The West is proud of its egalitarian heritage. We derive a sense of moral superiority from being a culture in which even the lowest classes can, through hard work, determination and applied will, reach the highest positions. The example of Abraham Lincoln, born into poverty in a frontier log cabin, is archetypal. But class relations in Clown World are very different to those in the 19th century.
In Clown World, we’ve effectively gone back to feudal times.
It’s so hard to buy a house today that, if you aren’t born into money, you will need to be in the top segment of income earners to do it. In both America and Britain, the house price to income ratio is at highs not seen since the aftermath of World War II. In the case of Britain, things are so extreme that you’d have to go back to the Victorian Era to find a time when it was harder for the average person to own their home.
This has led to large proportions of entire generations becoming resigned to paying rent in perpetuity. Some have even labelled the lower classes Generation Rent. Class relations in Clown World are marked by the great distance between the landowning class and the renting class. Many landowners in Clown World make more profit from capital gains on property than they could working for a wage.
This state of class separation is maintained by a concerted effort on the part of the Establishment to destroy class consciousness, the only thing that could really threaten it. The mainstream media pushes any and all alternatives to class consciousness: race consciousness, gender consciousness, age cohort consciousness, any possible corporate brand consciousness. Anything but class consciousness.
These efforts keep class relations much less antagonistic than would otherwise be the case. There are no workers’ marches in Clown World, because the working class is divided along multiple lines of fracture. These lines of fracture prevent the solidarity that would be necessary for collective action.
These divisions are maintained by the control that the ruling class has over the apparatus of propaganda. This control allows them to set the agenda in every Western country, and this agenda is inevitably fighting racism, fighting sexism, fighting ageism – and never fighting classism.
Class relations in Clown World, then, are characterised by the relentless efforts of the ruling class to keep the lower classes divided and conquered. The masses are bedazzled by the 24/7 circus of flickering images coming through the television. They are demoralised by the relentless bombardment of bigotry accusations. They are disorientated by the contradictions coming from the government.
The net result of these efforts to keep poor people down is greater inequality, and less social mobility, than ever.
Inequality is now at historic levels. The American Gini Index sits at 41.4, meaning that America is even less equal than kleptocracies like Haiti, Iran and Turkmenistan. Even China and Russia – bywords in some circles for autocratic shitholes – have lower Gini Indexes than America.
It’s similar with homeownership. The homeownership rates in supposed poverty-stricken dumps like India and Mexico is higher than in supposed lands of opportunity like America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet the Western mainstream media bleats incessantly about how wonderful everything is and how we’ve never had it so good.
In Clown World, wealth equals the ability to suck productivity out of other people by controlling their labour. The commodification of some people means fat profits for others. The poorer a population is, the more readily they can be extorted out of rents. The class system in Clown World, then, is much like a food chain: energy is passed upwards.
Inequality has reached such levels that a person can be significantly wealthier than average and still be a long way from the upper economic strata. The result of this is a widespread absence of sympathy for those in the lower strata. They are so far below that they might as well be animals. In Clown World, your opinion only matters if you’re wealthy enough to buy media time.
The 2020 American Presidential Election was fought between the billionaire Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a man who had already spent 47 years in the upper levels of American governance. The previous election was fought between Trump and Hillary Clinton, who had also spent decades in the upper levels of American governance. The one before that involved Mitt Romney, whose net worth was $250 million, and Barack Obama, the descendant of slave owners.
An Abraham Lincoln is unthinkable today. Someone born into poverty in today’s America is born so far behind that even becoming a homeowner would be a herculean effort. That they might become President is just laughable. Today, the ownership class has a complete lock on positions of power.
Naturally, a situation like this is ripe for revolution.
Democracy is about the easy satisfaction of desires. When those desires can no longer easily be satisfied, dissatisfaction quickly turns into a will to cause chaos. The widespread rioting of 2020 is a foretaste of the inevitable suffering of the next decade. As it becomes harder and harder to meet desires for decent housing and decent pay, people’s willingness to riot will increase.
The real risk of Clown World is that class relations become so bad that a majority of people want to overthrow the system. That could lead to them putting all their energies in behind a tyrannical demagogue. A leader who promised to get revenge on those hoarding property could summon a hurricane of rage behind them.
For class relations to improve, the masses have to have hope again. This doesn’t mean hope of becoming multibillionaires, just hope of meaningfully improving the station into which they were born. It means that they suffer less drudgery and poverty as they get older, and not more. If economic forces or policies push the masses away from hope, they push them into the clutches of fear and hate.
