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TheHeretic -> RE: What was your political evolution? (4/12/2010 10:29:03 PM)
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I've been at this stuff essentially my whole life. Some of my earliest memories are of a rooms full of leftist student radicals discussing Trotsky, and the theory of permanent revolution, and the political events of the day (I tend to laugh very hard at certain scenes in Life of Brian for reasons most people don't get). My stepfather was a recruiter with a militant offshoot of the Socialist Worker's Party, and good enough at it that the draft board rejected him as "politically undesireable," for Vietnam. At five, I was out selling The Militant. COINTELPRO had officially ended by then, but whatever they called what came after, had us on the watch/harass list. How many second graders ever get a chance to have the FBI flash badges and ask their classmates about playground conversations?
Some of those old leftie values are with me today. Others just didn't make the cut. Pacifism, obviously, was dropped very early [;)] The interest in politics never went away. Of course, such an early start gave me the opportunity to develop a cynicism far beyond typical for one my age.
Two books loomed large in my school years. 1984 and The Gulag Archipeligo. The first taught me that authoritarianism was not something to be feared, and fought to the death, only from the right, the second, that of all the places in the world to be an enemy of the state, the USA was a pretty damn good place to be, and worth defending.
Following a tour in the military, I got involved with a few political issue campaigns as a volunteer, signature gatherer, sometime speaker, and guy with a pick-up truck. Except for Clinton, we lost on all of them. (Later I discovered the advantages of being a paid volunteer.)
My worldview was evolving though. The elements of human nature that socialist theory rode on were exposed as fantastical myths and foolish dreams. My faith in the competence of government to solve problems wore away like the paint on an early 90's Chrysler. Courtesy of a few years incarcerated with fundie Christians, I had an abiding loathing for the religious right, which left me pretty securely on the Dem side, for a decade, regardless of how conservative my ideas about the methodolgy of achieving liberal goals got.
Then came Al Gore. I believed (and still believe) that he represented the very worst element of the Democrats, and here he was as the nominee for Pres. I had choked hard before accepting him as veep, but not this. If my vote for Nader that year would have changed the outcome, I'd have still flushed my vote to Ralph.
So there I was. Disgusted with both parties in a two party system. Where does a socially liberal believer in limited government go?
The answer I found, that allowed me to make peace with my new affiliation was this. I despise authoritarian forms of government. All ideologies are going to have a streak of it to contend with. The Republican brand is pretty explicitly forbidden by the Constitution. Our separation of church and state fights are about whether or not a city council meeting can open with a prayer that mentions Jesus. We are not discussing what time the neighborhood alarms will ring on Sunday morning so we can all line up for the church bus. They are only going to get so far before the system slaps them.
The Dems, on the other hand, are power-mad whores who will backstab every value they hold in a tearful embrace during the campaign. Their intrusions into my life and wallet are not so clearly prohibited, and I have decided to oppose them.
This is a really long story, but this post is done.
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