They are the clowns who shall inherit the earth – and for Trump, Johnson, Morrison et al, the jokester act provides the perfect political cover, writes Morgan Godfery.

(This essay is extracted from new essay collection Public Knowledge: Radical Futures and is heavily abridged. Godfery goes on to argue for a revolution by degrees, beginning with properly shoring up publicly-funded media).

After almost a decade in media and politics I can tell you one thing with certainty. If you give the voters a joke option, it’ll win every time. Call it the Boaty McBoatface rule. I mean, how else do you explain President Trump? In Britain politics is taken so lightly that a Fleet Street diva like Boris Johnson can win the London mayoralty, a seat in the Commons, and even the keys to 10 Downing Street.

It’s wild to think that only four or five years ago politicians like Trump and Johnson were more punchline than serious contenders. For liberals and leftists, it was all a terrific gag. Trump? Vulgar. A know-nothing. Johnson? Deeply unserious. Good for a hoot and not much more. But for conservatives and others on the right, it was all deadly serious. Trump’s vulgarity – “my fingers are long and beautiful [as] are other parts of my body” – and his apparent stupidity – climate change is a Chinese-run hoax aiming to make American manufacturing uncompetitive – were always part of his appeal. Johnson’s circus act, like the stump speech where he pretends to forget where he is, was never a disqualification. It was the qualification.

Our own chief joker, former prime minister John Key, knew as much, regularly appearing on commercial radio to play up. Dancing ‘Gangnam Style’ on Radio Sport. Slaughtering Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ on The Edge. ‘Picking up the soap’ on The Rock. You have to hand it to any prime minister doing it for the ‘bantz’, and for Key, a good many people really did. At the 2011 election Key made easy work out of former Labour leader Phil Goff, yelling a Jerry Maguire punchline – “Show me the money!” – at the hapless Goff and ‘winning’ the debate, according to the commentators.

The comedy set piece came to the rescue again and again for Key, even when it really shouldn’t have. At a tourism conference in 2010 the then prime minister told a ripper about a recent dinner with an East Coast iwi. “The good news was that I was having dinner with Ngāti Porou as opposed to their neighbouring iwi, which is Tūhoe, in which case I would have been the dinner.” It was quite the insult, and in the end Key made a very rare walk back, apologising to “anybody who was offended”. But the remarkable thing is there was almost no public pushback. One Ngāti Porou rangatira told RNZ it was just a joke. National Party pollster David Farrar played it down on his Kiwiblog. To paraphrase a good deal of the coverage at the time, it was just another case of John Key being, well, John Key. And that reputation for hamming it up meant Key could get away with cracking a funny his predecessors likely never could.

This is part of what makes the comedic persona irresistible to politicians. It’s a form of political cover. In a just world Boris Johnson’s “joke” about “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”, his crack at Pride’s “tank-topped bumboys”, and his quip about burqa-wearing women as “bank robbers” and “letterboxes” would bar him from high office. But for the Tory MP’s flag wavers it only seems to reinforce his suitability. “It’s not as if he really means it.” Of course, he does mean it, and he knows that beneath the customary denials (“I’m not racist”) is a spoken or unspoken qualification (“but”). And this is Johnson’s telling advantage: the ability to say absolutely anything depending on the audience and occasion.

Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister who cultivates a ‘daggy dad’ image, is in on the act too. Before taking up the top job the former treasurer had a reputation as a ‘hard head’. But almost as soon as he took office ‘ScoMo’ went from the local tough guy to embarrassing dad, suddenly dropping classics like how he’s going to Canberra to “give the boys a bit of a rev up” in an effort to sound extremely normal and relatable. What was suitable in one job – treasurer – wasn’t necessarily suitable in another – prime minister – and so the former New Zealand Tourism boss underwent a marketing “makeover”. It’s counterintuitive, but these personality 360s apparently help make politicians who undertake them more “relatable”. But why is relatable seemingly the gold standard in political communication? I think it has something to do with the state of politics and public knowledge.

