On family, friendships, power and the people I’ve lost along the way.
I’ve been thinking lately about why I have such a strong dislike of conservatives. Not just conservative politics, but the people who continue to support it despite everything we’ve seen over the course of my lifetime.
I know it’s a sweeping statement to say they’re trash human beings. It’s not especially diplomatic either, but I think I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m no longer interested in pretending someone’s political beliefs have nothing to do with their character.
My experiences with conservative people haven’t exactly been wonderful, or neutral.
I’ve been betrayed by friends, rejected by family, humiliated by employers and left to deal with the consequences of other people’s limited worldview and selfish decisions. Some of these experiences happened long before I understood politics well enough to put a name to the values behind them.
Looking back, I think there are some patterns worth talking about.
It started at home
I grew up in a conservative Catholic household with a Polish father and Filipino mother. We moved between countries throughout my childhood, and home was often a difficult place to be. I became conditioned to stay awake at night for my own safety and peace.
My parents fought constantly. As a young boy, I remember trying to mediate their arguments, before I was even old enough to go to school going between rooms in my grandfather’s apartment in Poland because neither parent wanted to speak to the other.
Later, when I got into trouble at school, however, my parents suddenly became a united front.
Teachers saw a disruptive child. My parents saw a child who needed disciplining. Very few people seemed interested in understanding what was happening at home.
By the time I was twelve, I knew I was gay, and I also knew this was something my parents wouldn’t accept.
I spent years frightened that somebody would find out. Eventually I discovered the Freedom Centre, a small community space for queer teenagers in Northbridge. For the first time in my life I could meet people like myself without having to pretend to be somebody else.
It changed my world.
I remember going for a walk with my father when I was fourteen, trying to build up the courage to tell him I was gay.
I couldn’t get the words out, so I wrote them in the SMS application on his phone and showed him.
He seemed to take it reasonably well at first.
Things deteriorated when we got home.
My mother wanted me to see a psychologist to fix me. My father’s initial acceptance turned into uncertainty, and the family descended into another escalation of conflict.
Not long afterwards I ran away from home, frightened of what would happen if I stayed.
I eventually found myself sleeping at a bus stop opposite an all-night McDonald’s because I was afraid somebody might attack me if I slept somewhere less visible.
I was fourteen years old.
That experience shaped how I think about family, authority and the way people use their beliefs to justify their treatment of others.
Today, my father supports Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. From what he’s expressed to me, their opposition to LGBTQ people is a significant part of their appeal. Even if Putin is a threat to his home country of Poland.
I find that extraordinary.
My father is a Polish migrant whose own family lived through the consequences of authoritarianism and war. My great-grandfather served in the Polish Army during World War II, and my grandfather lived through the Soviet occupation.
Yet here we are, with my father supporting Putin.
And he’s got a gay son.
I don’t know how to reconcile those things. I don’t understand how someone can know what their own child experienced and still find those political positions appealing.
I suppose I’ve stopped trying.
Friends who take more than they give
When you grow up without much support from your family, you tend to look for it elsewhere.
That was certainly true for me.
Over the years I’ve formed friendships with people who initially made me feel welcomed and valued, only to discover that the relationship wasn’t nearly as reciprocal as I’d believed.
One friendship in particular lasted on and off for over a decade.
I introduced this friend to people in my social circles. Over time, I felt increasingly isolated from friendships I’d helped him establish.
There were also incidents involving money and possessions that I regard as theft, along with dishonesty that gradually destroyed my trust.
During the breakdown of a nine year relationship, and sale of my first home, when I was experiencing a serious mental health crisis, he told members of my family I was behaving irrationally.
I needed support. Instead, I felt as though somebody I trusted was helping discredit me.
What disturbed me even more was what I knew about his treatment of another mutual friend, whom he dated.
My understanding of that relationship includes frightening episodes of screaming, objects being thrown and physical violence. My friend was so afraid that he would hide and cry.
