What is an election, really? (Patreon)

This piece has been written by my colleague and dear friend, Tasmin Prichard. It's pretty good. If you like it, I might invite them to write other pieces. If you don't, I still might  because fuck you it's my Patreon.

By Tasmin Prichard

An election is the government’s way of focus-grouping itself. Every three years it asks: how should we run this country? Every three years, we tell ‘em how we think it should run. But where do our beliefs come from?

Let’s start with voting itself. Yes, it’s the only real way one person can influence how the state affects us. No, this isn’t me pressuring you to enrol. We already have increasingly chaotic incarnations of the Orange Dude doing that. But all of politics, all of the noise, drama, spectacle, comes down to voting. It’s the act of describing - and aligning - our collective identity with our ideal society.

That’s because a few months before the election, out of all the party machinery comes a whole bunch of ideas thrown our way: free dental care, tax cuts for mum and dad investors, more school lunches for kids. Some ideas are good, some are shit. They all say: “this is what is important.” Ideas all tightly bound up in finely tuned political messaging. Which ones appeal to us? What sounds good? Which appeal to our sense of identity?

Bad news though. Those ideas don’t matter too much. Because unfortunately for ideas, we’re more attuned to people.

We vote for the person on the TV that appeals to us the most. And not just how they look on camera, but by closely taking in who they are, their background, and what they stand for. Where they stumble or sound a bit meek, and when calm, authoritative, stern, tough, funny, or irreverent. When they seem like someone you could have a drink with. At least some of our politics comes from our gut-biome-litmus-test-vibes-check on who’s most likeable.

More widely it doesn’t usually pay to get into the whole psychoanalytic underbelly of what sort of leader-avatar we prefer - a kind auntie, a stern old man, a cool girlie, a wise elder. But I must say picking between two middle-aged pākehā men named Chris feels like the panopticon, where we’re all being carefully studied by one omnipresent prison guard called the Electoral Commission.

Imagine a farming family from Southland. Long history of two proud blue ticks. That’s the environment. But artsy daughter moves to Wellington from Winton, dyes her hair, meets a cute girl at uni, comes out, and votes Green? Her sister moves to Invercargill to work, meets a handsome man, opens a small business, volunteers for the Sallies, and votes National? That’s politics, baby. That’s identity, culture, and politics all rolled into one.

Similarly, while we often hear stories of young people moving their politics to the left, especially during university, it’s not a one-way road. A centre-left, Labour/Greens voting family might produce a pro-small govt, ACT-voting commerce graduate. Either way, it’s clear that politics begins in the family. We might have a Greens-voting father or a National-voting mother. Then we grow, we learn, we move out. Once we’re 18 and election year rolls around, we make a choice: stick with what we’re told, or rebel? At 18, we are imbued with the rights of an adult. That means our political identity - our vote - suddenly means something. Our ideas about the world are suddenly valuable. Democracy is weird.

But still. What dictates our vibe? Where do our politics come from? The answer is that we actually *do politics* all the time. We do politics by filtering our identity through the world and seeing what sticks. What do we accept? What do we abhor? What do our mates say? Our partners, our parents? All of that filtering lead to choices about our discussions, arguments, friends, enemies - plus our hairstyles, dress sense, hobbies, music taste, and pretty much everything else. It’s a swirling, oily mass of identity like a blue-purple-gold oil stain in the supermarket carpark. That is to say, messy, ugly, beautiful.

So even if you’re not ‘about’ politics, politics is about you. It’s made up of your identity, your environment, and your subsequent choices. Voting is making a statement: this is how I think the world is. This is how I think the world should be. And the process of surveying everyone’s politics on a national scale? That’s what an election is. Asking a country how it thinks it should be. And the answer is based on our individual and shared identities, which are evolving and changing every year - every month, day, even minute. Politics is a crystallisation of our whole life, and casting a vote is a flash of light, reflecting colour.

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