David Seymour and James Baldwin: The fire this time - Simon Wilson

Act leader David Seymour had to deal with massive opposition to his Treaty Principles Bill. Photo / Mark Mitchell

THE FACTS

• Act leader David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill is before Parliament.
• Seymour debated race issues recently at the Oxford Union.
• In 1965, the Cambridge Union hosted a famous debate on the same topic between the writers James Baldwin and William F. Buckley.

Act Party leader David Seymour was guest of honour at a party held by his party recently, to celebrate his becoming Deputy Prime Minister.

In his speech, Seymour quoted the American founding father and Boston Tea Party revolutionary Samuel Adams: “It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

Powerful words. Keep ’em angry and active. Keep ’em thinking their goal is noble: freedom! Flatter them with high-blown speech. And that “brushfires”: it speaks of insurrection without declaring it, of burning everything down while plausibly being able to deny you want to do any such thing. It lights a spark.

Seymour is often seen as the house intellectual of the hard right in this country, the guy who articulates, endlessly, the supposed grand principles of his cause: democracy, equality, freedom.

And, speaking of brushfires, there are some uncanny parallels between his career of late and that of another intellectual of the hard right.

I’m thinking of William F. Buckley, the brains behind the spectacular failure of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican campaign for the American presidency. Bear with me.

Goldwater, with Buckley advising him, had been one of only six Republican senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Seymour was similarly isolated in promoting his Treaty Principles Bill last year and this year.

In 1965, peaceful demonstrations were broken up with batons and bullets throughout the American South, including, most famously, on the bridge in Selma, Alabama. It was the year Buckley debated race with the writer James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union.

Seymour did his own Oxford Union debate on race this year, albeit not against opponents of Baldwin’s class. Still, they both lost.

James Baldwin (centre) in a still from the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Photo / Magnolia Pictures

Buckley was 39, renowned as a thinker, writer and public speaker for his fluency and wit. Seymour has just turned 42 and is a little less known for his wit, but he is a genuine theorist and the politician near Prime Minister Christopher Luxon who appears to be thinking hardest.

When Buckley looked at the civil rights movement, he saw determined leadership and massive support among American blacks and liberals, and knew it had to be stopped.

For him, civil rights weren’t at stake. It was the threat to the existing power structures and social order he worried about.

Seymour repeatedly implies the same thing. He responded to the massive opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill generated by Te Pāti Māori with constant claims the Treaty is being used to undermine the equality and freedoms we all enjoy in our democracy.

Buckley believed, as a friend of his put it, that the goals of the civil rights movement would “bend the permanent structure of our society permanently out of shape” and “sacrifice the peace of all of us”. Democracy as they knew it would be destroyed.

Baldwin might have agreed. He’d run out of patience with soft liberals seeking accommodation and gentle progress. In his view, the “mountain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centres have failed to change the face of Harlem”.

Structural change was needed in the way power was wielded and how decisions were made. This is also the message of Te Pāti Māori.

In the book Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America, author Sam Tanenhaus says Baldwin’s theme for the debate was that “the structure itself was rotten and awaited the match that would set it ablaze”.

There’s that fire again. Everyone plays with it. Baldwin’s famous book The Fire Next Time had been published two years earlier and made him “a prophet of racial reckoning”.

Baldwin was to Buckley what Te Pāti Māori is to David Seymour: the enemy at the gates.

American author William F. Buckley was, in his day, one of the staunchest critics of the American civil rights movement. Photo / Herald Archives / Camera Press

Religion comes into it. Buckley wrote that The Fire Next Time was “a call to lynch the white God”, although he seemed untroubled by the Bible’s failure to recognise any such God.

Baldwin was especially critical of this “white God”, of the way America used Christianity to reinforce white privilege. But he didn’t think it was because white people were bad Christians who did not live up to their own ideals.

As Tannenhaus records: “He says we do not have any ideals: we do not believe in any of the things our religion, our civilisation, our country stand for. It is all an elaborate lie whose sole and original function is to fortify privilege.”

This is the central charge Baldwin brought against America. It relates closely to the central charge Te Pāti Māori brings against Parliament, the health and education systems and the other civic institutions of our own society: regardless of any good intentions of the people running them, their role is to fortify privilege.

Is it true? The statistics that reveal poorer outcomes for Māori are overwhelmingly consistent. It’s certainly worth debating.

And the deeper question is this. If we don’t want it to be true, what are we going to do about it? If we do believe in justice and fairness and the value of common care for each other, how are we going to prove that our democracy can deliver these things for everyone?

Or, if you prefer, when are we going to get serious about 1) eliminating poverty and 2) making the most of the enormous partnership opportunities offered by the Treaty?

It’s not enough just to say, “We’re good people, look at our values, so you should just let things be”. That’s what Baldwin spent his life attacking, it’s what Buckley tried to defend, it’s what Te Pāti Māori want to overcome and it’s what Seymour defends today.

Buckley and Seymour share something else. Although Baldwin didn’t say anything about his opponent, Buckley responded to him with an angry ad hominem attack.

Seymour does this to an almost feverish extent. Last month he went after Dame Anne Salmond and others who have criticised his Regulatory Standards Bill. He says his critics suffer from “Regulatory Standards Derangement Syndrome” and has called them “victims of the day”, before complaining they can’t take a joke.

This is strange because usually Seymour casts himself as the victim. He says his critics don’t understand what he’s trying to do. He goes to Waitangi and the pōwhiri gets up in his face. He goes to Parliament and the terrifying Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke does the same thing.

He’s the most powerful person almost every place he goes, but that doesn’t stop him crying foul.

We know from this that he is not trying to win the debate with his critics. If he were, he would engage with their ideas. Instead, his appeal, as ever, is to the irate, tireless minority. He’s setting brushfires in their minds.

Buckley also said: “The fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments that you raise.”

This is the subtext of everything Seymour says about Treaty rights: that we should not treat Māori as Māori. If we don’t accept Māori are formed by their history and cultural identity, as he says we shouldn’t, we don’t have to allow the possibility of agencies and programmes that focus on the results of that history.

Instead, Seymour wants simple “equality”. But when he insists everyone is the same, what that really means is that we should think of Māori as white.

As for Buckley, he was undone by the failure of his imagination. He could not conceive what it might be like to be black.

Seymour is Māori, so he doesn’t have that problem. But lighting those brushfires would be so much harder if he ever suggested his followers should acknowledge what the lives of others are like.

The shortcomings of his Regulatory Standards Bill were powerfully explained by Sasha Borissenko in the Herald this week. Supporting documents have been heavily redacted, contradictory, confusing or missing altogether. Public scrutiny has been limited and the bill was opposed by Seymour’s own Ministry for Regulation. It disregards the founding document of the nation.

Rarely, if ever, has a bill claiming to improve democratic processes provided such an egregious example of how to undermine them.

Does Seymour care? If he were serious about getting things done, instead of just lighting brushfires, he would have a very different record from the one he has established.

Only a handful of charter schools, all of them tiny, have been approved: Seymour would have a field day attacking this if someone else were responsible. His school lunch programme became a national laughing stock. His own ministry wastes money, with average salaries of more than $150,000. His divisiveness, particularly over the Treaty Principles Bill, is without parallel.

You could argue he hasn’t achieved anything, apart from making a mess of almost everything he’s touched. Including our democracy.

Okay, he’s a clever public speaker. Even if the students at Oxford weren’t impressed.