Parton had spent years singing outside her family’s rural Tennessee shack, imagining herself awing audiences in a glimmering silk dress, and had no doubt about her plans, she recounted during a 2009 commencement speech at the University of Tennessee.

Parton was an odd child in Sevierville, her small hometown in the Smoky Mountains. She would gaze at a flamboyant lady in town and compliment her style, despite others writing the lady off as trash, a trollop. She even tried to emulate the lady’s glamour, to the violent anger of her family.

In her 1987 song Wildflowers – a beautiful collaboration with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris – Parton sang that “I grew up fast and wild, and I never felt right, in a garden so different from me.” She loved those around her, but longed to get away and pursue her dreams.

“I wanted more than to be a farmer’s daughter, even though I am proud to be [a farmer’s daughter]. I just wanted pretty things … I wanted to [be] a star,” she told ABC’s Barbara Walters in December 1977.

Parton left Sevierville soon after graduation, released her first charted single just three years later, and spent the next six decades releasing a steady stream of country hits. Yet, throughout her career, she never changed.

She grew up and travelled, shot movies and sold out arenas. And through it all, where others saw trash, she saw beauty to uplift. Parton rarely crossed genres, but leaped between perspectives. She could belt out a love song at the start of an album, and put herself in the shoes of a hobo contemplating death at the end of it.

Parton wrote deeply personal, aching tracks about heartbreak and betrayal, alongside songs about the dignity of the ‘poor folks town,” the fierce determination of the working woman, and the pain of the migrant worker away from home.

“If you truly care for people, you won’t judge them, and then you will learn to appreciate the uniqueness in every single soul,” she said in her 2009 speech. And Parton applied the same standard to herself.

She was deeply vibrant, deeply Southern, and wholly unapologetic about it. At the start of her 1977 interview with ABC, Walters greeted Parton with a barrage of intrusive questions about her body and style, and the singer responded with charm.

Walters asked if she was a hillbilly, whether her body had been full as a teenager, and why someone as beautiful as her would wear wigs and ‘extreme dresses.’ Parton brushed her off with a smile and explained that she would not change.

“I don’t like to be like everybody else … I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable, that’s the easiest thing in the world to do,” Parton said. “I enjoy [how I dress]. I am sure of myself as a person. I am sure of my talent. I am sure of my love for life,” she added.

Parton did not lose her temper or snap at Walters. She rarely ever did. Interviewers often pushed Parton in directions she did not want to go, but never got very far. She would respond to pettiness with a calculated, disarming laugh and a healthy dose of self-deprecation, shutting down conversations.

Parton never ceased to be her beautiful, authentic self. But she did not make a big deal out of it. She never tried to defend her style or explain her life. She was herself, and that was enough for her.

Even in the realm of politics, where Parton avoided grand gestures to ensure that every fan felt welcome, she spoke through her music. Over decades, she covered some of the more explicitly political songs in the American canon.

In 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs – a companion album to her and Jane Fonda’s 1980 movie – Parton belted out covers of Woodie Guthrie’s Deportee, a searing anti-racist track about the treatment of undocumented migrants, and Merle Travis’ Dark as a Dungeon, a plea to young men descending into mine shafts.

Parton chose to love herself and everyone else for who they were, looking past imperfections and messiness, most days of her life. And she chose to do it quietly, rarely asking or expecting praise.

For one slightly dour teenage boy in 2010s East Auckland, that mattered. As the kid searched for the balance between expression and decorum, and tried to understand when to defend their difference and when to embrace it with a smile, Parton became a model to learn from.

She managed to be herself, proud and beautiful and different, without ever succumbing to myopia or disdain. She walked her joyous, extravagant path without losing her love for those around her. She showed the teenager that they could be themselves without needing to explain themselves.

Parton, to the teenager, was the wildflower that had blossomed for five decades and showed no signs of slowing down. But that is, sadly, no longer true. With the passing of Dolly Parton on 25 August, Tennessee’s wildflower has withered away. Yet, though she is gone, she remains with those she inspired and shaped by doing little more than being her beautiful self.

Rest in peace, Dolly Parton.

By Avinash Govind

The President’s ship was anchored in the Suez Canal, en route to Washington D.C. from the Yalta Conference, and he prepared to quietly meet Ibn Saud, King of the newly-unified Saudi Arabia, for the first time.

King Saud had left Jeddah days earlier on an American naval vessel, alongside a group of princes, diplomats, attendants, and ‘nine miscellaneous slaves,’ according to a manifest stored at East Carolina University’s Joyner Library. And President Roosevelt, onboard the U.S.S Quincy, did not appear to have a problem with that.

Roosevelt and Saud bonded over injuries and their love of farming, disagreed over Zionism, and promised to remain friends, Col. William Eddy – the meeting organiser – described in his 1954 book, FDR Meets Ibn Saud.

“[The President was] a charming host, witty conversationalist, with the spark and light in his eyes and that gracious smile [that won people over,]” Eddy said. “With Ibn Saud, [Roosevelt] was his very best,” Eddy added.

The President, less than two months away from death, seemed to regard Saud’s slaves as a kind of exotic curiosity. “[The] whole party was a scream,” he later wrote about the King’s partly enslaved entourage, in a letter to his cousin, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Roosevelt was neither incapable of confrontation nor blind to labour exploitation. Over the 1930s, he backed Labor Secretary Frances Perkins’ ground-breaking labour organising and safety reforms, and excoriated American business leaders.

“[Organised corporate interests] are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match,” he said at a 1936 rally.

But Roosevelt’s liberalism, even in its purest, rarely-achieved form, ended at the borders of the United States. And in doing so, it empowered reactionaries and blunted parts of his domestic agenda by letting the radical right avoid having to oppose universal respect for human dignity.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s – having accepted that respecting human dignity is conditional, on a ship with Ibn Saud and at home – Roosevelt failed at the macabre exercise of defining those worthy of protection.

He began his Presidency on the back foot, trying, and often failing, to explain why specific groups deserved to be treated with basic respect. He was able to mount effective majoritarian defences of the American working class, but failed to advance similar protections for Black Americans and Americans of Mexican and Japanese ancestry.

In 1934, while working to pass the Social Security Act, Roosevelt met with NAACP leader Walter White at the White House to discuss an early anti-lynching bill. White pushed the President on the issue, and Roosevelt appeared flustered. But the discussion did not yield much.