*
This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
All kinds of relations are bad in Clown World, but generational relations are at their lowest point ever. Instead of the difficulty that marked generational relations in the past, today there is hate. This hate is based on the fact that one generation in particular – the Baby Boomers – are chiefly responsible for Clown World and for its perpetuation.
The social contract, ever since the start of human civilisation, was that each generation prizes and nurtures its young so that, when those young are adults, they can take care of the elderly. This contract worked successfully for hundreds of generations. Each cohort of elderly people, upon observing their children, could take pride at the quality of life they left for those following.
The Boomers were the first generation to break this contract. Thanks to their unprecedented levels of godlessness, the Boomers decided that they had to indulge every possible desire during this life. And so they spent up large, whether by cash or on credit. Even their descendants’ credit was spent.
Instead of acting to preserve the wealth they inherited, so that their offspring could enjoy it, the Boomers squandered it on material possessions and crude pleasures. They became the first generation in history to leave less wealth to their descendants than they inherited from their predecessors. This is the main reason why generational relations are so bad in Clown World today.
In Normal World, elderly people put aside wealth they don’t need so that their children and grandchildren can escape poverty. In Clown World, Boomers vote themselves luxurious pensions that their children and grandchildren have to labour to pay for. Generational relations in Clown World are analogous to a war that the Boomers won 20 years ago. Since then, they have been enforcing their terms.
Boomers are happy to cut funding to any sector of society if it means more for them. Young people who, because of growing up in Clown World, have developed a mental illness that prevents them from working, are given less to live off than Boomers who already own their own homes. Other young people, struggling to start families, are given less assistance than Boomers give to refugees.
The result: in Clown World, generational relations are marked by hate and accusations of neglect and ingratitude.
The archetypal Boomer invention is the reverse mortgage. Thanks to the invention of this financial device, the descendants of many Boomers will inherit next to nothing. The bank gets the property, and the Boomers spend the rest. Like the grandmother in Dostoevsky’s Gambler, they just piss the money up the wall and let their kids go begging.
Nowhere is this more obvious than with national debts. The Boomers started getting their fingers on the national pursestrings around the turn of the century. At this time, the American national debt was less than $6 trillion. After two decades of Boomer stewardship, the American national debt is now over $26 trillion. The Boomers just ticked up luxury on the national credit card and left it for the younger generations to pay off.
Boomer mismanagement of the economy has led to Millennials having much less wealth than the generations before them. The average Boomer in 1989 had four times as much wealth as people of the same age today. By 2020, most of them have inherited from their WWII-era parents and are living it large. They don’t care if any of this largesse is left for the coming generations.
This has led to the Boomers becoming known as the Parasite Generation. They have purposefully set out to take as much from the following generations as they possibly could, and to give back as little as they possibly could.
The younger generations resent this immensely, but are so far too timid to do anything about it. Few speak of revolution, at least not seriously. The plan seems to be to wait 20-25 years for the Boomers to die off en masse. By then, hopefully, normal relations will restore themselves between Generation X, the Millennials and following generations.
The Boomers seem to have become as selfish as they are for two major reasons.
The first reason is because they, themselves, are heavily damaged. The Boomers were the first generation whose parents and grandparents were both World War veterans. This means that they were the first to be raised entirely by severely traumatised people who, quite naturally on account of the suffering they endured, put themselves first.
The prewar generations were too busy dealing with the psychological damage caused by the World Wars to raise the Boomers properly. The Boomers were, consequently, emotionally neglected. Most of them internalised this example and decided it was natural. So they neglected their own children in turn.
The second reason is spiritual. The Baby Boomers are a cohort of spiritually undeveloped beings. Very few believe in God; very few care about the possibility of incarnating in a place of torment after the death of one’s body in this world. The vast majority of them believe this world is all there is, so gimme gimme gimme now now now.
This widespread spiritual ignorance has convinced the Boomer that there is no punishment for misdeeds in this life. The Earth is a free-for-all, where one is permitted to indulge any desire one wishes at anyone else’s expense, and when the physical body dies the moral ledger is wiped clean. So selling the future of the younger generations, for the sake of comfort now, is not morally unconscionable for those born before 1964.
That generational relations are terrible can, given all this, be predicted.
When the Boomers start dying off, it will be a great relief to the younger generations. Quality relations between young and old will return when Clown World ends, and this is extremely unlikely while the Boomers still call the shots. Barring sudden support for a Day of the Pillow-style move, it’s probably at least 20-25 years away.
