by Nathan Smith

It always makes me laugh when I hear people say, “the prime minister is ruining New Zealand!” as if Christopher Luxon is swinging his gold sceptre like a Greek tyrant.

The reality is, no leader in a modern democracy has 0.001% of the power needed to “ruin” the country. Luxon isn’t in command. He doesn’t make any real decisions. This is not Luxon’s New Zealand; it never was, and it never will be. Luxon is a functionary, a conduit. He occupies the same empty seat as did the dissolving lettuce Chris Hipkins did.

The visible political class are never in power, only the elite power brokers within their ranks are. And their power persists no matter who is sitting in the big seat. Complaining about what elected politicians do or don’t do imbues them with more power narratively than they really have, and therefore, in a paradoxical sense, gives them a sense of legitimacy they otherwise didn’t have. This illusion is very useful to the real power brokers.

People still think of a prime minister as a king, but they also believe in bottom-up democracy. People can hold these two conflicting ideas simultaneously because they are trained from birth to think of themselves as a civic movement that can impact the will of the king. But if you stop to analyse this for a moment, you’ll realise that no elites will ever let the people organise in a way that allows them to overthrow those same elites.

The question of legitimacy is key to understanding politics. People think they know what this word means, but the popular concept of legitimacy is wholly false and often backwards. This mistake is a result of thinking that public opinion matters, that power comes from consent of the governed. This basic error makes the discussion of, and solutions to, real power struggles impossible because the moment there is a critical bursting of pressure on someone like Luxon, power simply parachutes in a new empty suit to take his place.

The formula for legitimacy is simple: to whom, and for what? Let’s begin with a quote from Hume.

“Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is affected, we shall find that as the force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion.”

Hume is saying that an organised minority will always, always, defeat the disorganised majority. That’s one of the axioms of politics. You can’t get outside of this. Anything that disagrees with that axiom is wrong. It’s not flawed. It’s not a difference of opinion. It is wrong.

Being legitimate doesn’t mean that you rule or don’t rule. It bears no significance on ruling whatsoever. It is a filter over which people view power. Legitimacy comes by ruling. Ruling does not come by legitimacy. Power legitimises itself and legitimacy can be reframed by power. Governance and government are not the same things. The only legitimacy that matters is internal. Public legitimacy comes from the masses outside looking in and expressing their emotions regarding a process they do not understand, nor can meaningfully influence.

The reality of modern democracy is that a leader does not need to be popular to be elected. A leader does not have to be liked. A leader can be despised by the population and remain in power, like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Jacinda Ardern. That’s because a population need not find its leaders legitimate. It only needs to submit to their rule.

When you confront people with the reality that a prime minister isn’t actually in power, it can sound a bit tinfoil hat-y. That’s why I like to use Neema Parvini’s analogy of pro wrestling.

Vince McMahon is the one in control of the whole wrestling story, not the audience. And especially not the wrestler. The wrestler doesn’t control his own fate. The wrestler can make some variations on his story, but the narrative remains beyond his control. I believe the average person’s political IQ could quadruple if they understood that there must necessarily be a Vince character somewhere in the political system. A scripting team always sets the broad agendas, and this team does not care who advances that agenda, so long as the agenda is advanced.

Politicians are a lot like pro wrestlers. They spend all their time debating in parliament for no reason at all because the decisions have already been made. It’s not about the war. It’s not about the oil. It’s not about the spending cuts. It’s about the narrative set by people who rarely are seen in front of a camera. As long as people focus on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of someone like Luxon, this will neutralise any action against those real power centres.

It used to be that the system would try to make you believe in the pro wrestling fakery of politics. But I don’t think this is true anymore. Instead, the system has worked out that it’s just as good to have people be sceptical of its narrative as to have them believe in it. Scepticism means you’ll treat the narrative with more attention, and that the narrative will be sent to both sides. By creating a partisan split, politicians end up becoming more legitimate to everyone again, even the sceptics. It’s a neat trick.

Understanding legitimacy is critical for any group looking to engage in politics. For a political group to become viable with the masses, the common wisdom is that it must have an air of legitimacy. But this is the fastest way to kill political energy. If an insurgent counter elite is attempting to dislodge a system, then being promoted as legitimate by that system would be fatal to the agenda of that counter elite.

Legitimacy is not something to seek out from the current system because if you are legitimised by that system, then you won’t be ruling it. If you are ruling in the system, then you will be legitimised by it. Legitimacy is only imbued by the fact that you are already in power. Because you are in power, you are legitimate. It’s tautological, but that’s how it works.

The idea that a political movement must shed its outwardly revolutionary rhetoric to gain public legitimacy is baked into all thinking on the right. The paradox is that to get into government to do the things you want to do, you have to swear you’ll not do the things you want to do. But then when you get into government, you can’t do the things you want to do anyway because the way you gained that legitimacy in the first place was to completely dilute what you stood for into an indistinct sludge.

This is why all populist parties on the right end up as a confusing mess. Electoral viability dictates that all political parties must fit into the larger managerial system by taking on a particular rigid shape. The bureaucracies, including the money power, are all more powerful than any party. The National Party, for example, has taken the shape that the institutions and bureaucracies around it have forged it into. Any party that has wielded as much power as it has over such a long time must necessarily turn into something that looks like the National Party. This goes for the Labour Party as well. But precisely because they have been moulded by the system, both parties can be dispensed with by that system at any point if they do not follow the overall agenda scripted for them.

This is why total rejection, total separation, from the system should always be the real goal. Modern democracy is constructed only to manage its own decline. That is all it can do. We were once led by strong men, and now we are led by weak men with shoulders too narrow and backs not strong enough to shoulder the burdens of their predecessors. Imbuing the weak men like Luxon, Hipkins, Peters, Seymour or anyone else part of the current system with agency and power they do not have is a huge error. Even if they agreed to put all their earnest efforts towards halting the decline, they would be incapable because they are not great men.

You don’t hate Luxon, you hate modern democracy in general. You hate the Reserve Bank. You hate managerialism. You hate managed decline. Until you are directly attacking the supporting structure of managed decline, it won’t matter what you do. There is nothing you can do from inside the system to halt the decline or change the direction of the agenda. Politics, proper politics, must begin with separation from the system, a complete and utter rejection of its framing and suggested pathways for “legitimacy.”

If you want to de-legitimise something, try and de-legitimise the idea of electoral politics out of your mind. As I always advise, start from first principles. That is the only way to become indigestible to the current system. If you can do that, you will be well on the way to creating your own legitimacy.

After all, that’s the goal, right?

Originally published on The Good Oil.