Roosevelt was not fond of lynchings, having described them as vile murders and rejections of the commandment that ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ in a 1933 talk to the Federal Council of Churches in America. “We do not excuse those in high places or in low who condone lynch law,” he told the group.

But he could not bring himself to end the practice. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, [opponents] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass [to] keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk,” he reportedly told White, according to former F.D.R Library Director Paul Sparrow.

To Roosevelt, lynchings were moral affronts that he was powerless to do anything about. He may have been right, but that was partly his own fault. The moment the President – like other liberals – accepted that human dignity was not universal, political fights became fights about whose humanity mattered.

They became fights that ethnonationalists, authoritarians, and religious extremists – those that Reinhold Niebuhr (secularly) described as the ‘children of darkness,’ the moral cynics among us – are entirely capable of winning.

Once liberals accept that human dignity is conditional, the ‘children of darkness’ need simply to prey on the anxieties, economic hardships, and, indeed, prejudices of decent voters to wind back progress. That is substantially easier than pushing back against most people’s innate, moral intuition that dignity is universal.

President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, understood this better than he did. While he prepared to break bread with King Saud and his slaves, the First Lady was in Washington D.C, thinking about Abraham Lincoln.

“Today, when we face problems which would come close to his heart, I think the knowledge of his firm belief in the dignity of the human being is something from which many of us draw strength and inspiration,” she wrote in a 13 February column, celebrating Lincoln’s birthday.

During the President’s meeting, she went further. “[Global peace] cannot be [achieved], however, unless the people of the nations involved see to it that at home they build the kind of atmosphere in which economic and political freedom is possible,” she wrote on 14 February.

And Eleanor Roosevelt’s support for universal dignity went beyond vague columns. In 1934, she arranged Walter White’s meeting with the President, and likely helped him prepare for it, having been a long-time member of the NAACP.

Roosevelt, in the final decades of her life, also routinely condemned Saudi Arabian slavery – which formally ended on 6 November 1962, one day before her death – as backward and publicly chided King Saud over it.

“To many of us, the King does not seem to have exercised his powers to raise the standard of living of his people, to get rid, at this late date, of all slavery in his kingdom,” she wrote in February 1957.

But despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s best efforts, both in the United Nations and in meetings with her husband’s successors, liberal statesmen continue to follow in President Roosevelt’s footsteps, rather than her own.

Liberal statesmen solemnly trigger oil shocks in solidarity with the victims of Bucha and Lviv, but their willingness to act does not seem to extend quite as far as Al Fashir, Tigray, or Khan Younis. They preach the beauty of pluralism in the morning, and then proceed to fete religious autocrats and hold umbrellas over genocidal presidents at noon.

There is a temptation on the part of governing liberals to compartmentalise responses to foreign atrocities, and wipe them away as wholly unrelated to domestic cohesion. But this ignores both the fact that voters live in global information environments and maintain the capacity to infer principles from actions.

When politicians alternatively defend and disregard foreign atrocities, which are often visible to their voters, they do the work of would-be authoritarians at home. They tell their electorates that human dignity is not universal, that it can be subordinated to economic and political interests.

They can try to explain why human dignity should be extended to everyone at home, but will face the same challenges that Roosevelt did. Reactionary politicians can appeal to the worst instincts of decent voters once liberal politicians give up on universalism.

When liberals resurrect President Roosevelt’s worst instincts – which he displayed on a ship in early 1945 – they should not expect to avert his historic failures.

By Avinash Govind

Burnham will be bound by promises of bold action and political culture change, Rachel Reeves’ self-imposed fiscal rules and tax pledges, and Keir Starmer’s generous parting gift of £4.7 billion worth of unfunded defence promises.

But unlike many other Labour Party members, Burnham maintains the ideological commitments needed to navigate his narrow path to political success. He will enter 10 Downing Street as the first British Prime Minister to serve both the Labour Party and the Co-operative Party, bringing his decades-long commitment to cooperative principles into the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Co-operative Party has served as the political wing of the British cooperative movement since its founding at the 1917 Congress of Cooperatives. Its history mirrors the Labour Party’s own historic, now-frayed relationship with the British labour movement, though the Co-operative Party is not wholly independent.

Co-operative Party activists develop policy and run advocacy campaigns, and its local branches lead candidate selections. But, since 1927, it has exclusively run joint Labour and Co-operative Party (LCP) electoral slates and required its candidates to secure Labour Party nominations.

The Co-operative Party promotes community ownership and the growth of financial, consumer, and labour cooperatives across the British economy. Its policies also do not cost much money. The Party – in keeping with cooperative principles – aims to slash barriers to local economic control, while maintaining a commitment to community-led, rather than state-led, projects.

“You can’t force co-ops on people … They have to be bottom-up, you know; you have to go with what people want… It’s [the Government’s] job then to facilitate and enable people,” Burnham said at the Co-operative Party’s 2021 Conference. And he has applied that principle, fairly consistently, since he first joined the LCP in 2001, across wildly different iterations of the Labour Party.

Throughout the 2000s – as he cycled through Cabinet posts in the Blair and Brown Governments – Burnham served as Chair of Supporters Direct, a Co-operative Party-proposed and Labour-backed group created to help football fans take control and ownership of their clubs.

“What is the antidote to a decade of greed [in football]? The answer is already before us: supporter and community ownership of clubs. Quietly and almost unnoticed, football is Britain’s fastest-growing sector for cooperative and mutual ownership,” Burnham wrote in a 2002 editorial in the Guardian. “The people’s game is ripe for a supporters’ takeover,” he added.

Under his leadership, Supporters Direct helped dozens of community groups buy shares in football clubs and a handful – including the John Green-sponsored AFC Wimbledon – buy out private investors entirely.

Burnham has further deepened his commitment to cooperative principles in recent years. He created the Greater Manchester Cooperative Commission (GMCC) in March 2019 – just over year into his first term as Manchester Mayor – and asked it to develop cooperative-sector growth recommendations.

“As the home of the cooperative movement, it’s vital we harness those values and put them at the centre of everything we do, working with cooperatives and social enterprises to build a stronger, fairer Greater Manchester where nobody is left behind,” Burnham said at the time.

In early 2020, the GMCC completed its work, and Burnham fully accepted its 43 recommendations. These included proposals for him to promote credit unions and lobby financial regulators to loosen reserve requirements for them.

Burnham has promoted Manchester-based credit unions in recent years, as the GMCC requested. He teamed up with nine local unions – in 2024 – to create a consumer loan product for Mancunian union members seeking annual bus passes. His move likely did not add any costs to Manchester’s annual bus pass scheme, but did create a clear incentive for people to join financial cooperatives and keep savings local.

