One of the blogs I follow is Up All Night by blogger and journalist Sam White. Yesterday he published an interesting piece about being politically homeless which I think is something that many of us can relate to.
It used to be so easy before MMP as it was National or Labour pretty much and we didn’t have to agonise over voting strategically. We also could hold political parties to account for not keeping their political promises as when they won they actually had the power to make changes and didn’t have to manage coalition partners.
Now it seems that people on both sides of the political divide are increasingly finding themselves homeless politically.
Are you politically homeless?
Then breathe a sigh of relief, and be thankful.
[…] You may have exiled yourself from your former camp because you didn’t like the direction it had taken. Or perhaps they exiled you for not keeping up. You may take this as a sign that you are not a tribal person, and pat yourself on the back for your ability to walk away or be willingly cast out.
You’re not one for blind loyalty, you tell yourself. You are an independent thinker. But if you tell yourself these things while declaring that you’re politically homeless, then you’re deluded, because to say that you are homeless indicates a sense of tribal loss. You feel that you should have a political home, and resent not being able to find one. You are a tribalist without a tribe, mistakenly taking the sense of isolation that reveals your tribalism as an indicator of a lack of tribalism.
How true. I am most unhappy that the National party have changed so much. I want to be a member of their tribe and resent that I now have to look elsewhere. I want a truly fiscally conservative party as my political home and I want nothing to do with Globalism.
[…] all you can do is select the group that comes closest to your current views, knowing that none will ever come close enough, and that in fact, even the closest may still be far away.
upallnight.tokyo/2019/08/22/rough-sleeper
If none of the party options reflect a single thing that you believe in, or if all contain so much that you dislike that you can’t stomach any of them, then you can simply choose the one that personally benefits you the most at this moment, or that benefits someone you care about, or that benefits a group or cause that you wish to help.
Or, you can sit this phase out, and come back later. This is likely the best option. You have given it your fullest thought and drawn a blank. Good news! Now go away and do something else. There will be more elections and more events, but there will be nothing new, because it’s all been done before, just dressed up differently.
[…]And so now, you are politically homeless. Really, authentically politically homeless. And you can really, substantially enjoy it. You’re a rough sleeper, far away from the machine-like din, but not unaware of it’s presence, softly audible but incomprehensible in the distant blackness.
And despite its constancy and its mass, the edifice has no pull on you. Being homeless, you have no attachments and remain in motion. If you choose to go with a particular group for now, you are not in any way bound to it, and you can choose again differently later.
You are free from commodification, and acquire flexibility and perspective, allowing you to move around the political landscape as you see fit, or to exit altogether if you’d prefer.
In fact, it becomes clear: you never had a home in the first place, and you never will.