A 'Lefty' with reservations about the Left: inequality, immigration, and social justice politics

Who would you vote for today and why?

I would likely give my party vote to the Greens. Both as a tribal and personal habit, I’m a ‘Lefty’. Despite reservations, I still hold to what I see as the foundational values of the Left: a concern for social equity which seeks to address inequalities in society.

What are your reservations with the Left?

Frankly, I don’t feel the Left in New Zealand fulfils that social equity function. I found it depressing that despite the Labour Party’s historic majority—and its unprecedent ability to pass legislation—it still refused to enact a capital gains tax. I’m not just picking on a specific policy issue. This is representative of the problems I see in New Zealand’s ‘lefty’ politics today. New Zealand’s biggest scandal in politics now is the vast inequality between a small, older generation who control the money, property, culture, and politics of the country to the exclusion of the young and poor. This older generation pass on their property and money to their kids, so we end up with something almost akin to a landed gentry. Increasingly, it seems impossible for the poor or even middle-class to get a stake in the country; that privilege is reserved for a small property-owing class and those who stand to inherit. Labour’s refusal to adopt capital gains is not just an issue of policy and revenue gathering; it’s symbolic of an unwillingness to address this vast inequality.

Here's a second problem with the Left: social justice politics is often a way of avoiding the difficult work of ensuring society is prospering economically while also addressing these huge inequalities. One thinks of the former Prime Minister apologising to the Pacific community for the Dawn Raids. It’s not that the Dawn Raid weren’t a terrible thing or that an apology shouldn’t be issued. But it’s not enough to issue heart-felt apologies and tell us all to be kind. The fact is people travel to New Zealand to study third-world respiratory diseases common in South Auckland; because the houses are low-quality, and many people cannot earn enough money to improve their lives. What these communities need from Government are policies to address those issues. I see their inability to address the root problem as a fundamental failure of the Left. Moreover, while the Left (and especially the Greens) talks about these issues, it increasingly privileges optics over sound policies. This looks like courting outrage and divisiveness and pointing a finger at the Right for being evil. So on the one hand, the Left are too invested in the status quo; on the other, they are verbally engaged in extremely divisive, optics-based politics. And I don’t think we have a good enough analysis of what’s gone wrong with the Left here. The Right tend to see this big Gramscian conspiracy with social justice post-modern wokes infiltrating politics and business. That seems rubbish to me. But beyond that, I don’t really know what’s going on.

Given these reservations, do you ever feel tempted to move right?

I cannot see myself voting Right because they offer even less in fixing these problems. While there are potential right-wing solutions, for example liberalising planning laws so we can build more houses, the Right are beholden to their property-owning, suburban voter-base who are profoundly opposed to new apartments blocking their view of Mount Eden. Something else the Right could offer is a recognition of difficult policy trade-offs: almost everyone on the Right acknowledges climate change is a very bad thing, for instance, but people also die of shrinking economies and getting poorer. But again, I don’t see this nuance coming through on the Right. Instead, I see lots of snark at the rhetorical level; and then too much complacency at the policy level. This means I don’t find myself with any easy political home. There are two options which might relieve this anxiety. One is to fall into the trap of social justice politics, spending lot of time posting angry tweets and sick burns. The other option, its opposite, is to become cynical of that kind of left-wing politics, give up on what leftist principles I’d previously agreed with, and engage in reactionary politics—taking pleasure in exposing the Left’s worst rhetorical excesses. Both options help let off steam. But in neither is that kind of bloodletting intellectually or socially healthy. So for me the temptation to go Right exists only in the negative: an opportunity to more freely fight back against the most specious ideas from the contemporary Left that I have been alluding to.

What are your (most realistic) hopes for New Zealand politics?

Until recently, my most realistic hope was that New Zealand, and especially Auckland, was increasingly becoming a big, multicultural society with lots of young immigrants coming in wanting to make a new life in New Zealand. This brings obvious social benefits to society: good food, diverse communities, and more vibrant societies as people start new small businesses and so on. But it also brings a freshness to the political discourse: a more grounded emphasis on what we need to do to make our country and cities more liveable, more affordable, where people can get on and make a life for themselves. That’s what makes a country and city work, far more than flighty discussions about social structures. Without immigrants staking a claim in our country, we are left with a more ossified society: poor people who remain poor and a small property-owning class who pass on their wealth to their kids. And our politics becomes more cynical. This was partly why the Government’s Covid response disturbed me. A Left-wing party wanted to keep immigration low for fear of infection. It’s interesting, there is research suggesting links between the fears of disease, of foreigners, and of new ideas. I think this works intuitively. There is the sense that ideas are also infectious and exposure dangerous; therefore we need strict intellectual borders as much as social, geographic borders. But just as our society ossifies without immigration, so does our political discourse without a willingness to expose ourselves to new ideas.

What do you think about the state of our politics and what can we do about it?

I would say a few things here. One huge problem is that the Left have decided that people on the Right, roughly half the population, are basically evil; or at least so utterly clouded and confused as to be worthy only of contempt. (Though they might carve out exceptions: it’s ok to be conservative if you’re from this or that culture or religion, for instance.) This means political opponents become enemies to be vanquished, bulwarks to be overthrown in the long march towards justice. We see this with Posie Parker’s visit to New Zealand. Now what she was doing was incredibly cynical, an intended provocation. But progressive campaigners wanted to shut down her speech under the guise of saying she’s ‘basically a Nazi who doesn’t want us to exist’. Well, if you take that language seriously—and what else do we have to go off?—then their extreme reaction makes sense. Who wouldn’t punch a Nazi, and do everything in their power to stop them? At least in New Zealand, the Right doesn’t make this same mistake as the Left. They certainly do in other countries, but I don’t see the same impulse towards popularism here: look at Judith Collin’s brief, half-hearted and failed attempt in this direction. It seems the Right don’t think lefties are evil; only wrong, bleeding hearts, or perhaps stupid. But it’s not this same quasi-spiritual battle going on, which means they can get on with the work of pursuing their policies.

Another problem is that a lot of our media engagement has become siloed, which makes it easier to see different views as infections rather than just contrary perspectives to think through seriously. And social media becomes a training ground for divisive, snarky rhetoric. Sometimes people try to push back on this argument, saying that this culture war is only really happening online and in media; it’s not how people actually behave in real-life. But that won’t do, since increasingly we spend much of our lives online. That’s our context far more than where we happen to live geographically. Our primary context now spans the entire online world, yet actually within highly constrained online siloes. It is at once immeasurably vast, while also incredibly parochial.

I’m not sure what we can do about all this … maybe that’s why I’m lefty, I prefer diagnosing problems and complaining instead of coming up with solutions! But seriously, one thing we can do is to try to detribalise, and to focus more on our local geographic community instead of fighting over the big ideas online. But more foundationally, we need a change of perception. People, like works of art, are irreducible and irreducibly complex. The idea that a work of art is just some representation of this or that didactic theory is the worst possible way to see a painting or a piece of literature. It’s the same with people. The more we see someone as ‘simply x, y, z political view or demographic trend or identity marker’, the less we can engage with them on any level other than that of metaphor. Yet people cannot simply be scaled up to whatever their most obvious ‘group types’ might be. This change of perception is more a matter of individual virtue than a programmatic solution. Though one important corollary is the need for a tacit agreement between politicians not to speak in these reductionist terms and to avoid the bear-pit fighting and fever-pitch tone we see elsewhere. For now, it seems that voters don’t want our politicians to engage in that kind of rhetoric, and I hope it stays that way.