Why I speak to right-wingers

It's not that deep

I reflect the, by now cringe, stereotype of the left-wing woman who dates posh English men. I recently started denying that assertion (look at all those smelly losers I have also dated!!!1!), but some quick head math shows an 85% public school¹ rate in my prolific dating career, so I shut up.

Despite the left-wing credentials I stack on the self-righteousness Jenga tower that is my resume and what I think is a personality high in trait openness, I have a lot of small ‘c’ conservative tendencies. I often write about the place of family, community, religion, the army, and the nation-state (!) in political culture. I am drawn to institutions, even when I actively chip at their shiny exterior and feel none could contain without suffocating me. I am fond of things that are hard to build and that you only miss when you lose them. I puke with disgust at people who claim to be Conservatives in words but, in practice, are obvious followers of Satan. If I weren’t dependent on the charity of the British establishment for the survival of my career, I would take every opportunity when in proximity to Conservative MPs to ask what stops them from being faithful to their wives? from refusing drugs? from going to church? from living within their means? Alas, British people don’t forgive confrontation, and my career would suffer if I indulged my instincts for extrajudicial justice.

Speaking of my career, we are here because I wanted to discuss why I speak to the right. The most obvious example of my fraternity with the right-wingers to people who don’t know me in real life is that I go to right-wing TV channels, GBNews and TalkTV, the British equivalents to Fox News, but it doesn’t stop on the screen nor is it a recent phenomenon. In my personal life, I keep an astonishing number of right-wingers close to me. I don’t just mean nice civilised one Nation Tories, the kind of Republicans that can bring themselves to defend Obama when his birthplace comes into question. The basket of deplorables Hilary Clinton was talking about is in my WhatsApp groups. I have friends who worked for Trump. I give air to people who believe in versions of the Great Replacement theory. Heck, I have friends who watch the TV shows I go on to…unprompted, TO GET THEIR NEWS.

Why? Someone recently tweeted to me and asked why I go on right-wing programmes that get to point to me and say, ‘Look, we love a debate around here; look at this dyed-in-the-wool leftie we invited to speak on our panel’.

The easy answer is that to get broadcasting experience, you need to start somewhere, and as a political commentator, you will only get invited on mainstream channels once you have proven yourself or your expertise. I could wear my day job hat and go to more mainstream channels, but that would mean being politically neutral and giving up building my own political brand. We can’t have that now, can we?

So that’s the cope, the anodyne reason I freely give at parties when bemused acquaintances devoted to respectability politics quiz me about my dodgy side gig. But the truth, and the thing you all came here to read, is that I am the child of a racist, sexist, homophobic, hate-filled woman who turns on the TV and feels visceral fear and disgust at the march of time. That’s not all mom is. She’s also a genius with a heart of gold, who, given the chance, could lead a nation to glory and a species to salvation. She wasn’t given it, so she made me instead.

I would have liked to speak to mom about politics more but it has always been painful. She never got over the fact that I differentiated from her and took risks in my life and career that she would never dare to. I realised that during the only time she visited me in London, seven years after I moved there. I took her for a tour of my workplace, the British Parliament, and to meet my then-boss, a Shadow Cabinet member. She looked deeply uncomfortable, insecure, and scared. Scritched like a cat all the way through, couldn’t get over it. Her daughter, no longer a child and most certainly no longer hers. She could not see how much I wanted to be here, in London, with the Westminster blob, because she was blinded by how much she wanted me to be there, in Greece, with her.

Since mom never wanted to hear about my politics over the dinner table, I sneaked into the TV programmes she would watch and took over the podcasts she’d listen to if she knew how. It’s painful for a child to face her mother’s sinister conclusions about the world. But I have no problem doing that with someone else’s mother, father and whole family tucking into their afternoon tea, logging onto Twitter for their nighly dopamine hit. They can’t get under my skin. I can speak to them, free of the fear that they will manage to bend a conversation about Quantitative Easing into one about ungrateful immigrant children leaving their parents behind.

I also feel strangely comfortable around some flavours of right-wingers, especially the men. I don’t have many posh English women in my friendship roster to speak of, but repressed, well-heeled men? I collect them like a Greek mother collects grudges against her unmarried 30-year-old daughter.

The reasons are not a refined political position. Comrades with itchy paranoias looking for a deserter in the making will be disappointed. Politically, so many of my actions are like a kid enthusiastically singing along to a sexually explicit song, mumbling the lyrics. They don’t fully understand the action they describe, but they love the tune.