Burnham could, as Prime Minister, give effect to the second part of GMCC’s credit union recommendation without bumping up against Reeves-imposed cost constraints. If he decides to, he would have an admittedly imperfect, working model to follow.

The National Credit Union Administration, the US’ main credit union regulator, has proposed dozens of credit union-related rule changes since 2025. The agency plans to ease collateral holding requirements and inter-union loan restrictions to encourage lending. But it has also proposed less ideal changes to remove some discrimination protections and speed up union-bank mergers.

Burnham has not announced any credit union policies in recent days. But his early comments as Labour Party leader suggest that he will adopt a cooperative approach to policymaking when he formally takes office.

Minutes after he won control of the Labour Party on 17 July, Burnham offered party members a stark diagnosis of the UK’s core political challenges. “Slowly, at times imperceptibly, over four decades, political and economic power drained away out of our communities in every region and nation of the UK,” Burnham said.

“If we don’t have sufficient public control over the cost of the essentials, how can we have control over inflation, public spending, and the rest of the economy? The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place,” he added.

Burnham’s speech was light on specific policy proposals – a source of concern among many activists – but his rhetoric was not new. He has used his precise diagnosis of the British state to advance a fairly specific set of cooperative policies for decades.

Burnham also gave listeners a clearer signal of his Government’s cooperative plans. “Let’s have the courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected, like social care, and have the conviction to go out there together and argue for our plans, he said.

Though the line itself did not say too much, Burnham’s past comments suggest his social care policies will focus on the cooperative movement. During a social care panel at Co-Op Congress 2023, Burnham was clear about the movement’s role in the sector.

“It does feel [like] the co-op ideal is uniquely suited to social care, doesn’t it, in terms of the culture and ethos of cooperatives. It kind of feels like the fit is perfect … So maybe the co-op movement is the only movement, really, that can fix social care,” Burnham said.

His plans on social care could be as structurally oriented and cost-effective as his Manchester-era credit union scheme, allowing him to obey Reeves’ budgetary rules without either running to the right or avoiding bold action.

Burnham could – as he promised Labour Party members on 17 July – “[not] out Green the Greens, or out Reform Reform, or [do] what we’ve done in the past … wearing too many Tory clothes.”

New Zealand’s three ruling parties – the National Party, ACT Party, and New Zealand First – voted the Bill through its first reading in Parliament. But multiple National Party MPs, including Minister for Women Nicola Grigg, have expressed concerns about it.

The Bill is meant to “uphold legal certainty, protect the integrity of sex-based rights, and ensure that [legal language] reflects biological reality,” according to an explanatory note.

But it does none of those things. It is mostly performative, yet still riddled with enough mangled definitions to potentially strip young women of their reproductive rights. The Bill prevents anyone below the age of 20 from being classed as either a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ by default – which could limit access to abortion services – and ignores the existence of intersex people.

To the extent that there are rare cases where it makes sense for the New Zealand Government to craft policy on the basis of sex, rather than gender, the Bill does little to address them.

Organisations across New Zealand can already create single-sex spaces and sex-segregated sporting events under the Human Rights Act, Attorney General Chris Bishop – a National Party MP – noted in a 19 May letter to Parliament.

New Zealand’s anti-discrimination frameworks also generally either define ‘male’ and ‘female’ in terms of sex, in laws like the Equal Pay Act, or protect against gender discrimination without mentioning specific genders or sexes.

Despite solving no apparent policy problem and creating a few, the Bill will not be inconsequential. The New Zealand Government’s support for the Bill could drag Parliament into the kind of performative culture wars it has largely steered clear of in recent decades.

In 2005, over 60% of Parliament voted down an effort by United Future – a minor, socially conservative party – to define marriage as exclusively between men and women and prevent recognition of same-sex marriages certified abroad.

“Let us see the Marriage (Gender Clarification) Amendment Bill for what it is. It is a cheap political stunt,” then National MP and current BusinessNZ CEO Katherine Rich said during the Bill’s first reading.

“This Bill is a cheap political stunt, and will be used as a platform for every … homophobe who wants to stand up and make comments about the way other people lead their lives,” Rich added.

Share

Two decades later, the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill risks alienating another community of New Zealanders, who already face exceptionally high rates of bullying, coercion, and psychological stress.

Two-thirds of trans people have withstood attempts to change their identity, including efforts to treat their identity as a defect, according to the 2022 Counting Ourselves survey. Trans people are also more than six times as likely to experience high psychological stress as the general public, the Counting Ourselves survey found.

The Government – if it passes the Bill – may legitimise harassment and prejudice, but is unlikely to achieve anything of substance. Religious fundamentalists who have disrupted library events in recent years will have their beliefs codified into law. Trans communities, on the other hand, will see the state endorse petty denigrations for no clear reason.

There appears to be no legitimate basis for passing the Bill. Irrespective of people’s views on gender, it is difficult to see any reason for Parliament to gratuitously step into cultural debates that have little impact on policy and routinely harm vulnerable communities.

New Zealand law is already sensitive to the difference between gender and sex. And in the rare situations where explicit sex-based, rather than gender-based, protections are warranted, Parliament can amend legislation without turning into a culture warrior.

By Avinash Govind

FBI agents were avid readers of the Catholic Worker, sweetly passing around notes about Day’s work for decades, beginning in the early 1940s. Regardless, it took them years to figure out her nationality, despite the 1938 publication of her memoir, From Union Square to Rome, which detailed her early life in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

“[Dorothy Day] is a Russian who came to this country, visited Chicago in [the] spring of 1939 and attempted to interest people in Communistic activities,” agents wrote in 1941.

But the FBI's main objection to Day had nothing to do with her economic philosophy. Its agents largely accepted that she abandoned Communism after converting to Catholicism. Rather, the FBI surveilled her because of her opposition to war.

In June 1940, as France and Norway prepared to surrender to Germany and the Roosevelt Administration armed the United States, the Catholic Worker took a stand for peace on its front page.

“In the present war, [the Catholic Worker stands] unalterably opposed to the use of war as a means of saving ‘Christianity,’ ‘civilization,’ [and] ‘democracy,’ Day wrote. “For eight years, we have been opposing the use of force – in the labor movement, in the class struggle, as well as in the struggles between countries,” Day added.