I found those experiences difficult to reconcile with the person I thought I knew. For years I made excuses for him, but as time went on I could see it wasn’t a heat of the moment issue, it was a pattern of behaviour and there was no remorse from the abuser.
Eventually this former friend became a Trump supporter.
I don’t think Trump made him behave the way he did. My suspicion is that he saw something in Trump’s public personality that appealed to qualities he already valued.
The emphasis on winning, dominating other people, personal status and getting what you want regardless of the consequences.
That’s my interpretation, of course. I can’t know exactly what motivated his political choices.
But knowing what I’d experienced in our friendship, I wasn’t particularly surprised.
The workplace isn’t much different
I’ve had similar experiences with people in positions of professional authority.
At one agency where I worked, the owner sent an email to the entire company encouraging everyone to vote Liberal.
I remember finding that incredibly inappropriate.
We’re employees, not members of somebody’s political office. And when the person expressing that preference is responsible for your livelihood, the relationship is hardly equal.
There were other incidents that troubled me about the way this business owner behaved towards employees.
I recall him kissing a married staff member, which I believe created tensions within the team.
Personally, I remember the small remarks more than anything.
He would comment on the junk food in my desk bin. On another occasion he told me to behave as though I were a dog.
Individually, little comments like that can be dismissed as jokes. But when they come from someone who holds power over your employment, they’re not particularly funny.
They make you feel watched, diminished and less entitled to speak for yourself.
I’ve experienced this kind of behaviour in other workplaces too.
In 2015, while experiencing a nervous breakdown, I was treated by people in management as though my distress were a disciplinary problem rather than a human crisis.
I had been performing well at work. Then my personal life collapsed and suddenly I was being scrutinised, threatened and treated like a liability.
When I went on a road trip while on medical leave, somebody in management interpreted photographs on my Facebook account as evidence that I was faking being sick.
Apparently someone experiencing a mental health crisis was expected to stay home and look miserable enough to satisfy management.
I had trusted the person who reported me to HR as a friend.
That experience taught me something about the difference between what people say they value and what they actually do when their authority is challenged.
It also taught me how quickly somebody’s professional reputation can be used to undermine another person’s credibility.
Respectability is not the same as decency
Another thing I’ve noticed throughout my life is how effectively people can hide harmful behaviour behind appearances.
I’ve written before about the class divisions I’ve experienced within Perth’s gay community.
Growing up, being queer meant finding solidarity with other people who had experienced rejection and hardship. The Freedom Centre gave me a sense of belonging I hadn’t experienced anywhere else.
As I got older, I found myself increasingly alienated by social circles where money, status and respectability seemed more important than looking after one another.
Some of the people I’ve known were wealthy, charming and very good at appearing reasonable.
Behind closed doors, my experiences with them were quite different.
I’ve had relationships involving intimidation, manipulation and violence. I’ve watched people who hurt me maintain their social standing while I was treated as unstable for reacting to what happened.
And that’s something I’ve come to resent.
The people with the most social capital often have the easiest time controlling the narrative.
If they’re calm, wealthy and respectable, people are more inclined to believe them.
Meanwhile somebody who has been hurt, especially somebody struggling financially or emotionally, can quickly become the problem simply because they’re visibly distressed.
I recognise this dynamic in politics as well.
We spend enormous amounts of time discussing the intentions of people who exercise power, while those who suffer the consequences are expected to remain composed, reasonable and grateful for whatever consideration they receive.
When it comes to proving harm, the burden of proof is always on the victim and not on the abuser. No foundational or institutional support for investigating the actual truth. No consequences when it’s found.
It’s an extraordinary double standard.
The politics of self-interest
This is where my experiences begin to connect with my political views.
I don’t believe all conservative people are dishonest or abusive. I’ve also been hurt by people whose politics were supposedly progressive.
But I do see a recurring tension between values centred on protecting existing advantages and values centred on improving conditions for people who have been left behind.
A lot of conservative political rhetoric emphasises individual responsibility, wealth creation, property ownership and the importance of rewarding success.
There are legitimate debates to be had about those things.
