarianz political party, freakishly articulate and literary dude plus…apparent inventor of this own form of yoga (“Periyoga!”).

And who might we regard as a classic New Zealand Progressive. Let’s plump for Stephen Rainbow, our newly minted Chief Human Rights Commissioner. Rainbow has done it all in truly progressive causes, even going so far as to found the “Progressive Green Party” in 1998.

We know Rainbow is made of the right stuff by the fact that Martin “Bomber” Bradbury tried to cancel Rainbow with an absurd blog on 19 August 2024 entitled Installing Israeli Apologist and Free Speech Stormtrooper onto Human Rights Commission undermines our collective human rights mana.

A couple of days earlier, Mad Madeleine Chapman of The Spinoff accused Rainbow (together with Melissa Derby - see below) of being transphobic, with an opinion piece entitled Can you be a human rights commissioner and transphobic at the same time?

In November 2023, Rainbow had criticised the "highly selective" Human Rights Commission for giving trans activist Shaneel Lal a platform, posting on Facebook that Lal's "divisive antics" were undoing support for gay people and same-sex marriage. Also in that month, Rainbow complained about "a civilisation in self-inflicted and terminal decline" (referencing images of the queer and trans community supporting Palestine) and praised British Conservative MP Suella Braverman for leading "the popular revolt against woke elites and their rejection of western cultural values".

In multiple Facebook posts, Rainbow has also attacked the current iteration of the Greens, calling them the "nasty party" and experts at hypocritical virtue-signalling…"NZ's Greens have become the cheerleaders for the murderous misogynistic homophobic death cult Hamas". All of which was perfectly justified and entirely consistent with laudable progressivism.

(Another worthy contender for Paragon Progressive New Zealander is Dr Melissa Derby, New Zealand’s new Race Relations Commissioner, photo’d along with Rainbow above. Derby - also covered in Chapman’s Spinoff piece - is a founding member of New Zealand’s Free Speech Union. In 2023, after trans rights protestors attacked women including Posie Parker in Albert Park, Derby shared a tweet saying the “trans movement” cannot be tolerated in civil society. In 2020, Derby spoke at an event hosted by “anti-trans” group Speak Up For Women at which she joked “As far as points in the oppression Olympics are concerned, I’m always off to a pretty good start, being female with Māori heritage. Although now that people who are biologically men want to compete in our sports teams, my winning streak may be coming to an end.”)

So then, can we combine Perigo and Rainbow - non-carnally, of course (they both happen to be gay) - without creating some sort of ideological monstrosity? Of course we can. Perigo is into minimal Government but is not an anarchist or nihilist. All societies must have rules. And the pot of gold at Rainbow’s end is not authoritarianism.

Proglibism, anyone?

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.