#7 The New Kid on the Podium: Warm, Moral and Useless

From the moment I began this blog, possibly even before, when I was still foolishly optimistic and thinking it through, I knew I would one day have to confront the phenomenon known as the political New Kid. That meant listening carefully to what he had to say. Thank you YouTube!

I have now done so, on and off for several weeks, and feel reasonably confident that this was more than enough time. I have now reached the stage with Zack Polanski where irritation has curdled into fascination. Not the healthy kind, the kind where you keep watching because you can’t quite believe an adult is saying these things with a straight face and being applauded for it.

Polanski does not speak so much as emanate correctness (look it up, it will explain a lot of what you’re about to read) Every utterance arrives wrapped in the serene confidence of a man who has never been troubled by doubt, detail, or the possibility that the world might be more complicated than his feelings about it. He is not here to convince you. He is here to educate you, and he is already tired.

His politics can be summarised easily: everything is terrible, everyone powerful is evil, and luckily the solution is to agree with Zack Polanski. Once you’ve done that, the rest will sort itself out. How? Don’t be vulgar. Asking how is exactly the sort of thing someone who doesn’t really care would do.

Watch closely and you’ll notice that Polanski’s ideas exist in a kind of frictionless vacuum. Money appears when needed. Resistance melts away. Trade-offs politely excuse themselves from the conversation. Reality, when it threatens to intrude, is dismissed as a capitalist construct.

He calls this eco-populism. What it mostly seems to involve is shouting moral absolutes into the void and then looking disappointed when the void fails to pass the legislation.

The truly impressive thing is how completely effortless it all is. Other people will change their lives. Other people will pay more. Other people will cope with disruption, uncertainty, and unintended consequences. Polanski himself remains untouched, hovering above the wreckage like a lifestyle guru explaining why discomfort is good for your soul.

It’s politics as performance art: all passion, no plumbing.

Whenever someone has the bad manners to ask a practical question such as costs, timelines, enforcement, Polanski reacts as though they’ve asked him to justify basic human decency. His expression says: I can’t believe you’re like this. It’s a remarkable trick. You never have to explain anything if you can imply that only morally defective people want explanations.

You’re about halfway through this blog now, probably thinking, “When does the usual anger and ranting start?” Funny thing is… it doesn’t. Not for me, anyway. No blood boiling, no pressure rising. And that’s because, after listening to him drone on about this, that, and the other, I realized something: he doesn’t matter. His ideas don’t matter. His words don’t matter. Honestly, much like the party he leads, the Greens, neither he nor his politics carry all that much weight and never will. No, this week’s blog comes to you with plenty of sarcasm and a touch of wit but without the personal rage.

Anyway, back to Polanski. His supporters love him for this. He offers them the greatest gift modern politics can provide: absolution. You are right. You are good. You are on the correct side of history. Everyone else is compromised, corrupted, or thick. No further work required.

This is not a political movement. It is a self-esteem workshop.

And then there’s the tone, that soothing, sanctimonious calm, like a man gently explaining to a roomful of toddlers why sharing is important or explaining to some poor gullible woman that a couple of hours with him under hypnosis could somehow miraculously make her tits bigger. He speaks as though persuasion were beneath him, and accountability an optional extra. One suspects that if power ever did come knocking, he would answer the door and ask it to come back when it was less demanding.

Because governing is hard. It involves boring documents, awkward compromises, people who won’t listen, and problems that don’t vanish when you glare at them. Polanski’s entire appeal rests on never having to deal with any of this. He thrives in the realm of the hypothetical, where everything works because it has never been tried.

I don’t doubt his sincerity. I doubt his usefulness. What he offers is not leadership, but a permanent protest dressed up as a personality. He is very good at telling people what is wrong and spectacularly uninterested in the mechanics of putting anything right.

In the end, Zack Polanski is not a revolutionary. He is a comfort blanket, warm, affirming, and utterly impractical. A man who confuses moral intensity with competence and applause with progress.

As recent opinion polls suggest, he will no doubt continue to be applauded. He will continue to be certain. He will continue to treat questions as insults and complexity as treachery.

And reality, stubborn and unimpressed, will continue to ignore him.

Oh, and one more thing. That face, a face that’s just begging to be slapped with a big juicy vegan Salmon.