My Political Journey

Intro Blerb

I started out 2019 as a very disaffected registered Republican. I grew up in a conservative house, that believed in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, buying used cars and generally saving as much money as you can so that you can get out of your situation (‘you got yourself in this mess, you get yourself out’ mentality). From what I could see, there were Democrats that didn't know how to hold intelligent debate and wanted to increase taxes on middle class people to give handouts that didn't do anything and then on the other side there existed the Republican foil. I also believe that life starts at conception, and I knew that the Republicans had my back and Democrats did not. At age 21 I would get to cast my first vote in national politics and I ruthlessly researched the field of 16 Republicans, because I didn't want to speak with a vote without having first used my brain. As I researched that election cycle, I began to notice some really silly things within the GOP that I hadn't noticed before... Prior to casting a vote in 2016, I couldn't believe how crazy the climate-change denialism in the mainstream Republican party had gotten, or how mean-spirited and horrible Trump behaved (and how every other politician running was more concerned with personal power rather than conceding and consolidating), or how every life seemed precious to the Republican party until it was born (granted that's extremely skeptical and none of these things reflect all Republicans, just most elected ones from what I've seen). Despite those things, as someone who was pro-life and anti-big-government I didn't think I could ever find a home outside the GOP. Some Republican rhetoric was good (Chris Christie had a great speech about making sure we are caring for people and being pro-life for drug addicts, single mothers, homeless, etc) and I thought my best option was to stay in the Republican party and try to change things from the inside-out. With that said, once Donald Trump was obviously going to win the primary I knew I needed to start looking at other options for the general election because I couldn’t see myself supporting him.

In 2016, I went through a libertarian swing and even voted Libertarian in my safe state of Oregon. I liked the libertarians in the race partially because they pointed out inefficiencies in government, Trump's silliness and how Hillary Clinton was a less-than-ideal candidate. For those that aren't aware, libertarians are also pro-weed and anti-foreign intervention, pro-freedom (economic and personal) and all of those ideas immediately or eventually resonated with me by election time that year (by the way, weed should not be scheduled at the same level as heroin; just saying). I liked both Gary Johnson and Bill Weld; their quirky charm and a lot of their ideas, but after further research I started to take issues with a growing number of libertarian ideals. Libertarians are pro-economic freedom, but their view on life assumes we all have very similar economic opportunities and that corporations will generally sit to the sidelines and not involve themselves in rigging systems of government to work for them—both unfortunately well intended but untrue. Unlike some friends, I assume that libertarians are generally good people that have a different perspective, and I always appreciate their input even if I don't think a government run by libertarians would be a good one. Ultimately, if I didn't believe in a party I knew I needed to switch again, and I might as well look at Democrats now that it was 2019.

The Dems

Sometime in February of 2019, a video came across my recommended feed on YouTube that was a long-form interview with a democratic candidate. I took a leap and watched my very first Joe Rogan video that was an informal sit-down with Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang... and I was blown away by what I heard. Yang is driven by facts and data, and especially at this portion in his run he was unabashed in his beliefs. His message of ‘AI is coming at a breakneck pace and our government is unprepared’ ended up being a great lead-in. He's absolutely right that many of today's jobs will disappear and economic power will continue to consolidate upwards (look at Jeff Bezos), and my brain instantly went to a place of imagining a technological feudal age (extra reading), which could eventually lead to "corporation kingdoms". I listened in earnest to what else Yang had to say and then he threw in his bit on Universal Basic Income (which I was not initially for; if you remember my anti-handout upbringing) but by the end of the interview I went from a skeptic of UBI to open to more research. Even more surprising was my interest in a single-payer ‘Medicare for All’ (as advocated at the time by Andrew Yang). Turns out that a Single-Payer M4A does a good job at taking care of people's most basic human needs—which fit in very nicely with my pro-life stance—as well as providing people with economic freedom to move from a job without fear that their family will lack health care. Yang also talked about using economic pressure to get universities to lower their costs, and so I absolutely had to look up the rest of his policies. Sure enough, his site was great and each viewpoint was explained and researched to a very satisfactory degree to the point of it only taking 4 policies to push me over the edge to become a supporter (where a single-payer M4A, Ranked Choice Voting, the American Scorecard and UBI). I joined a few Yang-Gangs online, and over the course of 2019 donated $60 directly to the campaign and bought around $50 in merch (proceeds go towards the campaign). Yang didn't do amazing during the first two debates but in subsequent ones his performance got significantly better. It was clear that he had a lot of good ideas, but it was also clear that his standing nationally wasn't moving very quickly. So I started to research the rest of the Democratic candidates more in depth, and found it immediately disappointing. From my initial research, it appeared that there several different types of people running for the 2020 nomination; including good people who had sold out (Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker), bad eggs (Kamala Harris, Tim Ryan, etc.), Bland Eggs (John Delaney, Mayor Pete, Amy Klobuchar, etc.), an incompetent egg (Joe!) and some anti-establishment people who ranged from Marianne Williamson to Bernie Sanders (who seemed to be saying the same thing now as he did in 2016). Even though the majority of candidates were disappointing to me, the more I dove into the anti-establishment ones the more I liked what I saw.

