“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So said the English writer, L. P. Hartley, in the first sentence of his famous novel, The Go-Between.

In the light of recent events in the United States, we might make a similar observation about the US. Despite the familiarity of so much of American culture to New Zealanders, via Hollywood and the television screen, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that they do indeed “do things differently there.”

Do you recall the last time a new judge was appointed to the New Zealand Supreme Court? Do you even know the name of the new appointee or the nature of the process that was followed?

Yet the appointment of a new judge to the US Supreme Court hit the headlines and kept the American nation – and the world – transfixed for weeks on end.

It was on prime time news day after day and was surrounded by a swirl of political intrigue, allegations of sexual impropriety and public demonstrations. The President of the country was deeply involved and directly campaigned at election-style rallies to support his nominee and to discredit and mock one of the witnesses who opposed the appointment.

Opinion polls were conducted on a daily basis to measure the degree of support or otherwise there was for the nominee and his critics. Any shifts in opinion were said to be likely to influence the outcome of the mid-term elections and, as a result, to decide which political party would control Congress, and perhaps even indicate whether Donald Trump would or could win a second term.

The public – that is, society as a whole – was revealed to be deeply divided, not just about the nominee himself and his suitability, but about wider questions as well. On the one hand, there were those who applauded the courage of the woman who gave evidence about an alleged assault on her by the nominee and were satisfied that she should be believed. Her courage and credibility became an article of faith for large numbers who saw the episode as further evidence of the treatment suffered by many women at the hands of sexual predators.

On the other hand, were similarly large numbers who professed to see the allegations as politically motivated – “she was paid by the Democrats to say those things” according to some Trump supporters – and who agreed with the President that men were being unfairly targeted and themselves needed protection.

In the end, then, the controversy may have produced a victory for the nominee and for the President, who now has a Supreme Court (as his supporters wanted) with a majority in favour of conservative social attitudes – on abortion, gay marriage and women’s rights. Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment was, incidentally, the second appointment in a row, following the appointment of Judge Clarence Thomas, of a judge who holds such views but who was also, as a nominee, accused of similar sexual behaviour.

Brett Kananaugh’s appointment was, in other words, achieved at the cost of laying bare and exacerbating the deep and visceral divisions that rack American society. A President and a process that should have tried to heal those divisions succeeded in doing the opposite.

Yes, they do things differently there. Despite our admiration for so much that is American, we can at least be grateful that, at least in this respect, we do not model ourselves on everything they do. The Kavanaugh episode should at least teach us that highly politicised processes can be deeply damaging and that short-term political victories can sometimes be achieved at a cost that is too high to pay.

Bryan Gould
8 October 2018

New Zealanders who have followed reports of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s consideration of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court may well have experienced a sense of deja vu.

They will have heard accounts of alleged encounters between Kavanaugh and his friends on the one hand and young women on the other hand who report being sexually assaulted by the Supreme Court nominee and his associates a number of years ago. Whatever the truth of these allegations (and let us hope that the truth can indeed be established) the ingredients of the alleged incidents are all too familiar.

Whether Kavanaugh was or was not one of those responsible, what seems clear is that both the complainants and Kavanaugh grew up in a social milieu, both at high school and college, in which it was common practice for young men to deliberately ply young girls with alcoholic drinks at social gatherings with the intention of having sexual relations with them.

The story will no doubt ring a bell with many New Zealand viewers and readers. It is, after all, only five years ago that the Roast Busters scandal burst upon the New Zealand scene.

The Roast Busters story exhibited many of the same features as we now see in the allegations against Kavanaugh. There was the same involvement of young women complainants (some, in the Roast Busters case, under age) alleging that they had been offered drinks or drugs designed to render them incapable of “saying no” to sexual activity, the same male bonding and boasting on the part of a group of young men of school age, the same refusal to believe the complainants, and the same lack of action and blaming of the victims on the part of the authorities.

In the Roast Busters case, the young complainants were apparently told by the police that, even if the offences had been committed, they had only themselves to blame – that they should not have been drinking or should not have been enticingly dressed. As with the Kavanaugh case, there was also a strong sense that the assaults were no more than a bit of “teenage mischief”. The question implicit in the public comments made in both cases was “who wasn’t involved in such situations when they were young”?

But, while men may feel that they should not be responsible for mistakes they made as teenagers, and while behaviours may change and improve with growing maturity, attitudes rarely do.

