Why do people vote the way they do? It is the question that political candidates and manipulators ask themselves in the shadow of their electoral campaigns. I will be voting today in a general election for the first time in over four decades. I hadn’t been able to do it before because I lived in countries where I didn’t have the right to vote and dedicated myself, as a journalist, to interpreting, or guessing, the motivations of others.
I will do an exercise that perhaps all of us who will vote here in Spain, and those who vote everywhere always, should do: I will try to explain to myself the reason for my political preferences.
The short version would be that they are based on my religion, randomness. But staying here would be superficial. It would be exaggerating the importance of rationality and denying the most decisive impact that the circumstances of my life have had.
First there are the two people who one day, by absolute causality, met and soon after brought me into the world. My mother was Spanish and pro-Franco. As a child, during the Civil War, that was the side she found herself on, and on which she remained without dwelling on it much. I didn’t follow the news in the media, unlike my Scottish father, who read about politics every day and voted unfailingly for the centre-left Labor Party.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about a dating app for far-right people. The premise of the business is that sharing political ideas improves the chances of a happy couple. My parents were the exception to the rule. They loved each other madly always.
I loved them both madly, but the one who influenced me most politically was my father, and his main political influences were that he came from a working-class family in Glasgow and that he had a low opinion of the conservative Winston Churchill.
The first and only time I voted in a general election was when I was at university. I followed my father’s example and voted for Labour, against Margaret Thatcher. It could have changed. As Churchill said, “If you’re young and don’t vote left, you don’t have a heart, and if you’re old and don’t vote conservative, you don’t have a brain.” But I haven’t changed.
My red heart hardened after leaving university and going to fall in Argentina of the military, the butchers Videla, Galtieri, Massera and company. It is likely that my political course would have been different if, instead of starting adult life in Buenos Aires, I had done so in the Soviet Union. But it wasn’t what touched me.
The question was whether I would stay to the center left of my father or whether I would become radicalized. Two things immunized me against this possibility. First, a couple of trips I made to Cuba during the time of Fidel Castro. It is true that they distributed the misery with admirable equity, but the mental asphyxiation that the regime imposed reminded me too much of the Argentine dictatorship and offended the value I gave as a journalist to freedom of expression.
Second, I observed the evolution of Sandinism in Nicaragua, where I also lived, from a leftist idealism that seduced me into another crushing dictatorship. That’s why, when Chavismo took power in Venezuela, I reacted with suspicion. That is why, when the left-wing party Podemos emerged here in Spain a decade ago and I saw that Chavismo was its source of inspiration and money, I was not able to share the enthusiasm it awakened among some of my closest friends.
I wouldn’t vote for Podemos, but, unlike some other kind of friends I have, I don’t hate them. I think they have good intentions. I would not go so far as to vote for the far-right party Vox, whose emergence in the Spanish political landscape is largely due to the initial success of Podemos. Action, reaction: in politics as in science. The truth is that, after a pile of years, and despite knowing that Churchill would have called me crazy, I will never vote for the right, neither the more moderate Spanish People’s Party, nor the British Tories.
My immobility is due in the first place, I insist, to the father who touched me and to the kind of political experiences I have had to live. But, for a matter of dignity perhaps, what I intend to do in adulthood is to impose a patina of free reasoning on my involuntary tribal choice. Here it goes.
My religion, the one I chose and no one imposed on me, is chance. And this is what prevents me from voting for the right, deniers by definition – heretics – of chance. It is by chance, as I think I have explained, that I look at the world from the left. And it is by chance that in the material realm I am one of the lucky ones on earth. I don’t earn more money than someone else because I deserved it and someone else doesn’t earn more money than me because they deserved it. Not in the first place. In the first place, far from the second place, one is poor or one is rich thanks to where and when and under what circumstances and with what genes one was born.
That’s why I hate the ruthless capitalism of the United States, that’s why I don’t accept the implicit premise of the right – that of Thatcher, for example – which says that those who work hard will succeed and those who don’t work hard should hang on and not wait for others to save their lives. That’s why I’m in favor of the State intervening to help those who were neglected by luck, even if it costs me more in taxes. According to my religion, generosity is the most important value there is, and in my opinion, the left is more generous than the right.
I put the limit on the utopian left, the one that is convinced that it is completely right, the one that does not understand that killing the hen that lays the golden eggs means sinking everyone into poverty. I will never vote for the right, but neither for those whose primary motivation is hatred of capital. It’s not very romantic, but I think, as my mother used to say without applying it, that in the middle ground there is virtue. In politics, the middle ground is, according to my credo, social democracy.
That said, maybe what I’m doing with this philosophical blah-blah-blah is selecting the arguments, like almost everyone else, to justify my joining the team that chance has chosen for me. Total, I could have followed my mother instead of my father and be a Vox voter today. Who will I vote for? He who does not know has not paid attention.