The "Left"

The anti-establishment general vibe was 'the DNC isn't that great, but Trump needs to go, and then we can work to reform our party' and I was instantly endeared to that message (as someone who also has no affinity towards the democratic party). Furthermore, they were not turning down Republicans and they even went a step further to try to reach out to conservatives wherever possible by bringing them around to their perspective. All of them acknowledge that we want to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps but they have the same rhetoric as MLK who said

“it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” 

They get that a large part of economic and personal freedom is having the ability to make choices with your money, and you can’t do that if you’re constantly on the bottom half trying desperately to claw your way up and don't have any money. Means tested benefits (or what I thought were handouts) can be cruel, and is a way to turn people against each other (the working class against the truly destitute) while the rich oligarchs who run our country continue to profit on the backs of working people, who must sell their time to survive. This was a revolutionary shift within my thinking, and even processing it now is crazy. The bottom line is that things that other Countries consider a basic part of life are viewed by many in the US as socialistic (national healthcare, paid maternity leave, overtime protection, etc.) and my tune was starting to change significantly.

The left (and the 2020 anti-establishment candidates) also point out that even though a lot of government programs have issues in the way they are run, a lot of the reason is that either profit motives get in the way or their non-universal nature means that the rich can put poor people on it, and then take away resources, claim it doesn’t work and then ax the program. I had always seen the left as complaining SJW’s who need safe spaces and are afraid of intelligent debate, but as I dove in I found out that that crowd is a very small subset of the online Social Left, not the Political/Economic Left. Obviously no presidential competitor in the democratic primary is going to come down on the side of being pro-life when it comes to abortion, but these candidates have shown that they are pro-life on everything after birth. Also, many of the policies that the anti-establishment candidates want would lower abortions, because abortions are the last choice anyone wants to make anyway and when you remove a lot of the barriers for having kids then people will probably decide to have kids. They have shown that they are on the side of working people and trying to make life better for all of us. Hell, the Left even agrees with Libertarians in their anti-war rhetoric, as both sides believe it’s wasteful spending, kills people and gives stupid amounts of money to military contractors who specifically benefit by worldwide chaos and violence. Even though I don’t agree with all of the Social Left, I am finding a happy home within the Economic and Political Left unlike any home I’ve politically had before.

Cut to Now:

Many bland and bad eggs have dropped and shifted (yay, Pete is now more bad-egg than bland-egg), and the Democratic Party continues to be a horrible mess. The establishment wing is basically at war with the leading Anti-Establishment candidate, and they are doing everything in their power to muddy the waters and create confusion around this “socialist”. Pelosi is running the house horribly and shot her party in the foot when she pushed for impeachment even though it was doomed in the Senate and when we pretty-much knew that acquittal would lead to a Trump surge. Generally, Democrats in Congress don’t tend to really have much of a voice or idea of what they stand for other than “Not Trump” and “Not Republican” and even that doesn’t mean hardly anything because many congressional democrats are playing the same corrupt corporatist game. There are some exceptional Democrats serving who I can agree with on many things (Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ron Wyden, etc.) but I’d say that by and large the corporatists outweigh the good ones by quite a lot. Not only is there all that BS to deal with, but there is a constant stream of conveniently timed press releases and shady stats coming out of the Iowa Caucus, and there is some really strong evidence that the Democratic Party was trying to cheat in Mayor Pete’s favor. I firmly believe that after this election the party either needs to be reformed so it becomes a party that celebrates democracy (and doesn’t have freaking Super Delegates), or it needs to be destroyed and a new left party needs to rise up instead.

The more research I went through, the more dubious I was towards Elizabeth Warren, and even though I was endeared to the Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi, it is clear the smear campaigns and work by the establishment wing had achieved its effort and she is no longer viable nationally. This left me with Bernie Sanders, who I had been defending from smears for awhile (he may not have been 'my guy' but I wasn’t going to allow people to trash him just because they didn’t understand him. The more I looked into Bernie Sanders, the more common ground I found. I do still have disagreements with him (I don’t think that the Federal Jobs Guarantee is going to go flawlessly) I generally found myself agreeing with his perspectives and subsequent policies. He went from being someone I wasn’t actively considering in the primary to being my second choice through his consistency, steadfastness, honesty and some honest-to-God really good policies (broadband for all?! Hellllll yes).

All that to say,

I was willing to support Andrew Yang as long as he was viable and give him everything I reasonably could by throwing my voice and money behind him whenever possible. Given Andrew Yang's performance in Iowa however, and his wishy-washy-ness towards a single-payer Medicare for All, I do not think that his time for leadership is now. I cannot express how thankful I am for having his voice in this cycle, because he has shifted the overton window a ton in so many ways: on UBI, AI, and making people aware of how many humans are suffering in our current system. I still love listening to his interviews, and I think that he’s a genuinely good guy who will make an awesome leader when his time comes. I also have fully come around to the idea of UBI, and I think it’s only a matter of time until others join me there as well. With all that being said, considering Sanders' huge surge, consistency and generally good ideas I've decided to support Sanders going forward. I know that he will be a voice for the people, and will do what he can to make things better.

I’m not voting “Blue No Matter Who”,

I'm a registered Democrat,

I strongly dislike the Democratic Party,

I’m supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary