So I've done this a few times, but I just want to update on this, since I did notice last night when I compared Biden to West I seemed to shift HARD from the left to the center in the past 3 years or so. And I really felt like I should investigate this and explain my thought logic.
In a lot of ways I really don't think I changed a ton, but in areas where I did, I feel like I should explain my logic a bit.
Foreign policy
I think that this is primarily a shift of the issues, rather than a shift of my own politics.
For most of my life, it was easy to align with leftists since for most of my political life, the primary issues of the day have been US interventions around the globe like Iraq and Afghanistan. I quickly abandoned my neocon roots after it seemed obvious that our foreign interventions seemed to do nothing but kill people and break things, and our actions seemed to create more hatred toward us around the globe.
And given a lot of our interventions seemed more focused on forcing capitalism on people as opposed to bringing them actual freedom and democracy, it was pretty easy to stand where I did.
Ultimately, rather than do such things, it seemed obvious that I would rather cut back on military, intervene less, and spend more resources at home.
BUT, let's be clear. I didnt want to dismantle our entire military. I did recognize that some military presence is good, like NATO in Europe, and our presence in places like Japan, South Korea, etc., in the eastern asia area. My idea of military cuts were in the ballpark of 10-25%. In my UBI plans, I'd cut something like $100-200 billion and try to bring our military spending back in line with what it was during the Obama administration. So these were mild cuts. I recognized we couldn't cut more than that.
I just wanted to get out of Afghanistan and crap. And....we did. Thanks Joe Biden. He actually did it. He ended the war on terror, finally. Some will complain we're still intervening indirectly in places like Syria or Yemen, or that we still support Israel, but to be blunt, I DONT CARE. We got out of the places we needed to where there are BOOTS on the ground. And the war on terror era is over in my estimation.
But much like after the cold war era, that peace didnt last for long. And now Russia is once again public enemy #1 as they decided to open up Europe to war for the first time in decades. This is not good. This is a situation that reminds me of like the early 20th century. Like Germany invaded the Sudetenland in 1938. It even uses the same logic about ethnic russians and blah blah blah. And honestly, if we dont learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it. I know the pro peace guys mean well. But they're naive, and stupidly so. We tried this with Hitler, it didnt work. he just kept invading crap until we HAD to fight back. And Putin will do the same. You cant just appease Putin here. It's a BAD strategy. And heck to go further, I actually watched all quiet on the western front today and followed the politics of it. The germans wanted to surrender, the french didn't, forced bad terms on them, and the germans went for it just to get peace. But that peace was a false peace. In reality, it was a 20 year armistice. And war just started up again. And this is what the pro peaceniks dont understand with this situation. You cant just back down and give Putin concessions. He's kiniving, and will just keep pushing as far as you let him.
So yeah, we have had a bit of a realignment in foreign policy, where it seemed easy to be with the left when the big issues of the day are "ugh do we really need to be in this war on terror? what are we getting out of it?", but when it shifts to a more direct confrontation with another great power, and one with the mindset of Putin's Russia....uh...yeah. I gotta side with the more sane centrists here. And I wanna point out I do think that Biden is a centrist hre. He's neither a neocon, or a right winger, who just shoots their mouth off and talks about turning countries into glass parking lots, but he's also not a peacenik. he shows strength when he needs to show strength, and he back off when he needs to. He's smart. And if I were president, I would LITERALLY be following the same general playbook Biden is running. Because that's the smart, optimal strategy. And if you do anything differently, you're flat out wrong.
And honestly, the left has gotten insane. Everything with them is "America bad". Like we're alway evil colonizers and imperialists and blah blah blah. Uh, like our enemies arent? Russia and China dont have imperial ambitions? Our actions are to PROTECT people from THEIR imperial ambitions. You can talk crap about the US all day, sure, we're not a perfect country, but let's not act like all evil in the world comes from America and that other nations are innocent little wallflowers here, THEY'RE NOT. Russia wants Ukraine, and China wants Taiwan. And we need to curb THEIR imperial ambitions.
So yeah, we're now in a COMPLETELY different situation geopolitically than we've been for most of my life. For most of my life it was US invading countries and us having to ask if it's worth the costs (it wasn't). Now it's up to us to help deter other countries by teaching them the same lessons. And that starts with making the invasion as painful as possible for Russia, so we make THEM wanna go home. And that's how I see it. That's the true path to peace. And yes, I'm aligned with the Biden administration 100% here.