Weeks later, she travelled to Washington DC to testify against the Roosevelt Administration’s pre-war conscription legislation, reaffirming the need for Christians to deploy ‘spiritual weapons’ in the fight against fascism.

The Catholic Worker movement – decentralised and filled with anti-fascists – was bitterly divided by Day’s editorial and activism. Groups across the US stopped distributing the paper by August, and subscriptions halved during the war.

But Day did not let opposition or heartache quiet her. The Catholic Worker would continue to stand for peace until silenced, and she would express herself from prison, if needed, Day wrote in a May 1940 letter to an English supporter, before publishing her editorial.

“You know with how great suffering and how great prayer we are trying to hold up these ideas,” she explained. “We must hold ourselves in readiness to help… exhausted nations. I think we should pray for peace without victory,” she added.

In August 1940, frustrated by the distribution halts, Day even asked groups that refused to carry the paper to disaffiliate from the Catholic Worker movement and return copies, noting that the paper would not change its position.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, she doubled down on the Catholic Worker’s stance, while explaining that she would not undermine the war effort. A year later, the Catholic Worker published an early rebuke of the US Government’s confinement of ethnically Japanese Americans on the West Coast.

“I saw a bit of Germany on the West Coast. I saw some of the concentration camps where the Japanese men, women, and children are being held before they are resettled in the Owens Valley,” an unnamed contributor wrote.

“If we do not cry out against this injustice done [to] them, if we [do] not try to protest it, we would be failing in two of the works of mercy, which are to visit the prisoner and to ransom the captive,” they added.

During the war, the Catholic Worker may have also housed an ethnically Japanese lady at one of its shelters in New York City, ignoring the virulent propaganda of the era, a confidential informant told the FBI.

But the movement maintained the tacit support of the Archdiocese of New York throughout World War II. Church leaders neither publicly defended nor opposed the paper, while insisting on Day’s earnest sincerity in interviews with the FBI.

Years later, Day claimed that New York’s Catholic Church resisted FBI efforts to censor her during the war, though her FBI file does not indicate that the agency attempted to pressure the Church.

Share

Day’s opposition to World War II, while controversial, came out of her strict, unfailing obedience to the Church and its teachings. She consistently defended the Church’s ‘just war’ doctrine as theologically valid, even as she argued that modern weaponry meant that wars could never be waged through just means.

“[The] conditions [for a just war] are impossible of fulfilment [in] these present times of bombardment of civilians, open cities, the use of poison gas, etc,” she wrote in her 1940 editorial.

And she maintained the same position in private. Reverend Leo O’Hare – a Jesuit priest in Philadelphia – explained that Day believes that “the present war is unjustifiable, because, in her estimation, the means used in its make-up are not moral… a brutal means has been used that includes the starving out of non-combatant nations,” in a 1943 interview with FBI agents.

In the months leading up to her June 1940 editorial, the Catholic Worker published thousands of words from theologians explaining Catholic teachings on war. The paper devoted pages to explaining Francisco de Vitoria’s distinction between ‘Jus ad Bellum’ and ‘Jus in Bello,’ the just causes and conduct of war.

Day critiqued Catholic support for war, but her critiques were characteristically immanent. She objected to the actions of specific Bishops and leaders by appealing to papal encyclicals and the Catechism, rather than by rejecting the Church’s teachings.

The Church has also drifted closer to her position and recognised its value in recent decades. “The ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated … [and the] use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations,” Pope Leo XIV wrote in Manifica Humanitas, a April 2026 encyclical on artificial intelligence.

Day’s argument was likely not an attempt at motivated reasoning, despite her pre-conversion pacifism. In multiple other areas of her life – particularly around sexuality – she explicitly subordinated her instincts to the doctrines of the Church.

Day had lived a liberated life in Chicago and New York, prior to her conversion, as she described in her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, in 1924. And her sensual instincts did not change when she converted.

“I am as free and unsuppressed as I ever was [about sex]. I see no immediate difference between enjoying sex and enjoying a symphony concert,” she wrote in a December 1932 letter to Forster Batterham, her common-law partner she left after conversion.

“[But] in breaking [the Church’s sexual] laws one is letting the flesh get an upper hand over the spirit, so I do not want to break these laws,” she added.

Day was also a Benedictine Oblate and pledged to live her life in keeping with the Rule of Saint Benedict, based in part on obedience to God and other just authority. Yet she remained a committed philosophical anarchist until the end of her life.

In Day’s mind, there was no contradiction between her commitment to anarchism and obedience to the Church. As far back as the 1800s, anarchists had differentiated between voluntary and coerced obedience, between obedience backed by threats of violence or destitution and obedience freely given, as a reflection of personal conscience.

Day did not see the Church as a coercive authority. Her voluntary obedience and submission to it – despite its flaws – were expressions of her love of Christ, channelled through his chosen voice on earth, rather than any sense of fear.

“My faith may be the size of a mustard seed, but … it brings with it a beginning of [a] love … so intense that human love with all its heights and depths pales in comparison. Even seeing through a glass darkly makes one want to obey, to do all the Beloved wishes,” she wrote in her 1966 essay, Reflections During Advent.

Day’s chosen obedience to the Church complemented her anarchism, in her view, because it came out of the depths of her heart, her unending capacity to reason sharply about the world around her.

“The Church is pretty anarchistic, you know… The saying of Vatican II is above all, ‘Conscience is supreme’,” she said in a 1971 interview with the Catholic Agitator.

Day’s distinction between voluntary and coerced obedience also reflected her economic commitment to mutualism, an anarchist philosophy built on an acceptance of private property and a belief in the communal ownership of productive assets.

Pierre Proudhon, who developed mutualism, once paradoxically argued that “property is theft,” “property is despotism,” and “property is freedom,” depending on whether it is used to exert control over others. Property is free when it supports individual flourishing, and despotism when it supports exploitation, in Proudhon’s view.

Day – like most mature anarchists – did not reject authority or control, only coercion. To her, “the new social order is to be built up by groupings of men together in communities … united in some way but without any governing bodies,” she said in her 1971 interview.

But Day’s obedience to doctrine was far from painless. She gave up Forster over the Church’s prohibition on sex, despite her deep love for him. Yet when it came to sex, Day also saw sensual beauty in prayer and the divine, often quoting Saint John of the Cross’ loving, devotional poems.

The Church’s teachings on sexual orientation and birth control were harder to reconcile with her instincts.