*
This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
The mass media has been a part of our lives for over a century now, even longer if one considers newspaper and wireless radio. And the whole time, it’s made us more and more detached from reality. The grotesque separation from reality that characterises Clown World wouldn’t be possible without the input of the mass media.
In normal world, the mass media serves to inform. A person doesn’t have the time to research all day, so they buy a newspaper to keep them accurately informed about the issues of the moment. They can then have meaningful conversations with other people who have been likewise illumined.
In Clown World, mass media serves to regiment public opinion in favour of the globalists who own it.
The main benefit to the globalists of controlling the mass media is that they can normalise the vacuous, soulless, rootless consumerist lifestyle that generates them the most profits. It’s no accident that watching television or Hollywood films puts people in the mood to consume – they were designed to have that effect.
Globalists also use their control of the media to manufacture consent for open borders.
An image of a drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach was beamed into the heads of every Clown World resident in 2015. The implication was that anyone who believes in borders is a child killer. After making people too afraid to speak up in favour of their national interests, the globalists then flooded the West with Third World immigrants, further destroying wages and pumping up house prices.
Consent for open borders is also manufactured by the mass media refusing to pay due attention to crimes committed against Westerners by immigrants. Coulter’s Law states that, in the case of mass shootings, the longer the mass media takes to tell us the race of the shooter the less likely they are to be white. The general rule is that crimes committed by whites are pushed front and centre; crimes committed by non-whites are hushed up.
None of this would be a problem if people were less gullible. If people were willing to think for themselves and to question authority, the mass media would be much less dangerous. In the depths of Clown World, however, most people believe this media to be made up of objective journalists who are employed to tell the truth.
This perception is maintained by further brainwashing. Anyone who suggests that the mainstream media cannot be trusted is written off as a “conspiracy theorist”, their concern dismissed as a possible sign of paranoid schizophrenia or similar. Distrusting the mainstream media is considered a moral defect, revealing a particularly malicious kind of antisocial intent.
In Clown World logic, there’s a small step between questioning the television and shooting up your school.
In reality, the mass media is owned lock, stock and barrel by international banking and finance interests, and they hire people to produce globalist propaganda. There no objectivity in it, any more than in the media publications of North Korea. There is truth in it, but it’s merely seasoning. The propaganda is the main fare.
That is why nationalists like Donald Trump get targeted so heavily. The mass media serves as a 24/7/365 wrecking machine, tirelessly ripping down anyone the globalists decide they don’t like. Eventually the whole world realises that to stick one’s head above the parapet is to attract the machinegun fire of reputational damage.
One feature of Clown World making the mass media more dangerous is that it’s difficult to find entertainment outside of it. Back in the day, one usually had a group of friends, neighbours or workmates who entertained each other with music or games. Either that or one spent time in Nature, hiking, hunting or fishing.
In Clown World, all those needs are met by screen interaction.
In Clown World, however, the mass media offers very little by way of pure information. Everything presented in it has been designed and calculated to manufacture consent for the objectives of its owners. This effect is so profound that the mass media can be described as the apparatus of propaganda.
Whoever controls the apparatus of propaganda controls the behaviour of the populace as surely as whoever controls the mouse cursor controls what happens on the laptop screen. They simply direct the talking heads on the screen to tell the populace what other people are thinking. The people who consume this media decide that, since everyone else thinks that way, they’ll think that way too. And so entire countries are regimented.
Today’s mass media works on a dopamine cycle. People get a dopamine hit from the feeling of being in touch with the dramas of the world, and they don’t get one if they fall out of touch. It’s a thrill to see footage of foreign conflicts. It’s a thrill to hear an expert say that someone else is an idiot because they believe something false. These dopamine hits keep people coming back.
The technologically advanced nature of today’s mass media means that it’s available all the time. Many people wake up and check their phones before they even get out of bed. The average Clown World citizen is plugged into the media matrix in almost every waking moment. The result is that there’s very little possibility of original thought outside of this totalitarian brainwashing apparatus.
Overcoming the nefarious effect of the mass media on our minds and behaviour requires two major steps. The first is to “unplug from the Matrix”, which requires aggressively curating what comes to our attention. The second is to find quality alternative media sources to replace the mainstream garbage.
*
This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
Calculating the correlations between demographic variables and referendum choice was made difficult by the Electoral Commission’s decision to put the ballots from different electorates into the same box on Election Day. At every polling booth, the referendum ballots for both General and Maori Electorates were put in the same box, and as such we can’t accurately account for how many people in each electorate voted in favour.