Social policy
I mean since the start of my blog, I have had a couple legitimate shifts in my politics. I became more pro gun, after my stance on that was quite muddled and mixed and philosophically inconsistent, but other than that, I havent really changed.
I've been transparent about my history with SJWs, and how I largely ignored them and found them harmless at first, but after they started picking fights with me over issues of interest, I started becoming more hostile.
The fact is, even though I intellectually see where they're coming from and agree with their concerns, their politics were never a massive part of my values. I just tried to align and sympathize with them in order to get them to be sympathetic to my causes, but after it seemed clear they had no interest in backing my politics, I have no interest in backing theirs.
The fact is, when I came over from the right, I was never THAT far left. I grew up with this idea of the "feminazi", which were these radical social justice types, but then when I came over in 2012, I thought these guys were just a conservative myth and i embraced a more moderate wing of liberalism that shied away from that. Then these guys came back, actually ended up being real and as crazy as the right warned me of, and I was just like "yeah no." So this was never gonna happen. This alliance with them, it was always tentative, always conditional, and all the SJWs had to do was push their junk too far to piss off and alienate me, and they did.
And I tried to be friendly with them at first and push back more gently, but after they just kept doing their crap, I just lost interest more and more. Weaponizing their politics in ways to be at odds with my own really did a lot to alienate me. Using identity politics as a edge issue to undermine actual progressivism alienated me hard. And at the end of the day, on social justice issues, i AM a moderate. I'm still quite liberal on most traditional liberal issues, I'm pro choice, pro LGBTQ+, anti death penalty, pro ACLU, etc., but yeah, the social justice stuff never clicked, and these radicals ended up turning me off where I feel a need to push back against them.
The Bill Maher thing really made it click for me, since atheism actually was my gateway to the left, and Bill Maher was a pretty solid standard bearer of the atheist movement when I joined. He talked about how he thought liberalism was all live and let live, and he doesnt like this social justice crap either. There really does seem to be big ideological differences between liberalism and leftism, and I'm just associated with bog standard moderate liberalism on social issues.
If anything, my ideological bases seem to align with with a form of moderate libertarianism. And this seems completely separate from the ideological bases of leftism, which IS based on a lot of this social justice nonsense.
Economics
Economics is where I was, and am, the most left wing. However, after leaving conservatism, I ended up forging my own path, not really embracing traditional liberalism or leftism, but making my own custom ideology. The fact is, being conservative taught me lessons about the left that I felt like I needed to bring to my approach to it. For example, if youre gonna change something, you should think about what youre doing and actually research the consequences. A lot of liberal policy is well meaning but tends to have significant flaws due to inefficiencies they create and the like. A lot of policies end up complex and convoluted and end up not helping many people and generally lose support as a result. And leftism, well, leftism was terrifying. We didn't want to repeat the failures of communism and something liberalism seemed intent on doing was proving it WASNT communism and it WOULDNT end the same.
Ultimately, I ended up forging my own path, discovering UBI, and building up an ideology that sounds suspiciously close to andrew yang's 2020 platform, but more progressive. THe fact was, I did have a bit of a leftist streak in me due to my hatred of work and the jobs system, and I felt like we needed some level of "class consciousness" to approach it. But my use of leftist rhetoric had limits. I kind of was in a place where i was leftist in rhetoric but still liberal in policy. And my ideas ended up becoming more akin to social democracy with UBI than anything socialist. Still, given how far right the US spectrum is, i THOUGHT I was left.
When Bernie came along in 2016, he was the closest to what I was. My original new new deal focused on three policies: UBI, M4A, and free college, and Bernie was for 2/3. NO ONE discussed UBI. it was still very much a fringe idea and I decided, you know what, we'll need to wait a few election cycles to discuss that. But if we could lay down the framework on it now, we could make a UBI oriented campaign easier in the future, since I knew the flaws in traditional liberal policies enough where the discourse would eventually evolve that way. It did in the 1970s, and I did figure before we could discuss this, we had to get back to where we were, which involved electing these social democrat types that mean well but some of their policies have flaws.
Then in 2020, I started noticing some philosophical rifts between myself and these lefties. While in 2016 we seemed on the same page, in 2020 I noticed we diverged. Yang was what I always wanted in some ways. Maybe a little TOO moderate, but the leftist attacks against him calling him a trojan horse were alienating. And then when i started nailing down what they actually wanted, it sounded like command economy socialism, talking about decommodification of basic needs and government run services. And ugh...just...no. Just give people cash, and have government run things where market failures exist. I dont wanna socialize the whole economy. It took us decades to get away from being confused with socialists, let's not do the stupid thing and support literal socialism.
