Elections and Civilisation

The election in New Zealand was won by John Key’s center-right National Party, which got 60 seats in the 121 seat parliament. This is the closest that any party has come to governing alone without needing coalition partners in an MMP election.

The leftish Labour Party got only 25 percent of the vote, its worst result in 50 years. The pundits are blaming David Cunliffe, the leader of the Labour Party, for their heavy loss. A torrid leadership struggle has now started, but the reason for the loss goes much deeper. The problem is afflicting parties from the left all over the world.

Os Guinness gives the reason in the following quote from his book called Renaissance.

The West has cut itself off from its Jewish and Christian roots—the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the west. It now stands deeply-divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global arena.

All over the world, parties on the left are finding it hard to find a role in a divided and uncertain post-Christian culture. They have focussed on the rights of minorities: women, indigenous peoples, racial minorities, and homosexuals. Others target the unions or the poor. The problem is that these groups have conflicting interests, which produces a divided party. They are too small to create a coherent governing majority. Without a cohesive and unifying vision for life in a post-Christian culture, they will continue to fail.

Parties on the right do slightly better, because they have a Christian memory, even if they have rejected the Christian vision. They appeal to nostalgia by pointing back to more stable times in the past, when the Christian influence was much greater. This is a fraud, because they are incapable of restoring the good times that they promise, because they have rejected the faith that made them possible. However, until this lie is exposed, nostalgia for a better time will continue to win elections.