ZORAN RAKOVIC: The Dynamite Fishermen of Democracy

Party politics increasingly treats voters like fish to be stunned before election day. But when campaigns win by blasting the civic lake, communities are left to live in the damaged water.

A strange thing happens when you spend enough hours walking through a place. Not driving through it like a commuter missile, not scrolling past it like a minor geographical inconvenience, but moving through it at human speed - on foot, on a scooter, on a bike, sometimes in a car only because modern distances, like modern bureaucracies, have no pity. The map stops being a map. Selwyn stops being a word in a boundary review, a growth projection, a line item in a council agenda, a safe seat in a party spreadsheet. It becomes faces, dogs, gravel driveways, young families, old farmers, half-finished subdivisions, muddy boots, school worries, rates worries, and that peculiar New Zealand politeness where people disagree with you as if offering you a cup of tea.

After meeting enough good people across Selwyn, party politics starts to look obscene in a very specific way. Not evil - that would be too simple, too cinematic, too useful to the party propagandists themselves. It starts to look primitive. Sophisticated in its polling, its messaging, its databases, its photo opportunities, its little colour-coded emotional grenades - but primitive in its basic social imagination. Increasingly, party politics resembles fishing with dynamite.

The lake is the community. The fish are voters. The parties arrive with moral speeches about the national interest, light the fuse, hurl the explosive into the water, and count what floats to the surface. "Mandate!" they cry, standing ankle-deep in civic debris. The people have spoken, of course. But under such conditions, what can they say except please stop throwing explosives into our common pond?

This is the first obscene joke of modern democracy: we call it participation, but much of it is organised as managed collision. The citizen is not invited to cultivate a political garden, but to choose which bulldozer should flatten the other side's garden. Voting becomes less an act of building than of disabling - you do not vote for a flourishing civic order, you vote to stop the bastards, and the other side votes to stop you, because from where they stand you are the bastard. The democratic act becomes a burglar alarm with a ballot paper attached.

Simone Weil saw this with terrifying clarity. She understood political parties not merely as organisations with policies, but as machines for manufacturing collective passion. A party does not ask, what is true? It asks, what helps us win? And because human beings are fragile creatures who prefer belonging to loneliness, members gradually learn to confuse the second question with the first. This is the party's great spiritual trick: it teaches people to experience obedience as conviction.

Weil's critique is useful because it doesn't depend on party people being wicked. Many are sincere, hardworking, even noble in small private moments - which is precisely what makes the machine dangerous. If only bad people did bad things, politics would be easy; we could build a moral quarantine facility somewhere outside Wellington and be done with it. The deeper problem is that good people get absorbed into systems that reward bad habits: exaggeration, selective outrage, disciplined silence, and the small internal death required to defend today what you condemned when the other side did it last year.

Here the dynamite metaphor earns its keep. Dynamite fishing is not unsuccessful - that's the whole problem. It produces fish. Negative partisanship works the same way. Fear works. Tribal signalling works. The attack ad, the meme, the moral panic - they all work. But rats also "work" as an urban waste-disposal system, and we do not invite them to chair the infrastructure committee. The question is not whether the method produces a result. It's what the method destroys while producing it.

A party can win votes while poisoning the civic water all future politics must live in. It can mobilise supporters while making neighbours suspicious of one another. It can expose the opponent's hypocrisy while training its own followers to ignore identical hypocrisy at home. It can shout "democracy" while shrinking the citizen into a demographic target - a persuadable profile, a fish floating belly-up after the blast.

George Washington - that inconvenient old ghost who keeps wandering into modern politics like a disappointed headmaster - warned against the spirit of party because he knew it could become an organised fever. Party spirit does not merely disagree. It inflames. It transforms prudence into betrayal and compromise into cowardice. It makes hatred feel like civic duty.