It’s no coincidence that 7 Days is the most popular political show on television. In one way that’s a worry, but when the Doomsday Clock is at two minutes to midnight, who can blame viewers for getting their news from a comedy panel? When the stakes are so high and disaster apparently so close, it seems like there are only two choices: check out of serious politics, or wholly commit to it. I don’t blame anyone who opts for the former, especially when the state of the latter is so dire. Even in progressive democracies like New Zealand, politics can seem trite. On TVNZ’s Q+A, the country’s leading traditional political show, the debate often turns on clairvoyance, with that week’s expert panel debating questions like how voters might respond to politician X or policy Y. It’s a strange situation for viewers. Their own thinking is outsourced to a rotating commentator who imputes thoughts and intentions on voter Z. It’s a favourite format for other shows too, especially in the international cable media. The same principle, if not the same format, increasingly applies in wider politics too. So much of what passes for politics today seems to settle on simply cracking the right incentives or cracking the right interventions, as Andrew Dean once put it. This is as true for Key’s government – think of the “social investment approach” – as it is for Jacinda Ardern’s coalition. As of 2019 the government had run or was running 182 working groups and reviews, outsourcing many of its political and policy functions to subject-specific experts and technocrats. Of course, this is fine as far as it goes, but it does reinforce a rather dubious message: that politics is too important to be left to politicians.

It’s not hard to find examples in extremis of outsourcing politics. In November 2011 outgoing Italian president Silvio Berlusconi put a cabinet made up entirely of unelected experts in charge of his country’s government in an effort to deal with the European debt crisis. That same month and year the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund threw their weight behind the Greek economist and unelected prime minister Lucas Papademos after his country’s historic bailout. I suspect most people would agree the brief technocracies in Italy and Greece were a disgrace. Yet it’s increasingly fashionable to argue they were an example of the perfect form of government.

In Against Democracy Jason Brennan argues most political questions are too complex for most voters to comprehend. We mistake our adaptive preferences for common sense. Our status quo bias helps maintain support for inefficient policies. And some of us are just irredeemably stupid. This is how we get Trump. In other words: can we trust ourselves with democracy? In a trite sense the question is a fair one. I make ideological claims and assumptions all of the time that evidence and events expose as nothing more than wishful thinking. But the answer to that apparent stupidity, contrary to what Brennan insists, is not a technocracy. Instead it’s a stronger public knowledge.

Without a strong public knowledge politics functions as an insiders’ club, from day-to-day debates – try discussing a capital gains tax without knowing specialist shorthands like “the bright-line test” – to front-facing institutions. Securing entitlements from the Ministry of Social Development, for example, can sometimes require an ‘advocate’ or ‘Whānau Ora Navigator’ to help sort out a person’s ‘client number’, the relevant thresholds that apply in each application, and any agreed ‘outputs’ or outcomes. The same goes for immigration, where an increasing number of prospective migrants are engaging ‘agents’ to help navigate the Byzantine immigration instructions, rules and criteria applicants must meet before the government will grant a visa. I suspect this is what a moderate technocracy looks like in practice: knowledge is outsourced, and politics and policy are reduced to a series of particular specialisms. Economics for the economists, legislation and regulation for the lawyers, and infrastructure and design for the engineers. In theory, intermediaries like political commentators should cut through this conceptual complexity. In truth, they likely add to it, pushing their own agendas and views, which may or may not align with certain politicians. In this kind of world is it any wonder that voters would back a ‘relatable’ politician promising to ‘take back control’ or simply ignore the so-called experts?

But what does a public knowledge mean? At its simplest it’s knowledge that is, well, public. In its institutional form it can include the media, trade unions, local and national clubs, schools, universities, and more. On this understanding public knowledge is embodied. And this is one reason it’s in a rather sorry state. Collapsing revenue means media organisations across the country are shutting up shop. With each paper’s closure goes a little bit of public knowledge. With savage cuts to certain university departments (think history) that same public loss is happening at a national level too. The average person is more likely to read, watch, or listen to a bank economist’s view on the mortgage market, interest rates or GDP than the view of a university economist or trade unionist. You might claim that as a partial win – the bank economist is still performing a public service – but I’m a little more cynical than that.

For the people who imagine ideas are things we pick and choose from the marketplace there is a ready-made answer to a declining public knowledge. Debate. Conservative politicians often insist the way to win over climate change sceptics (that is, if the politician is not a sceptic himself) is to engage in a speech-off. Mano a mano, or one on one, to borrow a formula from American pundits. In John Milton’s famous telling debate is where truth battles falsehood, exposing the frauds, fools, and charlatans.

