Formative experiences in your life

[All Along The Watchtower]

What are some of the formative experiences in your life that have influenced your political views?

For me, an early interest in plants and animals lead to me reading about environmentalism. When it came to the 2000 Presidential election (the first election I followed), my interest in protecting the natural environment made me support Gore. Of course, I'm sure I was also being influenced by my parents' relatively liberal views, even if not directly.

Then, after the events of 9/11/2001, I started to read about foreign policy. I didn't understand most of what I had read (and still don't understand a fair amount ), but it got me thinking more about the world and America's place in it.

By the time of the 2004 election, I had become a Democratic partisan. I was horrified when Bush was re-elected, and the horrible events of Bush's second term (like the botched response to Hurricane Katrina or the insurgency in Iraq) made me angry, and hoping for a Democrat to win election in 2008.

Which leads me to Obama. I had never before seen so many young people-people my age-interested in politics. It was a great day when he was elected.

Since then, I have gone from being a knee-jerk supporter of Obama, to being a detractor (from the Left), back to being a more pragmatic and level-headed supporter. I think he's done a lot of good things, given the hand he was dealt. I also think he made some big tactical errors in terms of his health care reform and his financial reform bills. He hasn't pushed certain issues nearly as much as I think he could/should, and I'm really not a fan of his foreign policy. That being said, I would much rather have him than Mitt Romney as President, and given the choice....

The more people I meet, the more I talk to people here and elsewhere, the more I learn about myself and the world.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Like you, my first experience of politics was on a rather superficial level during the 2000 election. I grew up in a very rural, very Sandersista part of Vermont and hence my elementary school was divided (insofar as K-8 kids knew or cared about politics, which they probably did in my village more than in most other places) between Gore and Nader. Gore won the mock election in my first-through-third-grade class (yes, the school was that small) 10-7, with 2 for Bush (this was with mandatory voting in the mock election. Yes, I KNOW). I supported Nader that year, because my mother was at the time highly idealistic and she supported Nader. She even took me to see him speak, although I don't remember much of it except that it was in a beautiful glade or garden with folding chairs set up in front of a platform like the ones in school gyms or auditoriums. She became incredibly disillusioned, of course, during the recount, especially as we lived literally across an alfalfa field from New Hampshire, but she kept her Nader-LaDuke lapel pin and stuck it on a bulletin board in our house because she believes in recognizing her ideals even if they've been disappointed.

We became pretty big fans of Gore after that, actually, and my mother wanted him to run in 2004. We were fairly enthusiastic supporters of Dean and then Kerry (yes, we were enthusiastic about Kerry) and hugely disappointed when Bush won reelection. At that time we were both fairly standard American left-liberals. I was a standard middle-school-aged American left-liberal, which is frankly kind of an awful thing to be. During Bush's second term my political views matured a bit and my mother's became more...I guess you could say Burkean, in the sense of skepticism about human nature in the realm of political idealism, but her economic views also drifted further and further to the left, for reasons that one would probably have to be familiar with my mother's psychology to understand. In 2008 my mother supported Edwards in the primaries and then Clinton once it became clear what a pathetic sleazebag Edwards was; I supported Obama through the whole process.

My views as expressed on Atlas Forum these days are mostly the results of observation of the successes and failures of the Obama administration so far, as well as the work I've been doing in college on various non-Western and non-secular models of civic life (some of which I, obviously, like a lot better than others).

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Where to begin...I guess I should go back and look at the views of my family as a whole for a quick second.

Well, for starters, I was, and still am, very close to my grandma. She grew up in rural West Virginia, being the second youngest of five girls, and the daughter of the counties only Republican. So, throughout her life, she has always been Republican. The candidate never really mattered. She supported Dewey when she was 6 (which would have been 1948) and every Republican since then. Her political activism died down when she was young-she married my New Deal Democrat (and around his 2008 death, Socialist) Grandpa, had my mom and aunt, divorced, and a few years later, remarried. It was her second marriage that brought back her political interests. She strongly supported Reagan in 1976, 1980, and 1984, and in the 1990's, became addicted to FOX News. This is where I come in....

When I would spend the night at her condo, the rule was we (my brothers and I) could watch Cartoon Network up until 9:00 PM (that is pretty damn late for a 6 year old ) and afterwards, we could go to bed, or watch John Kasich’s Heartland (anyone else remember that? ). I remember watching footage of the USS Cole bombing, the aftermath of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, Shock and Awe, and all of that. I adopted the prevailing ideology of neo-conservatism, and strongly supported Bush in 2004, and Rudy in 2008. In 2006, I got in trouble at school for calling a girl “liberal” (a grave insult in my mind), and like everyone else my age, I adopted Islamaphobia.

 I hated (and still do) Obama with a passion. So, the Tea Party appealed to me. I was so appalled to see Ron Paul supporters at the rallies. But Paul grew on me, and soon, I started liking everything but his foreign policy. Around 2010, just after the elections, I realized that we in the Tea Party love to throw around the words “Patriot”, yet, Israeli flags outnumbered the American ones. An attitude of Jewish supremacy existed at all of these rallies, and that turned me into the opposite direction-a phase (well known here) of White Nationalism. I abandoned that, with my return to religion.

And..here I am today, a full blown Paultard.

[Donerail]

I guess it begins with a school mock election in 2008 (when I was 10), which was when I first began to care about politics (or remember caring, at least). Anyhow, our mock election involved both a primary (for which I was a Democrat) and a general election. Great fun, little registered voter cards and everything. With the simplistic nature of my 4th-grade mind, I found a newspaper (which I already read) which compared the different candidates. Since I didn't understand how entitlement reform worked then, I decided to focus on issues I could understand (namely, the Iraq War), and compared what they said on those issues. I saw that Edwards promised to get us out soonest, so I voted in my mock election for Edwards (Obama crushed in the primary, but Edwards beat Clinton). In our general election, I saw that McCain actually said that we should keep troops in Iraq, which was probably when I began self-identifying as a Democrat (voted for Obama in the general). I kept with that throughout fifth and sixth grade, till seventh grade, when I (being able to understand big words like entitlement reform) began to question the lack of balance in our budgets and the lack of sense in our tax codes. I also had a school project on Bakke, which turned me strongly against race-based affirmative action. Eventually we took a test on our political leanings (basically the Forum's political matrix test, but that sorted you on a left-right spectrum. I realized I agreed with the left-wing people on some issues, but the right-wing people on issues that related to economics. I began to do some research on what that meant, and discovered the light of libertarianism (which meshed well with my original social liberalism and noninterventionism). And that's where we are today.

[opebo]

Having to submit to the humilation of paid employment turned me from what I was before into what I am now.