Crosby / Textor, NeoCon Leo Strauss and National

In the Sunday Star Times, Ruth Laugeson explores further the record and rationale of Crosby / Textor and their history with the National Party.

[...] While Crosby/Textor are known for stirring up deep feelings through their advertising, they are also known for [...] ensuring discipline within a party. They emphasise restricting messages from the party to a few key lines repeated with monotonous regularity.

There are already signs of a clear focus at work within National. Most strikingly, it is rare to see any other National MP on television apart from Key. Since late last year he has fronted all policy announcements, to the extent there have been any. Senior National MPs, once regular visitors to the Press Gallery with their press releases, have all but disappeared from doing the rounds to promote themselves.

Radio New Zealand has had problems making a programme on National's shadow cabinet because National MPs have refused to be interviewed on their portfolios, saying they have been told they cannot.

[...]

Former Bolger press secretary Richard Griffin confirms Crosby/Textor have been used by National for many years.

But he says they were not an important part of National's campaigning, in part because their ideas were seen as too extreme.

He says in 1996, they wanted to mount personality-based attacks on National's opponents, despite the fact that was the first MMP election, and National was preparing for the possibility of governing with some of its former political opponents.

James Edwards has left me a comment that helps put all this into context.

As I suspected the neoliberals in the National Party are adherents of the moral philosophy of Leo Strauss, the father of the neoconservative movement in the United States.

"A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals."

I had my suspicions when I read Nicky Hager's Hollow Men and now I'm even more convinced.

Thank you, for that, James. Democracy and all of us are the losers if we allow this to happen.