This is what we miss when we reduce politics to policy. Policy matters, obviously - roads, schools, clinics, budgets, pipes, laws. The pothole does not care about your theory of deliberative democracy. But before policy comes the civic atmosphere in which policy gets discussed, and a poisoned atmosphere makes even good policy look suspicious. In a low-trust electorate, every proposal arrives wearing a disguise. The school isn't a school, it's social engineering. The clinic isn't a clinic, it's a bribe. The road isn't a road, it's pork-barrelling. The citizen becomes a detective of betrayal.

René Girard helps here. He taught that human beings desire mimetically - we imitate one another's desires, rivalries, resentments. In politics this means parties don't merely oppose each other; they become dependent on each other as enemies. Each needs the other to organise its own identity. The opponent isn't an obstacle to the programme - the opponent is the programme. Without the enemy, the tribe would have to ask what it actually believes, which is far more dangerous than shouting across the aisle.

This is why negative partisanship feels so energising. It hands the exhausted citizen an instant metaphysical structure: here is good, there is evil, here is progress, there is the swamp. The mortgage is confusing, the health system impenetrable, the supermarket bill obscene - but politics offers the sweet narcotic of simplified blame. Freedom is tiring; party identity offers relief from having to think from the beginning each time. We have a position. We have enemies. We have approved anger. Please collect your moral certainty at the door.

The party machine relieves the citizen of the burden of attention. Yet democracy, if it means anything more than ritualised head-counting, requires attention - not the theatrical attention of televised outrage, but the slow attention of actually listening to someone explain why the bus route matters, why the clinic is too far away, why a new subdivision without a school or medical centre isn't "growth" but logistical vandalism with landscaping.

This is where doorstep politics becomes almost philosophically subversive. To knock on doors is to interrupt the abstraction machine. The voter stops being "rural conservative," "swing voter," "aspirational," or any of the other labels produced by consultants who have never met a human being they didn't wish to segment. The voter becomes a person. This is deeply inconvenient, because parties prefer voters in categories - categories can be messaged at. Persons must be answered.

Max Weber's ethic of responsibility enters here, not as a dusty German statue but as a stern whisper: politics is not the performance of pure intention, it's taking responsibility for consequences. If you win by dynamite, don't pretend to be shocked when the lake is dead. If you train citizens for years to treat opponents as enemies, don't be surprised when Parliament becomes a theatre of mutual contempt and ordinary people quietly withdraw.

Weber also spoke of the slow boring of hard boards - a splendid phrase, except that in our age the hard boards have been replaced by fibreboard panels in a press conference backdrop, and the boring outsourced to consultants. Real politics is slow because reality is slow. Trust is slow. Rural health capacity is slow. But elections are fast, media cycles are faster, and social media is a caffeinated ferret in a burning shed - so party politics chooses what's fast: attack, reaction, spectacle, the little dopamine firecracker of belonging.

None of this requires a villain. A party strategist doesn't need to hate democracy to damage it - he only needs to optimise the next election. A bureaucrat doesn't need to despise citizens to silence them - she only needs to follow process. This is how the lake gets damaged: not by one great crime, but by a thousand small efficiencies, each individually defensible, each collectively lethal to the water everyone has to keep living in.

And now the deeper contradiction. Parties claim to represent the people, but they need the people simplified before they can be represented. Selwyn is not a simple place. It contains commuter suburbs and rural communities, farmers and tradies, migrants and retirees, people who want less government and people who want government to finally show up, people worried about rates and people worried about losing the character of the place they love. To represent that honestly requires patience with contradiction.

Party politics struggles with this because parties need coherence. They need the message of the day, internal discipline, a leader who isn't embarrassed, promises traded against each other in coalition talks. The electorate is messy; the party must be clean. So the mess is strained, pasteurised, packaged, and handed back as a slogan.