But....these guys wanted literal socialism. And then I started thinking about where I stood post 2020 and how I didnt really align with the left, and I spent much of 2021 and 2022 retooling my policy orientations. I got down into the thick of it, did the math, prioritized what I wanted, and recognizing that Bernie and Yang's visions were somewhat mutually exclusive, I went the more Yang path. UBI, M4A if we can afford it, but maybe public option healthcare, a cheaper climate plan that focused on getting the results with less resources rather than a sprawling green new deal (which is the epitome of traditional liberal/leftist brainrot on policies, hey, let's have this huge bloated JOBS PROGRAM when we could just offer cash, brilliant, guys, brilliant), and while I still aligned with lefties on issues like free college, student debt forgiveness, and housing, often times my solutions would diverged from leftist policy prescriptions.
Like, sometimes I agree with leftists, and sometimes I agree with liberals. ANd ultimately, my overall ideology is neither. I go in this left/social libertarian direction based on indepentarianism and real libertarianism, and think differently from both liberals/socdems, AND leftists/socialists.
Even on topics like anti work, I stopped aligning with the movement by virtue of it being taken over by leftists who are overly dogmatic in their policy prescriptions, and I just ended up wanting different things. but because leftists cant tolerate diversity, I got banned from their subreddit. Turns out they'd rather just scream about how much rich people and landlords suck than propose a policy that actually fixes the issues.
It's ridiculous.
So yeah, I just ended up going in a direction where I'm too left and radical for liberals, but too moderate for socialists. I still have a combination of leftist rhetoric combined with liberal policies, but ultimately, I dont align with either, I'm a third force or a faction of my own. And while this faction is small in american and worldwide politics due to the diversity of its philosophical assumptions and policy prescriptions, I believe it's the best way forward.
I would not say I really changed a ton here, other than moderating on some issues out of pragmatism. Again, having to actually put ideas to paper and develop policies based on a certain budget requires me to make some compromises. I'd LOVE to support medicare for all, and I still do in theory, but Im just NOT SURE if we can afford it. I ran numbers myself, i might have just eeked out a solution there, but it leaves me with little breathing room. So, I also have an alternative that makes me moderate on healthcare in order to ensure funding for UBI.
I could have a green new deal and a medicare for all, but here's the thing, leftists afford that...by not having a UBI. They can do it, but they wont support UBI as a result of that. Or if they do, they do it poorly (see: howie hawkins NIT plan).
So let's be honest, in order to prioritize my policies as I prefer them, I need to move to the middle on a few standard bearers of leftist policy these days. But iM still not a moderate as Biden has not really done enough in my opinion. But given neither faction really supports a UBI, when Im forced to analyze other policies, I really end up just being mixed between leftists and liberals here.
And when I compare their platforms to my ideal, I end up just sometimes siding with Biden, and sometimes the left. I like the rhetoric of the left, the fire of the left, but at the same time, I dont think Biden is bad. And leftists just dont align with me on policy much.
Conclusion and my voting strategy for 2024
As such, my current voting strategy is the following: I will support williamson and her second bill of rights in the primary. I like the idea of it, I like the idea of getting people talking about this, but we did discuss it on this blog, and where I diverge. I even designed my own alternative vision to williamson's. If leftists do anything useful, its bring ideas to the discourse. But in the general, if I have to vote between Biden and Cornel West, West barely eeks out Biden in an honest debate over policy for me. On economics, as I said, West is technically preferable, but honestly, Biden and West trade blows. I'd agree with west on M4A and free college, but on the green new deal I side with Biden. And on a lot of issues, the two are functionally identical. Neither seem to embrace UBI. Both seem to support a minimum wage increase. And on social and foreign policies, I just full stop align with liberals and Biden. Given the circumstances, I'm not seeing a compelling reason to actually vote for a leftist as a protest vote. In 2020, Hawkins actually represented a positive shift over Biden. And in 2016 it mostly came down to the DNC screwing bernie for me. But this time, yeah, I'm just not feeling it.
The fact is, Im liberal on social and foreign policy, NOT leftist. Full stop. And on economics Im more a mix of liberalism and leftism without really identifying with either, and having unique policy goals distinct from both parties. As such, I dont feel strongly toward anyone, to the point that Biden and West are functionally equal in quality for me. They both have pros and cons. And neither really beats out the other by a massive margin. As such, I just cant be bothered to protest vote.
So yeah. Williamson for the primary, Biden in the general is my current plans. I think it's a solid strategy.
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