My problem begins when the same arguments are used to justify taking resources away from people who are already struggling, or when somebody else’s suffering is treated as an acceptable cost of protecting one’s own interests.
Look at Robodebt.
The Australian Government operated an unlawful debt recovery scheme that caused enormous distress to vulnerable people. The Royal Commission documented serious failures of legality, administration and accountability.
And yet the rhetoric surrounding welfare compliance so often makes it sound as though people receiving support are the ones who need to prove their human worth.
I’ve experienced a version of that attitude throughout my whole life.
As a child, I was responsible for behaving properly despite the chaos at home.
As a teenager, I was expected to manage the consequences of being gay in a family that struggled to accept me.
As an employee, I was expected to remain professionally presentable while my personal life fell apart.
And as an adult dealing with difficult institutions, I’ve repeatedly encountered systems more interested in whether I followed the correct procedure than whether they were actually helping.
At some point you start wondering why responsibility always seems to flow downwards.
Some people just get it
It’s not all doom and gloom, of course.
One person I’ve admired for a long time is Dolly Parton.
Dolly grew up poor in rural Tennessee and went on to become one of the most successful entertainers in the world. She made an enormous amount of money, built businesses, and became something of an institution herself.
Yet she never seemed to forget where she came from.
What I particularly admired about Dolly was her ability to talk about complicated social issues in the simplest possible terms.
When asked about LGBTQ rights, she didn’t need to deliver a political lecture or explain some elaborate philosophical position. She just wanted everybody to be treated well.
That was it.
And I think there’s something wonderful about that.
She was a wealthy, successful businesswoman who didn’t seem to think that having more than other people made her inherently better than them.
Her Imagination Library gave books to millions of children, inspired by her own father’s difficulties with literacy. She supported LGBTQ people, spoke about racial equality and made a point of treating people with dignity.
She didn’t need to turn everything into a partisan argument, either.
I don’t necessarily share her reluctance to judge people for their politics. I’ve had experiences that make that difficult for me. But I admire that her values seemed to come from a fairly uncomplicated place.
People deserve to be treated decently.
If you’ve got the means to help somebody, why wouldn’t you?
And if somebody is different from you, why should that be a problem?
These aren’t especially radical ideas.
What I find remarkable is how many supposedly respectable, educated and powerful people struggle with them.
We live in a world where politicians, business leaders and institutions can produce endless explanations for why helping people is too expensive, too complicated or economically irresponsible.
Mainstream media push narratives that conflate the existence of opposing views with a reasonable defensiveness to both sides.
Meanwhile, Dolly Parton built a programme to give children books because her dad couldn’t read.
Sometimes I wonder whether we’ve made the whole business of running society unnecessarily complicated.
I don’t expect everyone to be Dolly Parton. I certainly don’t claim to live up to her example. Though I do try.
But she reminds me that wealth, success and influence don’t have to come at the expense of compassion.
You can be successful without looking down on people.
You can be powerful without humiliating people.
And you can have strong values without making somebody else’s existence a problem.
I wish more people understood that.
Why Trump changed the conversation
Donald Trump’s political success has made me reconsider what people are willing to tolerate from their leaders.
He’s not simply another conservative politician with a different economic philosophy.
His public conduct, rhetoric, challenges to democratic norms and treatment of opponents have been scrutinised for years.
His likely culpability in the Epstein files, multiple genocides and widespread fraud and corruption are also on my mind.
People are entitled to support whatever political movement they choose. But those choices also tell us something about what they consider acceptable.
If someone enthusiastically supports a leader despite conduct they would condemn in an ordinary person, I think it’s reasonable to ask why.
Would they tolerate that behaviour from their employer? Their neighbour? Their child’s partner?
Would they excuse dishonesty, intimidation or disregard for others if it happened directly to them? Or their child?
Or do those standards change when the person behaving that way promises to advance their political interests?
That’s what bothers me.
I know what it’s like to have somebody with power treat you badly while the people around them make excuses.
