National keeps the door open to social conservatives: the love of hearth and home, worldviews, and free speech

Who would you vote for today?

I would probably vote for the National Party and that is because I see them as a moderately serviceable socially conservative party. I say ‘moderately’ because Christopher Luxon strikes me as a little bit of a squish on certain issues; he tends to kowtow a bit too much to certain pressure groups within the culture, and I find that deeply frustrating. But at the same time, the National Party at least keeps the door open to those of us who have a socially conservative bent. That’s important especially because there are fairly few of us in this country.

I wouldn’t vote for the New Conservatives, because what they call social conservativism I see as populism. I’m not a fan of populism, the idea that what you need is a popular leader to embody the supposed ‘will of the people’. Social conservativism is a comprehensive worldview. It is a worldview which values life, in the biological sense, as intrinsically valuable for its own sake; and it values institutions such as church, family and marriage. It places a strong emphasis on what Roger Scruton calls oikophilia, the love of hearth and home; and therefore on the importance of local (geographically local) commitments. Māori put it well when they talk about tangata whenua, and when they identify so closely with place. When you follow this all through you end up with something that gets called ‘national conservativism’, which gets a bad rap but I don’t see why it should.

What are the key issues that incline you to voting National?

It’s hard, because I don’t actually have the option of voting for a platform that seeks to realise my pro-life views, or my views on marriage or the local community. So that’s why I talked about ‘holding the door open’, hoping that sometime in the future we will be able to make more progress on some of these issues. But it’s also about the economic issues as well. I’m not a big fan of 39% tax rates; I’m in favour of mostly a free market. This tends to get misunderstood as being in favour of big business, which I’m not. Because ‘big business’ tends to end up turning into ‘big Government’. I mean that technically. It’s not just that big business gets into bed with big Government; but that big businesses increasingly start to wield de facto public power. The public-private distinction breaks down here. So by free trade, I’m talking about competition between entities who are below a certain critical mass, ensuring that no one of them ends up exercising what is effectively public power.

How do you perceive parties and voters on the Left?

There are several reasons why people might vote left. My boss votes Green, and I find this paradoxical given how commercially savvy he is. For him, it’s borne of a genuine commitment to environmental sustainability—ensuring a world that future generations can enjoy—and that’s very much a value I resonate with. In fact, National conservativism is very hospitable to an environmentally-friendly ethic, precisely because it encourages love of home and one’s local environment: one lives from, rather than just on, the land. So many people who vote Green are genuinely motivated by love of their own environment.

But for many others there is something else going on. There is this worldview motivating the Left which says that things don’t have any intrinsic structure to them — things like marriage, or gender, or social institutions. There are no ‘givens’ about the world, or about us. And so social expectations about these things become a raw imposition of power. But you don’t have to accept that. What if the social expectations match onto how the world is in itself? That’s what I believe. And so there are rival worldviews here, rival conception of the world, of humans, and of social structures.

If there is one thing you would want those people on the Left to understand, what is it?

Too often in political discourse we try to have discussions about politics and ethics in a metaphysical vacuum. But we can only really begin to have a productive discussion, say on politics around transgender issues, after we’ve first determined who and what we are as human beings. I would want people on the Left to acknowledge the metaphysical assumptions they make about the world and about the nature of humanity, which are by no means obvious. Let me give you an example. My personal theological view is that women cannot be ordained in the church. It’s not a popular position, and many people will say that’s just me imposing my own personal view on others; we are back to the raw ‘will to power’. But no: I have a different conception of what men and women are. Maybe they are aware I have this different worldview, which they think is itself sexist. But that’s only because they are assuming their own worldview. It’s a circular argument: my view is only sexist if you first assume my worldview is false. I agree that if my worldview is false than it’s fundamentally wrong and sexist to say women can’t be ordained, because is nothing ‘given’ about the world which would make that ethical stance coherent. But I do think there are these ‘givens’, and my view on the ordination issue is my good faith attempt to say what ‘falls out’ of prior categories that we find in the world.

What are your main fears about how things will unfold in New Zealand politics?

Take the recent events around Posie Parker. Make what you will of her, that’s not my point. But look at how she was treated. The reaction of the media was to associate her with the far right simply because some members of a far-right nationalist group, Action Zealandia, turned up to listen to her. Moreover, she faced intimidation and an actual assault (someone through a can of tomatoes at her) and the police did nothing to protect her from speaking her mind. My worry is people with my views will be increasingly shouted down, threatened with assault, have their jobs threatened, and so on, simply because we happen to have a rival conception of the world.

What about your main hopes?

Being realistic, my hope is that cancel culture would eventually fade away and people would realise the futility of it. That’s not just for my benefit; it’s not good for anyone. Because the result of cancel culture is the far right, the fascists and Nazis. And I certainly don’t want that. But people don’t stop thinking things. Cancel culture makes it harder for them to moderate or refine their views and some end up going far right.

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

Our political discourse is toxic at the moment, because I don’t think people are genuinely interested in having the kind of discussion we are having right now. Plus a lot of people don’t have the patience to do the heavy thinking. It’s almost like we need some kind of big conflict or conflagration before we realise the futility of what’s going on. I’m not saying things are going to turn into riots in the street (it’s an outside possibility, and I really pray that doesn’t happen), but things are trending in a negative direction and I don’t know what we can do about it. The internet is another big problem because it allows us to exist entirely in our own worlds, with people like us. Yet we are unable to connect with our actual neighbours, because our understandings of the world are so different. Perhaps one thing we can do is to try root ourselves more in our geographic location, to reignite that love of hearth and home.