Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Dennis Frank,
you seem to be discounting those who have (like me) been part of the Green movement their whole lives and vote Green in rejection of the left/right accordingly.
No, I'm aware of you, I just don't think your specific position represents anything like a majority in the support of the Green Party.
As you note, we agree this allows our leftist greenies to differentiate themselves from Labour, but do you not see the disenfranchisement it causes to the authentic Greens within the party? Those who self-identify as neither left nor right, I mean. Those who entered politics to represent the entire Green movement on an authentic basis.
The disenfranchisement you feel is actually a consequence of lacking the numbers, even within the Green movement, to actualize power around your "authentic" position, which is, of course, no more authentic than anyone else's. What you entered politics for does not raise the value of your vote.
I get the definite impression that you either don’t believe people like me exist, or you don’t believe the Green Party ought to represent us.
Not at all. I think it represents you well out of proportion to your actual numbers, but I don't have a problem with that. Environmentalism is the origin and soul of the Green movement. But as it's become larger it's also become broader, and more sophisticated. It's not a one-issue party any more.
The Political Compass website located me precisely in the center of the left-libertarian quadrant: the red dot showed up on my certificate printout right in the middle of Bernie Sanders’ face
Ergo, you are left wing.
But values politics making me an archetypal leftist doesn’t affect my choice to reject both left & right political alignment
I get that your position along that axis is not what you consider most important. But I'm yet to see the numbers on how it goes with the Green voters as a whole group that convince me they'd be willing en masse to sacrifice that position along the Left-Right axis (and every issue that make it up) purely for environmentalist concessions. I think they'd object both on moral and practical grounds. Moral because it involves giving up lots of important belief structures. Practically because environmentalism is fundamentally a matter of human self control and regulation, something that is anathema to the political Right.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to linger,
the chain between evidence and causal interpretation is very indirect
It sure is. This kind of analysis is basically a recipe for spurious correlation.
Sampling people and asking them would be the more robust way to find out the answer. Of course it is also expensive.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Dennis Frank,
To get the reality (acknowledge the twin tribes within) you’ll have to ditch that binary frame you’re using.
No, you just have to understand that when you measure a new dimension you don't magically kill the old ones. Just because there is altitude doesn't take away that you also have a latitude, and a longitude. It could be zero, but I put it to you that the average Green position on the Left-Right direction is NOT in the middle, it is NOT more Right wing than Labour. I agree that it is more "Green" than Labour.
Furthermore, I think we are talking at cross purposes, because I am referring to what people who actually vote Green think, not what Green official ideology is. I don't care about that very much, just what they have claimed their policy to be and what they have publicly emphasized.
And Russel Norman’s straw poll at our 2015 conference is evidence that our tribe is actually bigger than the leftist greens.
I'm not much interested in tribal analysis. I don't think it's anywhere near as simple as that. The views of millions of individuals, including the many thousands who voted Green, including myself, are varied, and when you actually take the time to do large scale samples, rather than straw polls at conferences, inquiring into the broad range of beliefs and sample the entire voting population, it becomes actually very hard to distinguish the clusters that people think exist. You want to simplify it down to one or two crucial issues and make it all about that.
I don't really know where you're going with this "unethical" and "undemocratic" line. Did you get your vote struck off in one of the meetings or something? People disagreeing with you is exactly how democracy works, and there's nothing unethical about that.
If you're right, it should be fairly readily apparent in Green polling of their own membership and support. I suggest that what is apparent is the opposite, which is why no one even wants to bother with the subgroup who are close enough to National to consider a deal. The party would fragment, and could be completely destroyed. That might happen anyway, if it turns out this group is large enough to achieve that. But I would not bank on it.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Dennis Frank,
That’s why we became neither left nor right.
I can't speak for the party or it's members, or you, or your motivations or political analysis. But I can speak to the supporters, being one, and having seen analysis of their views, and I assure you, they are of the Left. I voted for the Greens in a large part because they are of the Left. In answer to your question of whether every former Labour voter abandoned the Greens already for Ardern, the answer is a clear no in my case, although if the Greens seek to jettison my take on their Leftness, I will certainly jettison my support for them in future.
This is not some unwelcome hitching of my baggage onto the Greens, it is a response to their stated policy and my own view that environmentalism is deeply and fundamentally at odds with the free market views of our current political right. I don't actually place environmentalism that high in how I prioritize political agendas, but it is so strongly correlated with other aspects of social justice and sensible planning for the future that it makes no odds for me. If the Greens revert to being a party that places cleaning rivers ahead of child poverty and homelessness and gets in bed with National, I will dump them immediately. It was their unambiguous statements over a long period of time to the effect that these core values matter to them that places my alignment near them.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Dennis Frank,
You don’t believe that Jacinda already recaptured all the ex-Labour voters who had drifted into the Green camp? How else do you explain the 10% drop??