The special referendum votes were broken down by electorate, but the total number of such votes was less than 20% of the number of ordinary referendum votes, and so they are not particularly representative of the New Zealand population as a whole. They also don’t overcome the problem that the Maori population is split between the General Roll and the Maori Roll, and so no meaningful correlations between referendum choice and ethnicity can be calculated.
Despite these limitations, we can see the data accurately enough to notice some clear patterns. Five significant trends are apparent.
In short, the major opposition to cannabis law reform in New Zealand is the same people who oppose it everywhere else: old, poorly-educated, religious, antisocial conservatives, i.e. those who fall for fear-based propaganda the hardest and who act to harm other people the most readily.
Variable
Voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Special voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Aged 20-24
0.51
0.66
Aged 25-29
0.46
0.62
Aged 30-34
0.33
0.44
Aged 35-39
0.09
0.18
Aged 40-44
0.02
-0.02
Aged 45-49
-0.17
-0.24
Aged 50-54
-0.23
-0.40
Aged 55-59
-0.16
-0.52
Aged 60-64
-0.21
-0.57
Aged 65-69
-0.18
-0.53
Aged 70-74
-0.19
-0.52
Aged 75-79
-0.24
-0.56
Aged 80-84
-0.24
-0.58
Aged 85+
-0.16
-0.50
All of the age groups 34 years old or younger were significantly positively correlated with a will to reform the cannabis laws. This was true both for the ordinary referendum votes and the special ones. The correlation between being aged 20-24 and casting a special vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum was 0.66. Many of these voters would have been young people who enrolled to vote on Election Day.
All of the age groups 45 years old or above were negatively correlated with a will to reform the cannabis laws. As above, this was true both for the ordinary referendum votes and the special ones, although the correlations were only significant in the case of special votes. With the special votes, every age group 45 years old or above was significantly negatively correlated with voting Yes in the cannabis referendum.
Most strikingly, all of the age groups 55 years old or older had negative correlations stronger than -0.50 with casting a special vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum.
The pattern is unmistakable, and easy to explain. Old people who have been brainwashed for decades with Reefer Madness-style anti-cannabis propaganda are generally against it. Young people who have real-world experience with cannabis and who have observed its effects in their friends and/or parents are generally in favour of it.
Variable
Voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Special voting Yes in cannabis referendum
No NZQA qualifications
-0.36
-0.45
Level 1 certificate
-0.33
-0.46
Level 2 certificate
-0.31
-0.33
Level 3 certificate
0.41
0.54
Level 4 certificate
-0.30
-0.42
Level 5 diploma
-0.50
-0.46
Level 6 diploma
-0.22
-0.35
Bachelor’s degree
0.34
0.44
Honours degree
0.53
0.48
Master’s degree
0.48
0.53
Doctorate
0.56
0.45
Another trend is immediately apparent when we look at the correlations between voting Yes in the cannabis referendum and maximum educational achievement. The better educated a person is, the more likely they are to support cannabis law reform.
Belonging to any one of three most poorly-educated groups of people in the country was significantly negatively correlated with voting Yes in the cannabis referendum. By contrast, having any university degree was significantly positively correlated with voting Yes. The strongest correlation was between doctorate degree holders and casting an ordinary vote for Yes – this was 0.56.
The one anomaly in the data – the significant positive correlation between having level 3 NZQA as a highest qualification and voting Yes in the cannabis referendum – can be easily explained. These people are mostly intelligent young people who are at university but are yet to get a degree. So they’re mostly intelligent enough to understand the science of cannabis, but not old enough to have a degree yet.
The reason for the strong correlation between education and pro-cannabis sentiments is fairly obvious. Understanding the effects of cannabis is essentially a scientific enterprise. Those educated enough to understand science understand that cannabis is medicinal. Those not educated enough to understand science have to rely on what they’re told, which is usually by people not educated enough to understand the science.
Education is, at the end of the day, little more than a mental toolbox for determining truth from bullshit. An educated person will be equipped to appraise data and to decide for themselves what is true and what isn’t.
Those unequipped to make such determinations are forced to rely on dictates from authority figures, such as the television or the local priest. Doing so is extremely inaccurate, and is often completely misleading. Those who put themselves forwards as authority figures, and those who are presented as authority figures by the media, are often people with a vested interest in telling lies.
Unfortunately, the cannabis referendum was a national IQ test, and we failed it.