In her first known letter, years before her conversion, Day wrote to the pioneering feminist activist Margaret Sanger – the founder of the American Birth Control League, later renamed Planned Parenthood – about a job as a publicity director.

But just over a decade later, she accepted the Church’s teachings on contraception and decided to ignore the issue in the Catholic Worker, neither explicitly endorsing nor challenging doctrine.

In the final years of her life, she faced an even more painful dilemma. In September 1975, five years before her death, two Catholic Workers wrote to her and came out as lesbian, she wrote in a diary entry at the time.

Day did not want to judge the couple, recounting her own attraction to two women earlier in her life. But she felt unable to avoid it. “One must judge what one considers right and wrong and one must remember the [sexual] admonitions in [the Bible],” she wrote in her diary.

It was not easy. Around the same time she wrote the entry, Day described the situation as leaving her in “a most grotesque and horrible misery,” in a letter to a nun and friend.

Catholic teachings on sexual orientation also contributed to the first Catholic Worker – Day’s daughter, Tamar, whose adorably precocious childhood partly played out in newspaper editorials – deciding to leave the Church, according to her daughter, Kate Hennessey.

But Day never expected her obedience, or a principled life, to be easy. In her writings and interviews, she often emphasised that the life of a Catholic Worker was not for everyone, focusing on the discomfort and difficulty that accompanied it, but had lessons for all.

By Avinash Govind

They had planned to spend the night at a boarding house run by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – a syndicalist trade union co-founded by Eugene Debs – but officers barged into their room and arrested them. That night, the Palmer Raids, Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to jail or deport thousands of American leftists, reached Chicago.

One of the women, Mae, was severely depressed and had attempted suicide days earlier. The other was Dorothy Day, a young radical journalist, now on the path to canonisation in the Catholic Church.

Day, who worked as a nurse in New York City during the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, had turned up at the IWW house to support Mae, but decided to stay the night after seeing her, she later recalled in her 1952 memoir, The Long Loneliness.

Police officers held the pair at a local station for days, denied them access to lawyers, and then transferred them to a city jail after a brief court hearing, where they were charged with being “inmates of a disorderly house,” a euphemism for prostitutes.

In the city jail, Day bore witness to the horrors of the carceral state. A woman in the cell next door spent hours beating her head against metal bars, only to be placed in a straitjacket and denied medical help, she recounted.

Day had been arrested before, and would be arrested many more times before her death in 1980. She was jailed and went on hunger strike for 10 days in 1917, following a suffragette protest outside the White House. But Chicago, more than her previous arrest, changed her.

“I had the moral support in [Washington DC] of sixty or seventy women who were arrested with me, and it was some technical charge, such as obstructing traffic, that was made against us. Now we were alone,” she wrote in her 1938 memoir, From Union Square to Rome.

Where she had felt a sense of radical solidarity during the suffragette movement, she partly, rather unjustifiably, blamed herself for her arrest in Chicago. “I was a victim, yes, of the red hysteria of the time, but I was also a victim of my own imprudence, of my carelessness of convention [by spending a night at the IWW house],” she wrote decades later, in The Long Loneliness.

But she did not let her jailers off the hook. In her cell, she remembered Debs – then himself imprisoned by Wilson for delivering an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio – and his insistence that “while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Despite her self-blame, she understood her arrest as a reflection of society.

At the time of her arrest, Day was a secular radical with an affinity for Communism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. In January 1917, months before the Russian Revolution, she had interviewed Leon Trotsky for Call magazine in New York City, printing his prediction of wartime unrest. In March, she joined a rally in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the end of the Russian Empire.

But after her arrest in Chicago, Day took a break from activism. Over the next decade, she focused on writing novels, short stories, and gardening columns. She chose to limit her involvement in radical politics to writing occasional socialist articles and hosting weekly parties with activist friends.

She also fell in love. Soon after moving to New York City in the early 1920s, she met Forster Batterham, an anarchist and factory worker, through one of her comrades in the suffragette movement. The pair’s relationship was passionate and loving, defined by long days spent at Day’s beachside cottage on Staten Island, fishing, exploring, and enjoying each other’s company.

Those years – away from politics and absorbed in literature and love – were some of the happiest of her life, she would later say. They were also the years when she found the Catholic Church.

Day had always felt a connection to God. She had been baptised into the Episcopalian Church as a child in Chicago and studied the Bible, but drifted away from religion over time.

Share

From the mid-1910s until the mid-1920s, she largely viewed religion through a Marxist lens, as a distraction from the work of material liberation; as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions … The opium of the people,” to quote Marx’s 1843 essay.

In her Washington prison cell in 1917, suffering during her hunger strike, she briefly turned back to Christianity, soothed by the Bible. In her darkest moment, “[her] heart swelled with joy and thankfulness for the Psalms,” she said. “The man that sang these songs knew sorrow and expected joy,” she added.

But a prison cell was not her Road to Damascus. Within days of her release, she turned back away from faith, viewing her experience as personal failure, above all else. Day had, from a Marxist perspective, applied the balm of religion to a material wound.

“I was too weak to stand alone, too weak to face the darkness of the punishment cell without crying out, and I was ashamed,” she later wrote.

Day’s re-engagement with Christianity eventually came from a sense of joy at her life on Staten Island. She began to pray and attend Mass services as a way of expressing her gratitude, without seeking to involve herself in organised religion.

Her affinity for the Bible also came from the same place as her radical politics and her absolute willingness to rush headfirst into picket lines and a pandemic. It was Christ’s commands – most explicitly outlined in Matthew 25 – to serve the afflicted that drew her back to religion.

“Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me,” Christ said.

But what differentiated Day from traditional advocates of religious charity was her political edge. Even as she drifted towards Christianity, she remained a radical. She saw the class war as an analytical fact, rather than a political imperative, a reality that shapes political possibility.

Long before her re-engagement, Day had been disappointed by the Catholic Church’s focus on individual actions, rather than systemic change. “Where were the saints to try to change the social order,” she asked herself at university.

And it is a question she never stopped grappling with. At her first communion, she felt like she was betraying her old commitments. “I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition … The church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction,” she recounted in her 1952 memoir.

In the memoir, she even confessed that “this I had been taught to think and this I still think to a great extent.”

During her re-engagement with Christianity, she remained a radical but lurched decisively towards the anarchist end of the political spectrum. And it is not too hard to see why. By 1929, just years after her conversion, Trotsky had been exiled to Turkey and the Soviet Union had suppressed Russian Cossacks and anarchists alike.