This is why people feel cheated even when the system is formally working. They vote, the votes are counted, the government forms, the constitutional machinery hums along - and yet something has vanished. Their local concern has become a bargaining chip. Their hope has gone into the black box and come out as a press release. Coalition negotiation is normal, compromise is necessary, no party can deliver everything - true, true, true. But this defence misses the wound. People don't just resent compromise. They resent discovering the glowing campaign promise was never a promise in the ordinary human sense, but an opening position in a negotiation they weren't allowed to witness.

In ordinary fishing, the fisherman has to understand the river - weather, season, depth, current, patience. In dynamite fishing, understanding is replaced by force. You don't need to know the fish, only to stun them. Much of party politics has made the same trade. It doesn't need to understand a community if it can provoke, frighten, or mobilise it instead.

This is why local independent politics can matter, even before anyone talks about winning. It changes the method. It says the electorate is not a battlefield on which national parties test their weapons, but a place with its own intelligence - not raw material for party strategy but a living civic organism. And the representative shouldn't be a courier carrying party doctrine outward and local complaints inward, like a parliamentary Uber Eats driver delivering reheated ideology. The representative should be a steward of attention.

Attention is not glamorous. Nobody launches a campaign bus called The Attention Express. But it may be the most radical political act available in a distracted society, because to attend to a community is to refuse the abstraction that makes cynical politics possible. "Health policy" means a rural person waiting too long for care. "Education policy" means a growing town without enough classrooms. "Infrastructure" means a family losing an hour a day to traffic because planning lagged behind consented growth. "Local government reform" means wondering whether decisions about your future will be made even further away, by people with even less knowledge of your roads and your rhythms.

The independent candidate, at his best, is not anti-politics - that would be childish. He is anti-dynamite. He says disagreement is necessary but destruction is not; Parliament needs conflict but not permanent tribal poisoning; voters are not fish to be stunned into temporary usefulness but citizens whose trust must be cultivated like soil.

Of course, the party loyalist will laugh. Naive, he'll say, adjusting his branded fleece. This isn't how power works. And in one sense he's right - this isn't how power currently works. But that's precisely the point. Every decaying system presents its own corruption as realism. The courtier always says the king's arrangement is natural. The consultant always says the message tested well. The machine always says the machine is inevitable. But inevitability is often just power wearing a cheap philosophical moustache.

The mischievous possibility is that most people already know this, without needing the language of Weil or Weber or Girard. They have lawns to mow, invoices to send, cows to manage, and rates bills that now require a small act of spiritual preparation before opening. But they know when politics feels fake. They know when a candidate is reciting from headquarters, when "listening" means harvesting anecdotes for a campaign database, when the blast has gone off and everyone is pretending the floating fish are a healthy mandate.

This is why meeting people is dangerous, in the best sense. It makes propaganda harder to swallow. Once you've stood at enough gates, you can't easily believe in the cartoon voter. The "other side" has a face. The "safe seat" has a pulse. The "demographic" has a sick parent, a mortgage, a school run, a story about council, a memory of being ignored. Real contact ruins the clean brutality of partisan imagination.

Perhaps this is the quiet scandal of democracy: not that ordinary people are too stupid for politics, but that party politics is often too stupid for ordinary people. It offers them a red-blue, us-them drama when their lives are richer, more contradictory, more practical than that. It invites them into a ritual of mutual disabling when most of them would rather build something that works.

The dynamite fisherman is not merely a bad fisherman. He is a civilisation losing the distinction between extraction and cultivation. He gets the fish, but he loses the lake. Party politics driven by negative partisanship does the same: it gets the votes, but loses the civic water - trust, patience, neighbourliness, memory, and the fragile belief that public life can be more than organised resentment.

So when we look at the ballot paper, the real question isn't only who should win. That's important, but insufficient. The deeper question is what kind of political ecology we're helping to reproduce - whether we reward those who blast the lake and count the corpses, or those who learn the river, repair the banks, and treat the people living beside it as more than fish awaiting capture.

Zoran is a retired structural engineer, standing as independent candidate for Selwyn electorate in 2026 general election. His website is www.zoran4selwyn.nz