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Political talk is 99% bullshit. Nobody ever tells the real truth about their political views, for fear of damaging their reputation or being labelled an “EXTREMIST”. Sam McChesney tracked down two hardcore politicos from both ends of the spectrum, promised them total anonymity, and asked them the hard questions that would normally be deflected. What follows is an extract from their full and frank discussion.

So when did you first develop your political views and how?

Leftie: My parents would be my single biggest influence, and they’ve always been an influence, so I’m not entirely sure exactly when my views developed, because it’s kind of hard to separate out being left-wing by default because that’s what your parents are to actually understanding what that means and why you hold their beliefs.

So your parents – what are their backgrounds in politics?

L: My mum was a hippie. Both my parents were in the Values Party, which was one of the parties that went into the Alliance. And now they’re both quite staunch Green voters.

What do you think they did to influence you – was it books they left lying around, or comments they might have made?

L: Dinner table conversations mostly. We still have them whenever I go back, we’ll usually sit around the table for about an hour after every meal talking. And it invariably came back to politics.

Rightie: My parents were both classic centre-left Labour voters, living in a rich suburb that swung to the left. There was a big community feeling, where they’d have these dinner parties with rich friends where everybody was centre-left. I think they were called “trendy lefties” at the time. Champagne socialists.

So when you were at school, did you hang out with people who shared your beliefs?

L: I didn’t really talk politics with most of my friends. But there were a couple of friends in particular who helped me define my beliefs because I just argued with them all the time. There was one friend at high school who was a hawk and centre-right, and I’d have a lot of conversations with him about the war in Iraq and issues like that. He’s now a bona fide gun nut.

There was another girl in my class at school who gave a speech strongly against euthanasia. And I remember just getting fucking angry during this speech because it was just bullshit, and wanting to stand up and argue with her the whole time. And then just going away afterwards and seething, and thinking up all the ways she was wrong and full of shit. Often my beliefs were formed by people pissing me off, followed by me winning hypothetical arguments against them in my head. [laughs]

So where did you go from there, did you read books, or talk to people from the left?

L: Not really ... by the time I came to uni I was still quite politically naive and suggestible. By the end of first year I was convinced I was a Marxist because of some lectures I’d been to and some readings I’d done. By the time I did a full-on Marxist paper in second year I realised just how one-eyed it all was.

For a while I just got fucking pissed off at the NORML people and at the ISO, because they were just so fucking stupid, and making everybody on the left look bad. So I just kind of thought, “if this is the left, I want to distance myself from it.” I became more of a diehard rationalist, and less tolerant, although that’s softened now. I think learning some basic economics was a factor as well, it helped me see through a lot of the hard left’s bullshit. Even though I’ve kind of recanted on a lot of that as well, because I think a lot of economic theory is bullshit too.

Can you see anything happening in your life that would dislodge your left-wing beliefs?

L: I do wonder at all these stories of people getting more conservative in their old age, and I look at that and think “shit, is that going to be me?” And when I look at that I do really hope that it’s not me, because a lot of my identity is tied up with my political beliefs, and if it does reach that situation where I fundamentally change my political beliefs down the line, then I’d be a different person. So it is quite a scary proposition, because it’s like, “fuck, I might turn into this person that nowadays I’d severely dislike.”

I have a real problem with people saying that, “oh, I was left-wing when I was younger but then I grew up and got a bit more experience of the world.” That kind of thing pisses me off because it’s so fucking patronising. And those people who say those kinds of things, a lot of the time they don’t actually get any more life experiences, they just enter into a work environment and stay there for thirty years.

R: I think you’re right about the identity thing, that your political beliefs are a big part of who you are. I think friend groups are important too, if you’ve got friends who are involved in the same causes as you then you have that common ground with them. But if you change it kind of cuts you off from them in quite a strong way.

What about you [Rightie], when did you begin to develop your beliefs?

R: The first time I had any reason whatsoever for supporting National was this column I read by Don Brash about Working For Families and how it was creating bad incentives. I put that column up on my wall, and began to grow quite an admiration for Don Brash. And then when he made the Orewa speech, about a year later, I totally agreed with that as well.

By the time he made that speech, I’d developed a quite strong opposition to what I saw as Maori privilege. I went to an ultra-liberal high school, so there were probably even more special Maori programmes than at other schools.