Variable
Voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Special voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Following no religion
0.39
0.22
Following Buddhism
-0.05
0.14
Following Christianity
-0.53
-0.48
Following Hinduism
-0.06
0.11
Following Islam
-0.06
0.09
Following Judaism
0.33
0.44
Following a Maori religion
-0.02
0.20
Following Spiritualism or New Age religion
0.58
0.25
Many people fail to appreciate the extent to which hating cannabis users is a religious, particularly an Abrahamic, attitude. It was largely Christians who enforced cannabis prohibition in the first place, and it’s largely Christians who argue to continue enforcing it. As such, a significant majority of people who voted No in the cannabis referendum were Christian.
The truth is that cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, and has been used as such for thousands of years. Throughout all time and space, Christians have always sought to destroy all other religious and spiritual traditions, and they have destroyed spiritual practices based around cannabis use in the same way they destroyed spiritual practices based around psilocybin mushroom use.
Christians can’t burn spiritual freethinkers at the stake anymore, but they can still vote for them to be persecuted. And they do, in great numbers. The fact that Christianity is an ideology of hatred is seldom more evident than in the strong negative correlations between being Christian and voting Yes in the cannabis referendum. A correlation of -0.53 between being Christian and casting an ordinary vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum lays bare what many already knew: Christians hate cannabis users.
Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims were generally indifferent to the question of cannabis law reform. This reflects the fact that there are two opposing forces at play in these cultures: the conservative, control-based mentality and the liberal, experience-based mentality. Many voters in these groups, being relatively recent immigrants, are caught between two worlds, unsure of what to accept and what to reject.
Spiritualists and New Agers were the big losers from the referendum result. New Age religion is very fond of cannabis on account of that it facilitates meditation. Spiritualists also like cannabis for the same reason that Rastafarians do: they believe that it enables them to reconnect with God. This explains the strong positive correlation of 0.58 between following Spiritualism or New Age religions and casting an ordinary vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum.
The significant positive correlations between being Jewish and voting Yes in the cannabis referendum are no doubt because of the higher educational attainment of Jews, i.e. most of them voted Yes because they understand the science behind cannabis.
Variable
Voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Special voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Working as manager
-0.20
-0.20
Working as professional
0.51
0.52
Working as technican or trades worker
-0.33
-0.48
Working as community or personal service worker
0.35
0.22
Working as clerical or administrative worker
-0.20
0.02
Working as sales worker
-0.20
0.03
Working as machinery operator or driver
-0.42
-0.28
Working as labourer
-0.20
-0.31
The fourth apparent trend in the data is that occupations and industries with a lot of human contact tended to vote Yes in the cannabis referendum, while occupations and industries without much human contact tended to vote No.
This mostly reflects differences in empathy. People in social occupations tend to be more open, more closely attuned to other people’s suffering and more sympathetic towards the measures those people take to reduce it. They are also much more likely to support recreational drug use in general, and much less likely to support government measures to interfere in other people’s lives.
There were significant positive correlations between voting Yes in the cannabis referendum and being a professional (0.51) or being a community and personal service worker (0.35). This reflects the fact that people in these occupations are intelligent and empathetic. In the case of professionals, it also reflects a superior reasoning ability.
There were significant negative correlations between voting Yes in the cannabis referendum and being a machinery operator or driver (-0.42) or being a technician or trades worker (-0.33). This might reveal a working-class social conservatism, but more likely follows from the fact that these occupations cannot be performed safely while stoned, and so people in them are concerned about the person next to them being under the influence of cannabis while working.
Variable
Voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Special voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Working in agriculture, forestry or fishing
-0.16
-0.40
Working in mining
0.00
-0.16
Working in manufacturing
-0.58
-0.52
Working in electricity, gas, water and waste services
-0.12
-0.10
Working in construction
-0.38
-0.22
Working in wholesale trade
-0.56
-0.17
Working in retail trade
-0.25
-0.35
Working in accommodation or food services
0.47
0.40
Working in transport, postal or warehousing
-0.42
-0.06
Working in information media or telecommunications
0.47
0.57
Working in financial or insurance services
0.19
0.37
Working in rental, hiring or real estate services
-0.19
0.10
Working in professional, scientific or technical services
0.37
0.51
Working in administrative or support services
0.05
0.33
Working in public administration or safety
0.46
0.33
Working in education or training
0.29
0.19
Working in healthcare or social assistance
0.18
-0.13
Working in arts or recreation services
0.60
0.58
These correlations, between choice of unsocial occupations and voting No in the cannabis referendum, were replicated with choice of industry.