By the early 1930s, Day was a mutualist, supporting the community ownership of productive assets, while allowing artisans, individuals, and collectives to own their own property.

Under mutualism, mezzanine finance becomes the weapon of a revolution, wielded by a vanguard of credit union clerks and craftspeople, producing an anti-capitalism that abandons the centralised state.

But Day’s discomfort with the Church’s role in politics was far from the highest price she paid for converting. Forster – her lover – had little regard for either marriage or religion. When Day gave birth to her daughter, insisted on baptising the child, and then entered the Catholic Church herself, their relationship fell apart.

Between 1927, when they broke up, and 1932, they exchanged dozens of heart-wrenching letters, unable to reconcile their fundamental difference.

It was too painful for her to even remain in New York City. Day and her daughter, Tamar, eventually left the city and spent most of 1929 in Hollywood and Mexico, where Day worked as a writer. Over the next three decades, she would only meet Forster once, according to a 1957 diary entry from Day’s friend Judith Malina, a prominent anarchist theatre director.

But it is not clear that Day and Forster ever stopped loving each other. Malina, in her diary entry, recounted a jail stint that she and Day served together in 1957 – when Day was around 60 years old – after resisting nuclear war drills.

“When [Day] talks of [Forster], her voice grows warm with admiration … She has been faithful to him and chaste, though many men have loved her,” Malina wrote. “And if he were to come to me and say, even now, after all these years, let us recommence our life together, I do not know what I would say,” she recalled Day saying.

And it was not entirely one-sided either. Less than a week after Day expressed her continued love and admiration for Forster, a man she had hardly met in decades, he turned up outside the jail, picketing for her and Malina’s release.

Forster and Day never rekindled their relationship. They only began to regularly exchange letters in 1959, a few years after the jail incident, according to Robert Ellsberg, the editor of Day’s posthumously-released letters and diaries.

But Day had a bit more luck reconciling her leftism with her faith, largely because of Peter Maurin, a French émigré she met in December 1932, during the Great Depression. She met Maurin in front of her house after returning from a reporting trip to Washington DC.

On the trip, she had covered strikes organised by newly formed, Communist-aligned Unemployed Councils and scores of tenant farmers, and been dismayed by the lack of Catholic solidarity for the marchers.

“I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership … for the actual works of mercy that the [Communist] comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching workers?” she asked herself.

In Maurin, she found her answer. The French intellectual – though he would have hated to be called that – educated her on the social program of the Catholic Church and urged her to publicise it.

A year and a half before Maurin turned up at Day’s home, Pope Pius XI had published Quadragesimo anno, a papal encyclical on the reconstruction of the social order.

Pius took a position against both free market capitalism and socialism. He affirmed the Church’s explicit support for private property, outlined in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum decades earlier.

But he also backed a degree of workplace democracy and firm-level collectives. “We consider it more advisable … that, so far as is possible, the work-contract be somewhat modified by a partnership-contract … Workers and other employees thus become sharers in ownership or management or participate in some fashion in the profits received,” Pius wrote.

Pius similarly backed a decentralised state, arguing that governments should delegate non-essential powers to smaller agencies – describing it as the ‘principle of subsidiary function.’

He was not exactly on board with everything Day supported. Both Pius and Leo explicitly argued in favour of limiting strikes and lock-outs, in favour of public interventions during labour disputes.

But Day still eventually came to view distributism, the Catholic economic philosophy stemming from Pius and Leo’s encyclicals, as synonymous with mutualism.

“Distributism is the English term for the society whereby man has sufficient of this world’s goods to enable them to lead a good life. Other words [to describe it are] mutualism, federal pluralism, regionalism; but anarchism … best brings to mind the tension [between authority and freedom],” she wrote in 1952.

Over months, Maurin eventually won Day over. And in May 1933, the pair published the first edition of the Catholic Worker newspaper from the back of a New York City tenement.

In their inaugural editorial, the pair wrote “[The Catholic Worker] is printed to call [people’s] attention to the fact that the Catholic Church has a social programme… The fundamental aim of most radical sheets is the conversion of its readers to Radicalism and Atheism… Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist? Is it not possible to protest to expose, to complain, to point out abuses and demand reforms without desiring the overthrow of religion?”

The paper, in their view, existed to promote papal encyclicals on social justice, generally, and Quadragesimo anno, specifically. And it continues to do that, to this day, despite the passing of both Day and Maurin.

But Maurin and, to a lesser extent, Day, were not prepared for the Catholic Worker to simply stand as a publication. Instead, they would go on to build a movement based on voluntary poverty and small, daily actions to, in the words of Maurin, build the foundations for a new society within the old one.

To be continued

By Avinash Govind

The piece was an interview with an unnamed railroad operator, who was not in the mood to hold back about corruption in the state. “I once supposed that the company owned this [rail] road. But I know that legislators and the judges have a first mortgage on it,” they told the journalist.

“I can show you some of the requests for passes that will cause you to lose faith in office-holders, if you have any,” they said. “I have received today a request for an annual pass from a justice of the peace who says they decided in our favour [in a hog case],” they added.

The operator estimated that they gave public officials around 3000 annual passes and at least 6000 trip passes each year to secure favours. “The custom … has been so firmly established and is so generally indulged that we are slaves to it.”

Each of the dozens of elected officials who held diffuse power over Indiana's railroads claimed their own tickets, trading their limited authority for personal benefit, the operator explained.

“We never dream of refusing legislators and members of town councils, and when we want anything from them, we never fail to ask for it! We give passes to county clerks and recorders in return for favours they render in attending to our records, etc,” they said.

The railroad operator’s comments were particularly brazen, but would not have come as a surprise to Indianapolis’ residents. American politicians in the 1880s hardly commanded public respect.

Share

Just a page after the interview, the Indianapolis Evening News reported on an Illinois Representative-elect pleading guilty to assault after thumping a journalist over the head and shoulders with a cane, over an election dispute.

Five years earlier, corruption and patronage had fatal consequences. On 2 July 1881, Charles Guiteau stepped onto a train platform in Washington D.C. and shot the recently elected President James Garfield in the back. Months later, Garfield died from infections stemming from the shooting, marking the first U.S. Presidential assassination since President Abraham Lincoln’s murder.

Guiteau had campaigned for Garfield in the 1880 election, writing a handful of speeches, and expected an Ambassadorship – which he was wholly unqualified for – in return.