In third and fourth form we were forced to watch all these really suspect videos about things like Treaty claims. Some of them were just ludicrous. I guess once I was about fifteen I felt like I’d been duped, and that we’d all been indoctrinated in a systematic fashion, and I began to regret all the fawning essays I’d written because I felt like they’d been preying on our young minds. And there were a bunch of programmes in my school as well, where Maori students would get taken away on snowboarding trips, all paid for, because it would “build leadership” or something. So when the Orewa speech happened that really cemented my political beliefs and from that point I was very much a National, right-wing man.

L: I guess my school didn’t have the sort of overt indoctrination that you describe. Our primary school was kind of like, “whatever, we’ll just teach you the same eight Maori words every year and the same stuff about the Treaty every year, and we’ll just assume you’ll have forgotten about it by the time we come around to teaching it again the next year.”

R: In my school the Maori students were almost segregated for the first couple of years, because they had this room called the whanau room, and all the third and fourth formers would just spend all their time there. There were quite a few Maori students who I met later and realised we’d been at the same school at the same time, but never met each other.

So do you think your parents ultimately didn’t have much influence on your political beliefs?

R: No, I don’t think they did in the end. I think for some people there’s definitely an element of rebellion against their parents, so people with really left-wing parents sometimes might be like, “screw you, damn hippies, I’m going to be a right-wing square.” I don’t think that was a big factor for me though.

Do you or other left-wingers secretly yearn to be accepted by the working classes?

L: I don’t know about others, but I personally don’t, at all. And a lot of my friends think the same way – one of my friends says that she’s “down with the working class cause, but not down with the working class. So I think we support that in an abstract sense but we don’t really have many friends who are working class.

R: But do you know the kind of person I’m talking about? I mean, [name redacted], the wealthy Marxist. He probably wishes he wasn’t private school-educated, wishes he was raised in a coal mine and had street cred, and wants to be accepted by the working class, but obviously that will never happen.

L: With [redacted], a lot of it’s probably ego, or a grandiose sense of self worth. He doesn’t regret his background so much as he regrets the fact that he isn’t going to be this great leader of the working class, because he doesn’t have that back story. So all he can be is this ivory tower Marxist who slums it out of some romantic ideological bullshit reason, and will never be a true leader of the cause, which I think is what he really wants to be.

Do you believe that left-wingers are motivated by envy?

R: I think some definitely are, no question. The ones who have a passionate hatred for the rich, certainly.

L: I think the reason most left-wingers hate the “tall poppy syndrome” rhetoric and the “politics of envy” rhetoric is that it’s just accurate enough to stick, but also inaccurate enough to enrage us. So the envy might be there, but I think most people feel it doesn’t actually influence their beliefs. It’s more that once the view has been settled that these people are my ideological opponents, you just kind of throw anything that will stick at them. And it quickly devolves into, “they’re greedy bastards, they’ve got no empathy for anybody, fuck John Key, fuck all the rich people,” and that’s where the appearance of envy
comes up.

R: Maybe, but I do think that envy is a huge motivating factor for humanity. Right-wingers have a lot of envy too, I’m sure.

L: The way I see it is that left-wingers’ thing is more just rooting for the underdog. And once you start rooting for the underdog all the time, most of the time the underdog loses, that’s why he’s the underdog. And so you can end up just getting fucking pissed off all the time, and a lot of the time that means left-wingers can just be horrible people to be around, really annoying and shrill. It’s kind of a weird world in which if you care too much you can easily turn into this sullen misanthropic person.

R: I’m not so sure, I became way more detached and chilled out about politics after I started befriending a wider group of people including more left-wingers, and once you start to humanise some left-wingers and realise they’re not all monsters, you start to be less shrill about politics in general. That could be a white male thing – maybe it’s harder for women if they feel oppressed by patriarchy to let go. Because certainly if things are affecting you personally it’s a lot easier to get riled up about them. Things that affect me personally, I do get way more riled up about.

Do right-wingers genuinely care about the poor?

R: I used to. But then I became far more cynical about it and started believing that the majority of beneficiaries were just abusing the system. But I do think I’m in the minority for right-wingers, because some of them have at least some sympathy even if they also kind of hate beneficiaries, and then there are some that actually passionately believe that flat taxes will lead the poor out, and give them an opportunity to rise to greatness.