People in social industries heavily supported cannabis law reform, and this was also true of people in creative industries.
There was a significant positive correlation between casting an ordinary vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum and working in Arts and Recreation Services (0.60), Accommodation and Food Services (0.47), Information Media and Telecommunications (0.47), Public Administration and Safety (0.46), Professional, Scientific and Technical Services (0.37) or Education and Training (0.29).
People in industries that are (generally speaking) neither social nor creative heavily opposed cannabis law reform.
There were significant negative correlations between casting an ordinary vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum and working in Manufacturing (-0.58), Wholesale Trade (-0.56), Transport, Postal and Warehousing (-0.42), Construction (-0.38) or Retail Trade (-0.25).
The major distinction here is not obvious, but it is striking, and perhaps summarises the entire cannabis law reform debate: voters working in industries that are focused on people supported cannabis law reform, while voters working in industries that are focused on things generally opposed cannabis law reform.
Variable
Voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Special voting Yes in cannabis referendum
Voting Labour 2020
0.36
-0.11
Voting National 2020
-0.50
-0.49
Voting Greens 2020
0.85
0.68
Voting ACT 2020
-0.25
-0.43
Voting New Zealand First 2020
0.03
-0.21
Voting New Conservative 2020
-0.46
-0.66
Voting The Opportunities Party 2020
0.74
0.42
Voting Maori Party 2020
0.34
0.39
Voting Advance NZ 2020
-0.06
-0.06
Voting Sustainable NZ 2020
0.12
0.05
Voting ALCP 2020
0.08
0.23
Voting TEA Party 2020
-0.36
-0.08
Voting Heartland NZ 2020
-0.10
-0.09
Voting Social Credit 2020
0.14
-0.30
Voting NZ Outdoors Party 2020
-0.04
-0.26
Voting ONE Party 2020
0.05
-0.14
Voting Vision NZ Party 2020
-0.17
0.26
The fifth apparent trend in the data involves the strong positive correlations between voting for progressive parties and voting Yes in the cannabis referendum, and the strong negative correlations between voting for conservative parties and voting Yes.
Unsurprisingly, voting for any of the parties that campaigned specifically for cannabis law reform had the strongest correlations with voting Yes on the cannabis referendum. Casting an ordinary vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum had a correlation of 0.85 with voting for the Greens in 2020, and 0.74 with voting for The Opportunities Party in 2020. The correlations with casting a special vote for Yes and voting for these parties were only slightly weaker.
Cannabis law reform supporters will be invigorated by the fact that the correlation between voting Labour in 2020 and casting an ordinary vote for Yes in the cannabis referendum was significantly positive, at 0.36. This suggests that a significant majority of Labour supporters want legal cannabis and so Labour, if they take the will of those supporters into account, should change the law.
National and the New Conservative Party, who explicitly campaigned against cannabis law reform, had the least cannabis-friendly voters. The correlation between voting Yes in the cannabis referendum and voting National in 2020 was -0.50, and with voting New Conservative in 2020 it was -0.46. To a large extent, this reflects the fact that those voters are old, and in the case of New Conservative voters it also reflects a lack of education.
Many will be surprised by the significant negative correlations between voting ACT in 2020 and voting Yes in the cannabis referendum. David Seymour wrote about his support for cannabis law reform in Own Your Future, and openly stated before the referendum that he was voting Yes. ACT is also associated with libertarian urban types who are generally favourable towards drug use of all kinds. So understanding why their voters oppose cannabis law reform is not straightforward.
The reason is that many of the people who voted ACT in 2020 voted National in 2017, and are still conservatives at heart. They voted ACT in 2020 mostly to protest the National Party leadership of the time, and are not really libertarians. This is supported by the fact that ACT voters were much, much older in 2020 than they were in 2017.
The weak correlations between voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and voting Yes in the cannabis referendum will also surprise many.
First it has to be understood here that ALCP voters are very few in number, and represent the top 1% most fanatical about cannabis in the entire country. Second, many of these cannabis fanatics were unhappy with the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill because they either felt that it didn’t go far enough, or because they didn’t want the cannabis industry to become commercialised. So many of them cast No votes despite supporting cannabis law reform in general.
Their reasons might sound paradoxical, but nothing about the cannabis debate has been rational from the beginning.
*
This article is an excerpt from the upcoming 3rd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing. Understanding New Zealand is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people.