It’s a wonderfully seductive argument, and you can use it for anything from opposing hate speech laws – they “stifle debate” – to arguing for a national media platform (excluding me from this platform stifles debate). Still, I suspect most people know it is all bunk. In a political debate the ‘winner’ is not necessarily the person with the better argument or the best facts. Often the winner is the person who best exercised power. In a parliamentary debate that might mean the politician who carries the day is the person wielding their identity (white man?) and best using it to build camaraderie with the audience. Others might turn to their qualifications (economist?) in an appeal to authority. This is not exactly how an ideal debate should work. But for a decent rhetorician the facts are never fatal. They know debates usually just end up reflecting the power relations in wider society.

When people find out the idealised debates they have heard so much about are, in fact, elaborate set pieces, is it any wonder they prefer ‘comedy’ in their politicians instead?

Public Knowledge: Radical Futures edited by Emma Johnson (Freerange Press, $30) is available from Unity Books. 

Alie Benge on the book that built a shimmering private world for her and her sisters. 

I own two copies of Little Women. One is bound in white leather, has gilt edges, a gold filigree pattern on the front, and the heft of a family Bible. Each copy of this edition is made to order. It arrived in the mail on my 25th birthday – a present from an ex-boyfriend who’d once noticed that every time I spoke about Little Women I put my hand over my heart and sighed deeply. He’d planned to buy it for me when we were together, and though we’d broken up before my birthday he still wanted me to have it. When I saw what he’d given me, I hovered my finger over his name in my contacts list, wondering if we should get back together. As for my other copy, I don’t remember who first put it into my hands, but I remember reading it in bed at seven or eight years old, reading it on the lawn, and on the library bean bags, and in a tree – which was disappointingly uncomfortable, but Jo read in a tree so I stuck it out. I kept a list of words I didn’t understand and would take it to my parents the next day. “What does it mean to ‘put on airs’?” I try not to open this copy anymore because the spine has broken and it flaps open, revealing the gum binding, and the pages feel like they could easily tear away if I wasn’t careful turning them. Last year I rented Little Women as an audiobook for my commute, but had to stop because I was getting to work with splotchy eyes from an hour of weeping in my car. 

My sisters and I watched the 1994 adaptation so many times that we’ve memorised the whole script and can find a quote to fit any situation. When I cut my long hair I got a text that said, “Your one beauty!” We can’t walk past the limes in Countdown without saying, “Are limes the fashion now?” Growing up, we would argue over who was which sister. Sarah thought she was Jo, which was absurd because obviously I was Jo and she was Beth. She maintained that I was Meg, which I was appalled by. Aimie, the youngest, is Amy through and through. We eventually created composites and managed to settle the debate forever. I’m Jo/Meg. Sarah is Jo/Beth. As Aimie has gotten older she’s become Amy/Beth. When I say we finally settled this, I mean that I was well into my late twenties. 

Some stories you read, and you love them, but then they go back on the shelf. Others, like Little Women, you consume again and again. You want to roll in the stories, to hang them over your shoulders like a coat, and let them travel with you through your life like a companion, like a sister.

There is something fascinating about the lives of sisters. We have the Mitfords and the Brontës, Marian Keyes’ Walsh girls, even the Kardashians. The nature of the friendship is complicated and fractious, and they also live in a kind of isolation. The world of sisters is private. Each group has its own language and games, and shared history. No one else is let in, we can only watch when allowed. 

I have this feeling, which I’m sure many have, that Little Women belongs to me and my sisters. There’s something painful about other people’s enjoyment of it, because it’s our thing and for so long we didn’t realise other people even knew about it. It’s been a disconcerting experience to read of other writers, like Patti Smith and Simone de Beauvoir, identifying with Jo and realising our private world with the March girls was shared with other people. Some unreasonable and reactive part of me wants people to acknowledge how important the story is to me personally before I give them permission to enjoy it. It’s distressing to hear others talking about Little Women, because it’s like they’re talking about me without realising that I’m there and can hear them.

