Politics Is Serious Business

As many of you know, The Best Party - a joke party created by comedian Jón Gnarr - has been kicking the tar out of every other party running for city council. Up until now, his opponents have offered vague platitudes in response. Well, today the gloves came off.

Ármann Jakobsson, who has worked closely within the Leftist-Green Party, recently posted a blog entry detailing all the reasons why he believes Jón Gnarr is largely more sympathetic with the right than the left.

He mentions, among other things, that Gnarr was one of Independence Party MP Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarsson's supporters. He also told the Grapevine in 2006 that he supported former Independence Party mayoral candidate Gísli Marteinn Baldursson. Ármann also brings up the long string of conservative Christian columns Gnarr wrote for the newspaper Fréttablaðið a few years back.

OK, that's certainly notable. And it would give Ármann's article more weight if he stuck to facts like this. Instead, he adds to his point that Gnarr spends more time making fun of leftists than he does conservatives, the main example being his Georg Bjarnfreðarson character. That seems like reaching a bit to me, to be honest. It makes the leftists look, frankly, scared and defensive. And they certainly have reason to be scared.

Gnarr also granted The Grapevine a new interview in our latest issue. Among other things, he talks about his punk rock past and his anarchist tendencies. This I find interesting in context with the above mentioned facts.

I had a friend who used to call libertarians "closeted Republicans", and there's definitely a kernel of truth to that. Anarchists, libertarians, conservatives - many of them derive from the same ideology of personal freedom over the needs of the collective, a distrust of regulation and law, and the belief that the smaller the government the better. It's not very difficult, ideologically speaking, to shift gears between being an anarchist and being a rightist.

Now, I say all this knowing full well that there are many, many different schools of anarchist, libertarian and conservative thought. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have next to nothing in common with, say, Steve Ignorant. My point is solely that what Ármann is pointing out isn't that hard to believe, really, and doesn't necessarily contradict anarchist leanings.

Having said that, I think Gnarr is not very easy to pin down politically. He doesn't hail from the right or the left, and seems to have contempt for both. His ideas stem rather from wanting to fight against what he sees as the biggest problem with politics in this country: stagnation and nepotism. But in any event, you can read the interview in the latest issue and judge for yourself.