In the Roast Busters case, no one was ever charged and the perpetrators escaped without sanction. We are seeing in the Kavanaugh case the same sequence of events unfolding – complainants struggling to be heard, to be believed, and to have any sanctions applied against their assailants.

What is surprising is that in two societies – the US and New Zealand – so geographically distant from each other and so culturally distinct, there are so many common features to the two stories. The assertion of male seigniorial rights by young men and the assumption that young women are simply sexual playthings, the unwillingness of the authorities to believe the complainants but their readiness to blame them, and the acceptance that such behaviour is par for the course and therefore free from blame, are apparently features of both societies – and no doubt of others as well.

Little wonder, then, that the Prime Minister, in her speech at the United Nations, focused on the continuing issue of the denial to young women around the world of basic rights and opportunities. She effectively encapsulated her view of that issue when she said, “ ‘#Me too’ must become ‘we too’.”

It is surprising, and sad, that some female commentators back home in New Zealand profess not to understand what the Prime Minister meant by this remark. The meaning seems very clear to me. What Jacinda Ardern is saying is that it is not just the victims but all of us, society as a whole, that must refuse to accept that sexual assaults on young women are normal and just a bit of fun.

Young women, like everyone else, have the right to live in a society where they are free from the threat and reality of unwanted sexual advances.
Bryan Gould
1 October 2018

In his successful 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump used a number of slogans which he and his supporters repeated ad nauseam. They memorably included “lock her up” and “build the wall” – but the one that seemed to resonate most effectively with American voters, and still does, was “make America great again.”

There is nothing wrong with the sentiment, but it has proved to be something of a chimera, since Trump has fallen into the habit of linking it to another slogan which he also uses most of the time.

As he meets world leaders at the United Nations this week, we were assured in pre-briefings that he will be be focussed on “putting America first” and that is what – to the amusement of his audience – he delivered. His declared preference for patriotism over globalism is a further sign of his lamentable inability to understand how the world really works; he does not seem to recognise the disjunction between the two slogans – that “putting America first” is not necessarily the best way to “make America great again” and might actually work against that second objective.

If we look back now at how the global scene played out in the post-war era, it is surely clear that one of the reasons for America’s emergence as the world’s premier power was the fact that they were willing to become the leading force in the establishment of major institutions that helped to create an international world order. It was not, in other words, their pre-eminence as a military or economic power, but their readiness to use that power, in conjunction with others, in multilateral
efforts to build peace and prosperity across the globe – not least through the Marshall Plan, so vital to Europe’s regeneration – that made America a super-power and guaranteed them a sort of moral leadership.

Trump, however, seems unaware that US support for the United Nations and for NATO, for the World Trade Organisation and for many other multilateral attempts – like the International Criminal Court – to secure coordinated action on many of the problems facing the world, was what really “made America great.”

Instead of embracing and reinforcing this valuable role, Trump has insisted on slamming on the brakes and going smartly into reverse. So, we have seen him tearing up the WTO rulebook, lecturing NATO on its failings and threatening to cut the US contribution to its budget, behaving similarly at the United Nations (where he has already cut or ended American funding for refugee aid – particularly in Palestine), abandoning the Paris Accord on Climate Change, unilaterally withdrawing from the nuclear agreement with Iran and re-imposing sanctions instead, without consulting other countries (formerly regarded as America’s allies) who were parties to the same agreement.

Trump of course has a point in that organisations like the UN and NATO have depended heavily on American financial support, but saving a few dollars – which, when spent in the past, could be regarded as the price to be paid for America’s dominant role and influence – is not necessarily the best (or any) way to “make America great again”. Trump’s disregard – perhaps even contempt – for the leadership role America has embraced so effectively in the past is completely at odds with – indeed, a specific denial of – the very elements which made America great.

Across the board, we now see an American President who celebrates the sacrifice of American leadership of what used to be called “the western world” and gives priority to “putting America first” through saving a few dollars and impressing his “base” with his “toughness” as the mid-term elections approach.

There can be few examples on such a broad scale of such a narrow mind failing to encompass and understand such broad and important issues – or of a major country deliberately throwing away its influence in the world. America may be many things under Trump’s leadership but “great again” is unlikely to be one of them.

His other campaign slogans don’t look as though they will be much help either. Being “locked up” seems a more likely fate for some of Trump’s closest advisers than for Hillary Clinton, and “building the wall” is as far away and fanciful as ever.

Bryan Gould
24 September 2018