L: Do you believe that?

R: I don’t know. I think it’s better for their mentality, and stops them being useless and lazy and being paid hundreds of dollars for being so, which is probably not good for your development as a person. I think people in a right-wing society will grow to become more intelligent and motivated. But I think materially they’d be worse off. But I think some people genuinely do believe that poor people would be better off.

Do you think you would be better off had you been non-white?

R: Ooh, interesting! Yeah ... generally I do. I mean, it’s hard to separate it – would I be the same but with different ancestors, or would different things have happened in my life? But generally, I think, yes – you get free scholarships, you get money, you can join the ethnic industry which exists in every country. Maybe I’m underestimating the amount of racism that people face, but I’m not so sure. What about you?

L: No, I’m very glad I was born white!

R: What if you were born 1/32nd Maori? Would you want that?

L: Yep, for the scholarships. But I’d still be white, though, that’s the point. It’s not a question of having a token amount of Maori blood so that I can claim scholarships, it’s being identifiably white, rather than being identifiably Maori, or Pacific Island, or Asian.


R: I’ve always really hated the idea that because I’m white, male, straight, rich, whatever, it means I can’t comment on anything. And those identity politics type people hate it when it’s turned around against them. Like Helen Clark was always told that she couldn’t comment on motherhood and raising children because she didn’t have any. Do you think she should have shut up and not commented?

L: I don’t think it’s a situation of being unqualified to comment, I just think it’s a case of having to listen.

R: Well, everything I’ve said I could get signed off word for word by someone who ticks all the right boxes. Like Thomas Sowell, the African American conservative economist. Or a woman, I could get it signed off by a right-wing woman.

L: That’s not the point though, because it’s not just getting someone who ticks the boxes to say it for you to insulate yourself from criticism. It’s a question of understanding, and there is always a gap. For instance, I’m not going to know what it’s like to be whistled at by construction workers; or I’m not going to know what it feels like when somebody says ‘that’s so gay,’ and it makes me clench up; or I’m not going to know how it feels when someone says the n-word.

R: But realistically, that feeling could be anywhere on the scale of extremely hurtful for some people to not hurtful at all. To a certain extent I’m sure some people are genuinely affected by this stuff. But there are the ones who just make it their life’s mission to talk about how oppressed they are, and you can’t automatically agree with it just because it’s their experience and not yours. Because getting offended makes people feel morally superior. Being offended puts you in a really powerful position.

L: Not necessarily. It depends who’s being offended. Because I think if a Christian got offended and talked about how offended they were, that Christian isn’t going to be in a powerful position at all, because most people will say, ‘shut up, you easily-offended Christian moron, fuck off.’

R: People want to be offended, though. When Hone Harawira said “white motherfuckers,” it was pretty hard for a white person to get really offended by it. But there were so many people really trying to get offended by it, and really trying to claim that they felt horribly violated as a white person to have these slanderous words spoken. Because being offended gives you the moral high ground.

Do you think it’s a random occurrence that you turned out the way you did politically, and that it could have gone either way?

L: No, I think with my upbringing it was always very likely that I’d turn out left-wing.

R: I find it interesting to think that if I’d been influenced by someone at a different time, I could have gone a different way. I don’t really think that either ideology is “correct” in any real way. What do you think?

L: Well, personally I think that socialism, or the variants of socialism I’m attracted to, draw on a wider range of experiences. I think that libertarianism for instance reflects a narrower outlook and set of interests than the more progressive forms of socialism – the variants that came along when people started to realise that the Soviet Union was actually a bit shit, and started looking for something better.

R: I really tried throughout uni to be open-minded when reading left-wing things, but there’s only so far you can go. Even if you open your mind as much as you possibly can, you can’t really shut out the bias. So I’d always be reading it in a slightly sceptical way, because I just fundamentally wouldn’t agree with some of the things the writers would take for granted, like that patriarchy existed or that capitalism was inherently exploitative.

I think everyone likes their ideology so much and it’s a big part of who they are, so they don’t want to think of the possibility that maybe it’s just a random piece of chance that led them to it. You don’t want to think that maybe if you’d just walked down a different road one day and bumped into some charismatic person, you could have a totally different outlook.