I wish I were one of those principled, well-read lefties who can give you references for the policies they support. People ask if I am a Marxist. A what? I don’t know what that means. Never read the guy and I don’t have time to read him now, I am too busy writing cryptic horny poems for strangers on the internet.

I love how the posh/right-wing men I surround myself with indulge me. They are too shy to humiliate me. They let me yap along. I am re-living my childhood, where I get to be the wild child while a stern but kind paternal figure looks over me and gives me the institutional approval we all crave.

I also find them amusing. I am a regular on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s TV show - if you don’t know him, he is a British Conservative politician right out of the 16th century. On the panel this week was another Tory MP who said only posh kids go to Oxbridge. Jacob responded, what, even Cambridge? I startled the cameraman with my howl. I can imagine someone else finding that comment abhorrent, and it is a bit². It is also hilarious. Posh British people have these impossible poshness standards that are invisible to the rest of us. If you are entirely off the poshness race because you know your place - peasant - you can luxuriate in mocking the whole system. It’s a win-win situation; I am entertained, and they remain perched at the top of their imaginary status totem pole.

I am not saying I won’t do my shift leading them to the guillotine when the time comes; I am just saying I will likely hold their hand in their final moments like a reformed Stockholm syndrome victim, ‘Thank you for keeping me distracted through the famine you imposed on my people; left-wing men are too woke to simp hard enough. Now, tell me I am exotic for the last time.

Why am I less hostile to institutions like the church and the army than other lefties? I don’t need to write a policy pamphlet to explain that to you. It’s simple. My grandad was a Greek Orthodox priest, and his brother, my beloved uncle, was an army General. They were both close to the right-wing government of Greece at the height of their career. My uncle was, at some point, the right-hand man of the Conservative Prime Minister. But to me, They were kind, forgiving, and gentle men who died without ever being toppled off the pedestal. They never uttered one word of criticism towards me, even when I did my best to deserve it. On my return from my socialist pilgrimage in the USA, where I campaigned for Bernie Sanders, my uncle, a debonair, impeccably mannered man till his last breath, told me he admired me. My mother cackled like a witch from her kitchen, hardly hiding her jealousy. I got to have my pie and eat it, too. She experienced no such leniency when she was growing up.

I understand that many people have been oppressed and mistreated in the name of the religion they were raised in. My religion is not the Orthodox Church, it is my Grandad. I can only recall being mean to him and him forgiving me on the spot, never the other way around. The worst he ever did was joke about how short my shorts were, like a teenage boy’s underwear, which was 1) true and 2) quite funny in Greek. I have this scene from when I was a kid maybe 7, lashing out for no reason (because my mom was insane?), I was in the kitchen with grandma, her stretching filo sheets for spinach pie, me making dinosaur shapes out of filo dough that would go straight in the bin. He entered the room, and I spit on him, on his priestly gown nonetheless. No clue why. I looked embarrassed, and my grandma froze; without skipping a bit, he filled the void ‘She didn’t mean it, it’s ok’. I went on to get bullied mercilessly in high school, but for me, they didn’t mean it, none of them did. My trolls on Twitter, the comments about my accent on YouTube, the rumours about me through the Westminster grapevine that reach my ears occasionally. Anyone being unexplainably mean to me ever since that day in my grandma’s kitchen. They didn’t mean it. It’s ok.

For a man who claimed to hate cats he sure adopted a lot of stray kittens

Sorry, did you guys come to this post expecting some grand strategy about how the left needs to convince right-wing voters if we are ever to change the world? Lol. Wrong newsletter losers!!

There are principled arguments about why left-wing politicians need to adopt mainstream political language (don’t scare the hoes), write for right-wing publications and go on right-wing media. I am sure my fellow left-wing media grifters sucking on the right-wing Murdoch et al tit say that to themselves to sleep at night. But I dropped out of the respectability race a long time ago. I always go to sleep dreaming of becoming Obama, but still wake up a Trump. I dance for the artless and sing for the deaf, someone has to, and who better.

So, why am I talking to the right? Because, I can’t talk to my mom. So, I am talking to yours.

1. In the UK public school refers to an exclusive list of private ones, rather than state schools.

2. For the non-brits: the joke is that Oxford is posher than Cambridge, obviously both universities are very posh but Oxon grads like to dang on Cantab grads and vice versa. Charming tribalism, if you are a keen observer of the Brits.