Many seem to have related to Jo as a writer, a tomboy, or someone who struggled with the expectations of being a girl in the world. I wasn’t a tomboy, and I had no literary ambitions except to be allowed to read in peace. For me, it was the family unit that I related to. Like the Marches, my sisters and I were uniquely alone in the world. By the time the book found its way to me, I’d already stopped counting the times we’d moved houses, regions, and countries. I’d been uprooted from communities so many times that I’d lost any expectation that relationships would be permanent. Before finding the book, I’d been living in an isolated village in the Ethiopian Highlands where there were no other English speakers. My best friend and I didn’t share a common language and worked out our games with signs and charades. My concerns in those years were with sickness, the leopard in the backyard, the bowls of blood and beads that were left under the tyre swing we’d unknowingly hung from a tree that was worshipped by the local people. And then suddenly I was back in New Zealand, being told by other women that I shouldn’t wear gumboots to school or clothes that had rips in them. People didn’t raise pets to eventually eat. On TV there were cartoons, and the Spice Girls, and people selling exercise machines. The only thing in my life that had remained unchanged was the fact that I had a family. 

The stories I read were a point of consistency. No matter how many times I returned to Little Women, it was always the same. In a way that I didn’t have the language to express as a child, Little Women was more than a story, it was the house I grew up in. The March sisters, along with Anne Shirley, Heidi, and Milly Molly Mandy, linked hands above me, like a roof.

The March family didn’t have the right clothes. They were barred from full participation in society because of their poverty and their strict morality. Only a few scenes in the book take place outside the family home, and when they do leave, disaster waits. Amy falls through the ice, Meg compromises her values at a ball, Beth catches scarlet fever, their father is injured in the civil war. The family home is a place of safety and sureness, a retreat from a world that they don’t quite fit into.

The Alcotts also moved more than 30 times before Little Women was written, often to escape the debts their father had racked up. Although the book is based on Louisa Alcott’s own life, these moves don’t make an appearance in the story, but anyone who’s grown up with the same instability might see it shimmering over the text in the restlessness, the uncertainty, the isolation that she maybe didn’t mean to include but which worked its way in subliminally.

I returned to the book in preparation for this essay. It had been quite a few years since I read it. I was struck the simple elegance of the writing, the vitality of it. “Beth’s Secret” is devastatingly well-written without becoming cloying or sentimental. The proposal scene rejects traditional tropes and manages to be funny, honest, and slightly disconcerting. This isn’t just a relatable, fun story for girls. This is a beautiful work of art that shines for an adult as much as for a child. Not every children’s book holds up upon rereading. I broke my own heart by going back to Little House on the Prairie and realising Pa was selfish, controlling, and neglectful. The book was so appallingly racist that I would never put it in the hands of a child. Famous Five is a good time but the gendering of literally everything is frustrating as hell. The Faraway Tree is still a banger, but I appreciated it on a nostalgia level. It’s fun, but that’s all. Little Women, however, had layers that had aged with me, and that I could only relate to as an adult, like circles of meaning that had been waiting for me to come back and understand. As a child I enjoyed the raucous joy of their games and plays, burning Meg’s hair, creating newspapers, and befriending the boy next door. As an adult, I could hear Alcott speaking through Jo about her own struggles with identity and freedom. She famously wanted Jo to be a literary spinster as Alcott herself was, but her editors forced her to marry Jo off. She does so, but you can feel Jo kicking and screaming all the way. There is something so distressing about her eventual conformity, as though underneath the calm resignation is a wild animal shrieking in a cage. 

Alcott is quoted saying, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body … because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” Though considering the time, it’s possible this was about power and autonomy rather than gender in isolation, but you sense that both Alcott and Jo struggled with something that they didn’t have a language for – not just the destiny they were being pushed towards, but with the things they were supposed to want but didn’t. Each sister has different desires; wealth, a family, and in Beth’s case, more life. Each desire is presented as equal, except Jo’s, which so closely mirrored Alcott’s own, and was written as something to be overcome and left in childhood.

This is a book about growing up that doesn’t try to reason away the sadness of it. Jo says to Laurie, “We can never be boy and girl again: the happy old times can’t come back, and we mustn’t expect it. We are man and woman now, with sober work to do, for playtime is over.” Jo is not Peter Pan, gathering fellow children and trapping them in infancy. Jo’s resistance means she is left behind by her sisters. The noise and games of childhood wind slowly down, getting quieter and further away, until Jo finds herself in an empty room, suddenly so lonely that she looks for something to lean on. This book is not wish fulfillment or fantasy. These are ordinary girls with ordinary lives, who grow into ordinary adults. But Alcott shows us the sparkling brilliance of ordinariness. It’s something that can’t be seen directly, only out the corner of the eyes.

Various editions of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, as well as books linked to the new film, are available from Unity Books.