When Garfield’s Secretary of State, James Blaine, rebuffed him and the President signalled discomfort with patronage politics, Guiteau decided to act. “Ingratitude is the basest of crimes,” he wrote while planning the assassination, according to Winston Bowman, an Associate Historian at the Federal Judicial Centre.

Americans, by the time the railroad operator spoke, were tired of corruption. Reflecting on the Indianapolis Evening News’ interview, in March 1887, Eugene Debs – who would later become the godfather of American trade unionism – asked: “With legislatures, congresses, and courts and town councils corrupted by bribes, what show is there for honest government? Who does not see at a glance the absolute necessity for radical remedies?”

Debs’ solution was for organised labour to act as a force to “rescue government from the men who … are bent upon its destruction.” And it was a view shared by many on the American Labour Left at the time.

On the same day that it ran the interview on corruption, the Indianapolis Evening News published a short story about a group of unions meeting in Columbus, Ohio, to form the American Federation of Labour (AFL), which would later merge into the AFL-CIO in 1955. The AFL, at its first meeting, explicitly passed a resolution showing solidarity with activists controversially sentenced to death over the Haymarket Affair months earlier.

But the American Labour Movement did not have a monopoly on reform ideas.

As the railroad operator confessed and unions united, a 33-year-old Woodrow Wilson would have been sitting at his office in Princeton University, finishing The Study of Administration, a case for bureaucratic change that would guide reformers for generations.

Wilson, in his essay, lamented that “the poisonous atmosphere of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration … and corruption ever and again discovered in the bureaus at Washington” show how ideas of good governance were absent in the US.

American and English civic development, he argued, had focused on policy innovation and political freedom, rather than administration. Indeed, Wilson believed that America’s tradition of popular rule made governing harder.

The young professor – just years out of university – made the point that the US political class needed to treat administration as the science of carrying out the public will, distinct from politics, the messy work of determining it.

“The broad plans of governmental action are not administrative; the detailed execution of such plans is administrative,” he said. “The assessment and raising of taxes, for instance, ... and recruiting of the army and navy are all obviously acts of administration; but the [policies] which direct [them] are obviously outside of and above administration,” he added.

Wilson called for specialised, extensive civil service training for government employees, designed to create technical skills and a culture committed to helping elected officials implement policy.

But this is not to say that he supported an unaccountable bureaucracy. He called for a system with “clear-cut responsibility” and visibility to ensure trust. Unlike some of his fellow Progressive-era reformers, Wilson built his model of administration on the assumption that voters could be trusted.

“Public attention must be easily directed, in each case of good or bad administration, to just the man deserving of praise or blame … If it be divided, dealt out in shares to many, it is obscured; and if it be obscured, it is made irresponsible,” he said.

“The less [the administrator’s] power, the more safely obscure and unnoticed does he feel his position to be, and the more readily does he relapse into remissness,” Wilson added.

For a few decades after writing the piece, Wilson dedicated himself to academia. He wrote prolifically about administration and reform for nearly two decades, rising to become President of Princeton University, before politics came calling.

In March 1909, while still at Princeton, he travelled to Missouri to speak at the St Louis Civic League’s annual dinner. On the night, he delivered his long-brewing case for consolidating power among a small number of public officials, giving them the power to act.

“Simplify your process, and you will begin to control; complicate them, and you will get farther and farther away,” Wilson said that night, his later political ally Richard Childs recounted in a 1956 review.

Childs, who also backed the early career of Robert Moses, the New York planner made infamous by Robert Caro’s Power Broker, was a political reformer in his own right. Before meeting Wilson, he had written The Short Ballot, a piece calling for executive power to be held by a smaller number of elected officials.

Soon after, Childs and Wilson began to co-lead the National Short Ballot Organisation, pushing municipalities to consolidate. By 1911, they had begun to convince cities to adopt versions of their plan. And that same year, Wilson entered public office for the first time, as Governor of New Jersey, his home since the 1880s.

Wielding the power of the state for the first time in his career, Wilson embarked on an ambitious reform agenda, designed to clean up politics in the state. He actively rejected patronage and stunted the power of political parties.

On a municipal level, he passed the Walsh Act, which allowed cities in New Jersey to trial a new form of local government, the Commission Plan. Commission Plan cities elected boards of people to serve as dual legislators and administrators, held to account at open meetings.

“Commission form of government is the very one to take up because it is so easy to understand. You elect five men to run the government, and you hold them responsible for running it right. You can watch five men where you could not watch twenty-five,” he told a crowd in Jersey City in July 1911.

He was not naïve to the possibility of corruption. Some New Jersey cities had elected poor Commissioners after adopting the model, but, with power concentrated and visible, they were quickly recalled, he told another group in Baltimore that December.

“Under our system of commission government, there is a very great advantage in having an opportunity to identify your undesirable commission,” he said.

And he did not simply support the policy. He was effusive in his praise of the new model that he hoped would speed across the US.

“There is a zest in commission government not found in any private arrangement ever conceived by the mind of man. That wine, the wine of absolute confidence, of your fellow man, quickens every drop of blood in your body,” he said.

But not everyone in the Short Ballot movement shared Wilson’s enthusiasm for Commissioners. Childs supported Wilson’s plan, but only as a stepping stone. He thought the model was unsound, but believed it opened the door to new forms of local government.

As Wilson served out his term as Governor, became a wartime President, and then spent months in Paris, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, Childs powered on with the Short Ballot reform agenda.

And in 1912, after the city of Sumter, South Carolina appointed an apolitical city manager to run the daily business of government, he became one of the prime advocates of manager-based city councils.

Mayors and other councillors pass ordinances and budgets in manager-based city systems, but lack operational and broad staffing control over local governments. They act as legislators, not operators.

Managers, unlike Commissioners, are separate from elected officials and usually outlive political cycles, heightening their independence. By 1914, the US had 17 city managers; by 1955, they accounted for the plurality of large US cities. And the model soon spread out across the world.

At the time, Childs and Wilson’s preferred models differed, but not in ways that mattered very much.

In the 1910s, administration across most levels of government largely involved box-checking exercises. The work required care and skill, technical knowledge and integrity, but not value judgements.

As an example, when then-President Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, it approved or rejected mergers on the basis of whether revenue levels hit thresholds or trade practices met specific criteria.

Whether formally elected officials or apolitical appointees held executive control mattered less than whether they were held to account for failures.

When New Zealand eventually consolidated its hundreds of local councils and boards into district and regional councils in 1989, the Fourth Labour Government backed Childs’ model. District and regional councils got power and the ability to set policy, but administration became the domain of staff under the immediate direction of independent, unelected managers.