You're the one telling the story. Keep talking up the blue greens. Eventually that massive sector of the Green support who voted for them so we could get the National Party again will surely rear its head.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Given that the Green movement has been making way more progress globally via blue-green tech than red-green talk
Oh well I guess they don't need to red-green votes then, and can stick to the blue-green ones they already have.
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Hard News: Media Take: The selling of…, in reply to Sacha,
How do we make the editors and producers who let such lies into print or on-screen accountable?
Time will take them from us, I think. It won't be long before everyone with fond memories of FPP is at least gone from any kind of political influence.
FFS, how can a senior journalist not grasp the basic concept of majority.
She grasps it. But when you're out of material and have to get to print, you rerun old stories. It works for a huge part of the readership who is feeling left out because essentially they voted National and haven't grasped that there's a good chance that more than half of the country has had enough of that and National swallowed up all the other options. Basically, they don't have the numbers, but they feel like they should. Like every loser of every close election ever thought.
I well remember the feeling, from some time around 2007. I could tell that Labour was over, and that we faced 6-9 years at least of National. It sucked because I personally found it hard to believe so many people thought that National was a goer. However, the more National voters I met, many of whom were old friends swinging to National, the clearer it was to me that in a representative democracy, eventually people tire of every leadership choice. If your life isn't peaches, who else can be held accountable but the most powerful people for the last decade? And for many it wasn't peaches. And now, it's still not peaches, and back it swings.
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Hard News: Media Take: The selling of…, in reply to Sacha,
You sure it wasn’t an indication of *who* they trust, more broadly?
No, I'm not sure. Demographic info was in the survey, but I've never had the time to look more closely. Multiple factors will contribute to distrusting internet banking, but I'd be willing to bet that age would be very strongly correlated, and it is a completely unambiguous measure as well. There's very little nuance the question of how old you are.
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I also think that Labour is likely to be aware of this. They're big enough that they get strong statistical analysis done. The question of the coalition is not how Labour can get along with NZF (that's been done before, for starters), it's how they can broker a relationship between NZF and the Greens. Which means they sit in the middle, really, and they are the ones holding the cards. At the end of the day, they are going to be the Lion's share of the government, they will have the PM, and it is on them to show how this fragmentation on the Left is not really over the issues that mainly concern their voters as much as their voters will to oppose the much more stark contrast with the option of another National government.
My gut feeling is that Peters will want to make his last days as politician in NZ something to be proud of, a final vindication of the reason he formed his party in the first place, to oppose neoliberalism and all it's repulsive ilk, rather than spending 3 years as a junior partner to more of it.
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On the viability of a NZF/Labour/Green govt, I keep coming back to some research I did a few years back on the NZES, which was a properly conducted very large scale survey that tied actual votes to a large range of opinions. My project was to remove from the questions anything that was either demographic, or an outright statement of political support for a party or political alignment. That reduced it to about 80 questions that were about a range of political opinions, divorced from statements of affiliation or identity. So they were mostly questions about what kind of general policy the person preferred. That was my intention.
I then attempted to model how people voted, based only on these questions, and also to simply find the clustering and principal axes of the respondents.
What I found was that NZF voters were very hard to distinguish from Labour voters. The most dividing question was not (as I’d predicted beforehand) something to do with immigration or opinions on gays. It was whether the person trusted internet banking. This was pretty clearly a proxy question to a demographic distinction (probably age).
Green voters were much more readily identified. The environment was always going to be their largest concern.
Distinguishing all of them from National and ACT voters was easy. They pretty much put taxation as their highest concern. There was not enough data to make any kind of robust statements about Maori Party or UF voters.
The PCA clearly put every party except National and ACT on the Left. This is a “mathematical Left” rather than making any ideological assumptions. It simply finds what direction most divided the group (in the high dimensional space of all the questions) and splits them in half along that. The outcome is partially a result of National being such a large group, that one side of the spectrum had to be dominated by them. But the closer proximity of all the other parties to each other was unmistakeable. National and ACT were in a class of their own, when it comes to how their voters thought. NZF voters, as I mentioned above, just look like older Labour voters.
Of course the fragmentation of the Left makes it hard for people to see just how close they are to each other. We are fine tuned to homing in on the one or two issues that distinguish us, in order to recognize our tribes and be able to verbally war with our enemies. But when the aggregation of views on matters of how the country should be governed is taken in a broad and algorithmic way, they’re clearly much closer together than they care to admit.
ETA: And obviously, now that our archaic method of declaring tribal allegiance in our votes is behind us, the more serious matter of making a government that works means that the similarities are at least as important as the differences, and Red/Black/Green coalition is (IMHO) much more about the differences between NZF and Greens than NZF and Labour. So the Shaw olive branch to Peters is (IMHO) the lynchpin of this. A Blue/Green coalition is (IMHO) a very remote thing, barely worth considering.