By many accounts, I am a bit of an odd duck as regards my political history. When I first began thinking about politics in middle school, I was rather right-wing, and remained conservative-leaning all the way through high school. I had some forays into libertarianism and Objectivism as I attempted to articulate myself a bit more sharply late in high school. But when I went to attend university in a medium-sized city, I took a hard turn to the left. I left school and remained residually attached to leftism for a few years, and have returned to conservatism, bolstered by my conversion to Mormonism.
Now, why was leftism so appealing to me in college? On the one hand, leftism is appealing in college in general. College campuses are a cornucopia of liberal causes, with no shortage of activities in which to involve oneself. But I would say something else was at work as well. Even though I adopted left-wing politics, I always retained an antipathy for the Democratic Party. I was a socialist, a Trotskyite. Looking back on it now, I think there was a desire to appease my social environment in adopting a left-leaning political line, but also to express my instinctual revulsion towards liberal politics.
I had no home amongst the urbane College Republicans. In the first instance, I wanted to discuss and elaborate ideas, NOT campaign for candidates. It became clear after not long that the College Republicans were a prep school for party functionaries. These individuals seemed to possess a detached, country club smugness about their own perspective that I found off-putting, to say the least. They had no interest in grappling with ambiguities and hard compromises. They were emphatically not the party of ideas.
Who was? The only community I found was amongst the liberal activists. It was not the measured, thoughtful community of scholars that I had hoped for, but it was the only game in town. But throughout it all, there was an underlying tension between my natural inclinations and my reality.
Pittsburgh was the first place I had lived in that was a significantly liberal (or at least Democrat-controlled) enclave, and the first bona-fide city I had lived in. As part of a military family growing up, I lived primarily in suburban bedroom communities, and usually in areas near military installations where, since these forts and bases contributed immensely to the local economy, they exerted a conservatizing influence on already middle-class local attitudes. Combine this with the fact of the “nomadic existence” of military life as my father put it, and the only sense of roots I came to have were in the backcountry of Appalachia from where my parents had moved. So, much about the assumptions that informed Pittsburghers lives I did not understand.
In fact, I don’t think I ever came to truly understand it. Instead, I subscribed to a brand of left politics that gave me the opportunity to speak the language of the leftists while retaining my criticisms of the meat and potatoes of modern liberalism. For instance, with respect to gun control, instead of sticking to the traditional right-wing arguments against it, I cited the targeting of the Black Panthers in the gun control laws of the 1960s. It was more acceptable to be against something that had a detrimental effect on a radical political organization than it was to have ideas about neo-republican virtue or radically Lockean liberty. So, that was the tack I took. To that extent, I think the Davidsonian “left in form, right in essence” characterization of my politics was correct. Interestingly, I discovered an article in The American Conservative concerning this very issue:
- The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children’s safety. Red-region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don’t care that white liberals’ kids are in peril. Besides, in sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chances of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.
White liberals, angered by white conservatives’ lack of racial solidarity with them, yet bereft of any vocabulary for expressing such a verboten concept, pretend that they need gun control to protect them from gun-crazy rural rednecks, such as the ones Michael Moore demonized in “Bowling for Columbine,” thus further enraging red-region Republicans.
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