For a few years – as in the 1910s – this did not matter too much. But over time, views of administration changed. Cities grew and the rigidity of planning laws became a burden, creating demands for more nimble, agile regulatory frameworks.

In 1991, the New Zealand Government passed the Resource Management Act and, in doing so, blurred the line between politics and administration on a local level. Section 104 of the Act requires planners to consider a wide range of impacts related to consents and form considered judgments about them.

New Zealand’s Ministry of the Environment notes that planners need to be satisfied that most proposals with potential environmental impacts align with relevant Government plans and objectives.

Planners may consider everything from design considerations and economic impacts to infrastructure and transport effects, as long as it is relevant to local and national policies. But the Act does not mandate any specific weighting of values. Consenting officials have the right to emphasise criteria as they choose, within the bounds of relevant policies.

That may create a more dynamic government, but it also attacks the separation at the heart of Wilsonian administration. The line between politics and governance.

The differences between Wilson and Childs’ models of local government did not originally matter because administrators – whomever they were – simply did what legislators clearly wanted. But the moment that the values of administrators entered the work of administration, those differences began to shape the democratic character of cities around the world. At that moment, Wilson’s trust in democratic oversight suddenly became vital to maintaining public accountability.

A public unsatisfied with a Commissioner’s approach to planning could recall them, as Wilson noted. A public unsatisfied with decisions coming out of a Council’s planning team cannot.

People can vote for politicians who support one approach to planning or another, and those officials can change entire policy frameworks. But they cannot shift the internal cultures of Councils, adjust how staff subjectively assess applications.

On a fundamental level, elected officials cannot – as Wilson wrote in The Study of Administration – guarantee a “civil service cultured and self-sufficient enough to act with sense and vigor, and yet so intimately connected with the popular thought, by means of elections and constant public counsel, as to find arbitrariness of class spirit quite out of the question.”

By Avinash Govind

At 2:48pm, a Rodney Local Board member warned Council staff of “extreme flooding and impassable roads in Rodney.” Two hours later, at 4:30pm, Council’s Chief Executive and another Councillor alerted Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown.

But the public heard nothing until 6:30pm. “If it’s safe, stay home … don’t drive through floodwaters. We will continue to update,” Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) said in a social media post that evening, according to Mike Bush’s report into Auckland Council’s flood response.

By the time AEM posted its message, Auckland had observed 75 – 79% of its annual summer rainfall over a day, according to NIWA Weather. Multiple Councillors and Parliamentarians, the New Zealand Police, MetService, Waka Kotahi, and Fire and Emergency New Zealand were issuing periodic updates too.

It took until about 9:30pm for Mayor Brown to declare an emergency, and another few hours for AEM to transmit information about evacuation sites.

In his report about the Auckland floods, Bush was clear. “The later declaration of emergency, establishment of evacuation centres and related public messaging came too late to provide Aucklanders with timely public safety advice and reassurance,” he said.

It would be easy to argue that Auckland Council’s response was a display of incompetence. Council certainly made missteps and Mayor Brown’s late-night comments – explaining that it was “not my job to rush out with buckets” – did not help the situation. Yet that would not be entirely fair.

Council’s core problem was that Mayor Brown – the city-wide elected official expected to be leading the response – could not actually do very much. He lacked both the legal authority to direct an emergency response and the access to information needed to keep people informed.

AEM sits within Auckland Council, under the supervision of Council’s Chief Executive, not its elected officials, as is the norm in Mayor-Manager (or weak mayor) cities. Mayor Brown and other councillors pass ordinances and budgets, but lack operational and broad staffing control over Council.

The Bush Report describes that the Mayor’s Office did not make public announcements because it was struggling to find reliable information about the floods. Though the report did critique Mayor Brown for failing to ask for regular briefings.

On the late emergency declaration, the report similarly found that “once the Mayor was informed of the need for the declaration of emergency, he signed it immediately and returned it to officials.”

Share

As water drained from Auckland streets in the days following the floods, leaving four bodies behind, public opinion turned on Mayor Brown. A petition called for his resignation; frustration towards him was palpable.

When floods hit Auckland, residents understandably expected – in line with the central premise of representative government – our elected officials to wield control of the state, to direct public resources, order evacuations, and liaise with central government.

Auckland’s Mayor could not, constitutionally, meet that expectation. In the absence of operational authority, informational challenges are bound to arise in any crisis.

AEM was not dormant during the Auckland floods. Council staff were in constant contact with other agencies and planning next steps, including when to ask for a declaration. But without the Mayor in the room, he could not exercise the judgement that Aucklanders expected.

The gap between representative ideals and bureaucratic realities in weak mayor systems also extends beyond emergency management to the regular decisions that shape our cityscapes and regional economies.

Under local government rules, regulators assessing development applications generally need to weigh a wide range of factors, including everything from transport and economic development impacts to cultural heritage and environmental ones.

But they do not make decisions algorithmically. Rather, staffers working across New Zealand make inherently subjective judgement calls about applications they review.

As an example, while serving as an Economic Policy Advisor at Northland Regional Council, I once spent the better part of a week thinking about what the word ‘significant’ meant, reading guidance documents from Wellington and scanning criteria from municipalities in New York and New South Wales.

More frequently, skilled planners routinely approve, deny, or attach conditions to resource consents, doing work that is both vital and inherently political.

Every time a planner chooses to emphasise the economic benefits of a project over its transport impact, or alternatively attaches transport-related conditions to an economic project, they shift power from one faction of society to another. They also shift that power without a mandate from the voting public.

Planning work requires technical expertise that Mayors are not universally capable of providing. But elected representatives – and, in particular, Mayors elected city-wide – are perfectly able to guide priorities, within the bounds of the planning ordinances and under the threat of judicial review.

NIMBY mayors and their voters have every right to expect planners to emphasise cultural heritage protections over housing effects when assessing applications. Just as development-oriented ones have the right to expect the opposite.

Planning systems, in our current mayoral system, select for continuity, even in situations where voters explicitly ask for change. Giving Mayors the right to appoint planning personnel, at a managerial level, would maintain technical expertise while reaffirming representative control over the state.

When New Zealanders vote for Mayors, they expect them to shape Council operations, not just policies and funding decisions. And with our current system of weak mayors, they are persistently let down, trained to expect disappointment from local politicians and rigidity from local government.

By Avinash Govind