I’ve had enough of it in my personal life. I don’t particularly want to celebrate it in public life either.
And what about the other side?
I’m not especially impressed by the way supposedly progressive parties have represented working people either.
Australian Labor and the Coalition have both participated in economic reforms that have changed the relationship between governments, public services and the people who rely on them.
We’ve seen outsourcing, increasingly complicated welfare systems, unaffordable housing and public institutions struggling to deliver the services they’re supposed to provide.
The political branding changes, but many of the underlying problems remain. Conservatives implement the bad ideas, progressives leave them in place and fumble changes. The ratchet effect is real.
I don’t think voting Labor automatically makes someone compassionate any more than voting Liberal automatically makes somebody selfish.
But I do think we should examine the values expressed through political choices and the consequences people are willing to accept.
Not every policy failure is equivalent, and not every politician or voter bears the same responsibility.
Understanding that doesn’t mean abandoning moral judgement.
It means being more precise about what we’re judging.
Choosing who gets to be in my life
Over the past decade I’ve done a lot of work trying to understand what happened to me.
I’ve revisited childhood memories, difficult relationships and experiences in workplaces where I felt powerless.
Writing about these things has helped me understand patterns I couldn’t see when I was living through them.
One of the biggest changes has been learning that I don’t have to keep giving people access to my life simply because I care about them, or even love them.
I don’t have to remain friends with somebody who repeatedly betrays my trust.
I don’t have to accept cruelty from a family member because we’re related.
And I don’t have to pretend somebody’s political choices are irrelevant when those choices conflict with values I consider fundamental to human dignity.
That doesn’t mean I wish harm on people whose politics I dislike.
It means I have a choice about the people I surround myself with.
Today I have a partner who cares about me, work relationships built on mutual respect, and a quieter life where I can spend time writing, building things and looking after the people and animals I love.
It took a long time to get here.
I don’t want to recreate the same relationships that made my earlier life so difficult.
So, are conservatives trash human beings?
That was the statement that started this whole train of thought.
I was blowing off steam when I said it, but I meant what I was expressing.
I’ve spent much of my life around people who believed their authority, wealth, social position or personal convictions entitled them to treat others badly.
I’ve been bullied, betrayed, manipulated and made to feel worthless by people who seemed perfectly comfortable with themselves.
I’ve watched the same attitudes play out in politics, where ordinary people are expected to accept declining living standards, punitive public services and increasingly insecure lives while those responsible explain why it’s all necessary.
And I’ve watched people continue supporting those political movements because they believe they’ll personally benefit, or because the people being hurt aren’t people they particularly care about, or even see as human.
I’m not going to pretend that every conservative is the same, or that every progressive is some wonderful humanitarian.
I’ve known enough people to understand that the world doesn’t work that way.
But I also refuse to pretend that people’s political choices are meaningless expressions of personal preference.
They tell us something about what people value, what they’re willing to tolerate and whose interests they’re prepared to sacrifice.
And frankly, after everything we’ve seen during the Trump era, I have very little patience left for people who enthusiastically embrace that movement.
I’ve heard enough explanations about good intentions.
I’ve heard enough excuses about complicated circumstances.
I’ve spent enough of my life being asked to understand the people who hurt me, while they made very little effort to understand what their behaviour did to me.
I’m done with that.
Dolly Parton showed that you could be enormously successful and still recognise the humanity in people who had very little.
You didn’t need an economics degree, a political movement or an elaborate theory about personal responsibility.
You just needed to give a shit about somebody other than yourself.
That’s the kind of person I admire.
And that’s the kind of person I want in my life.
I don’t expect perfection. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I don’t even expect people to get everything right the first time.
But I do expect them to care about what happens to other people, to show remorse when they harm others and to empathise with the harships that others experience.
And if somebody repeatedly chooses to support cruelty, defend it, excuse it or profit from it, I’m perfectly comfortable judging them for that.
They can call it politics.
They can call it personal responsibility.
They can call it protecting their interests.
I call it being a shit human being.
And I want nothing to do with it.