Where is the Right – 2026?

In the aftermath of the 2020 General Election, I suggested some premises for the next three years ahead.¹ I was not naively optimistic but wrote on the basis that something should be said, even if it had no chance of fulfillment. Obviously in the aftermath of the 2023 General Election, I felt no such compulsion even on that basis as there had not been the slightest shift towards an actual Rightist movement.

My primary purpose in writing the 2020 article was to urge the elimination of pseudo-right clutter, that is, four main points: (1) no Islamophobia and pro-Israelism of the Tommy Robinson variety; (2) realisation that the USA (Wall St., and Hollywood) remains an existential threat to the remnant of High Culture, regardless of Trump, (3) no Classical Liberalism of the Act Party variety, (4) rejection of ‘one nation’ assimilationism of the NZ First/Act variety.

Each of these four points are assumed by cretinous types such as journalists and academics to be intrinsically ‘Right’: Islamophobia, Americanism, Free Trade, melting pot.

Imprecise Dichotomies

Because the foundation of New Zealand was as a waste product of English Liberalism, and its Treaty of Waitangi is social contract theory, we are flawed from the start. That the Left upholds this heritage is entirely in accord with its having emerged from the same Zeitgeist as Liberalism. This partially explains why there is a pervasive muddle in defining ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in the Anglophone world generally. Those who are considered ‘conservatives’ such as Don Brash et al are, to the contrary, Liberals.

For the Anglophone world the origins go back to the 17th century Cromwellian upheaval, where the doctrinal delineations can be found in the conflict between Parliament and Crown, Roundheads and Cavaliers, and despite the Restoration, the rot permanently subverted the British world, contaminated the American Colonies and spread to France. Even Marx’s doctrine emerged from the English Liberal economists (e.g. David Ricardo). The British conservative philosopher Anthony Ludovici is instructive.²

Fundamental Necessity – Breaking Mammon

In my 2020 article I referred to the fundamental necessity of banking reform. That is a prerequisite for any change, and again it is often confused, including by certain banking reform advocates, with the ‘Left’. Hence, when some years ago I suggested that the iconic NZ poet Rex Fairburn, a zealous advocate of Social Credit, was intrinsically a man of the ‘Right’, this prompted a heated reaction from the NZ poet Dr Denys Trusell, Fairburn’s biographer, who despite the excellence of his biography of Fairburn,³ did not understand the Right and resorted to crude straw-man arguments.⁴

Fairburn’s epic poem ‘Dominion’⁵ is comparable to Ezra Pound’s ‘With Usura’⁶, written at the same time, and Dr Trussell’s acclaimed expertise notwithstanding, I reiterate that Fairburn should be regarded as premising a NZ ‘Right’ in most important respects. Further, if one wanted to teach real NZ history in schools, one could well start with Fairburn’s ‘Dominion’, but that would require erudition on the part of teachers.

While I had commented in 2020 on the gradual decline of Social Credit that had existed in NZ for a century, today we find in facing the election a party that had dwindled so pathetically as to require deregistration, and another renaming, now at its most facile: CoOperativeNZ, with a passing allusion to Social Credit as if in embarrassment.⁷ Good luck with finding any mention of the National Dividend and the A+B Theorem; the fundamental policy of SC, which addresses a problem that socialism, including Communism, cannot resolve with its Theory of Surplus Value, nor Social Democracy with its tax fiddling.

Low Expectations

The best that can be expected is that the populist elements of NZ First push the National Party to maintain several reactionary positions, since NZ politics is so middling that identifying genuine contrasts between the parties becomes difficult, as electioneering generally assumes the role of bidding for the public vote on issues of taxation and the GNP. What is certain, however, is that no party of significance will present any platform that deals with the causes of New Zealand’s decay.

As for what has developed among the ‘Right’ since 2020 it is very difficult to discern that such exists, although that does not inhibit certain journalists and academics from making a career out of exposing an impending ‘threat from the Right’, by just making stuff up.⁸ Action Zealandia came and went, as had the Dominion Movement. There remain some news and commentary portals that include Rightist elements, the most cogent being The European New Zealander, with the welcome addition of William McGimpsey’s weekly Zeitgeist commentary⁹ (despite his oft-stated commitment to ‘liberal democracy’). Such efforts are more realistic than the creation of parties and electioneering.

Task Ahead?

The most immediate practical task, I suggest, is at least to partly serve as conduits for metapolitical efforts from the Occident; introducing the transcendent and thus universally applicable ideas of the Right to NZ. As for the emergence of any ‘movement’ (not limited to ‘party’) that is the preliminary, and as far as I am aware, the task has not yet started.

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1.K R Bolton, Post-Election Right, The European New Zealander, https://theeuropeannewzealander.net/2020/07/18/post-election-right/

2. Anthony Ludovici, English Liberalism (1939), online: https://www.anthonymludovici.com/eng-lib.htm

3. D Trussell, Fairburn
(Auckland University Press, 1984).

4. K R Bolton, Fairburn and the Right: A Rejoinder to Dr Denys Trussell, Counter-Currents (2012), https://counter-currents.com/2012/03/fairburn-and-the-right-rejoinder-to-trussell/

5. Rex Faiburn, Dominion (1935, 1938), online: https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/webarchive/20210110140915/http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-FaiColl-t1-body-d1-d1.html

6. Ezra Pound, ‘With Usura’, Cantos XLV (1935, 1936), online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv

7. CoOperativeNZ, https://cooperativenz.nz/

8. For example, Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij, Paul Spoonley, Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand (Otago University Press, 2022).

9. William McGimpsey, The Zeitgeist, https://x.com/TheZeitgeistNZ/status/2070601490902008145