My political views are hard to characterize

People sometimes tell me that they don’t know what my political beliefs are. When they say that, I am happy to hear it. It means that I identify more strongly with ideas on their merits rather than aligning myself with a particular party.

When I was growing up, my views were conservative but I also lived in Canada; it’s not the same thing as being a Republican in the United States. Later on, in university, I took a sociology class and flipped my views to more left wing and identified with the Democratic party (but not any left-wing party in Canada). But then I read some books on Objectivism (Ayn Rand’s philosophy) and on Libertarianism. I never adopted Objectivism except for maybe 1 or 2 beliefs (out of dozens).

And so I was a free market capitalist. But then I started reading books on behavioral psychology and evolutionary psychology and came to understand that people are not inherently rational but have many different motivations and abandoned Libertarianism (I don’t remember how Libertarian I was; maybe 50%). I now see Libertarians as mostly a bunch of white guys who think we should get rid of the government because it’s holding them back and their rights are being oppressed. I see this as ironic because in North America, white men are the most privileged class this is by far.

Furthermore, I see Libertarians as trying to trick people into coming over to their side by saying “Hey everyone! We believe in gay marriage, too! Come to our side!” but what they’re really saying is “… come to our side and as soon as we get enough votes, we’ll cut 80% of the government because we (mistakenly) believe it’ll help everyone” but in reality will mostly help white males.

So, Libertarianism is out.

And so it’s hard to classify my views because it depends on the issue. And I find some beliefs of Republicans and Democrats are coupled when it doesn’t make sense. For example, why are gun control and support for abortion linked so closely (i.e., if you’re against gun control, you’re also less likely to support abortion, and are for lower taxes, too). That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

For me:

1. The right wing is usually anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, and the left is the reverse. But to me, it seems like to be consistent you should be both pro-abortion (pro-choice) and pro-death penalty, and anti-abortion and anti-death penalty. Taking the life of a human is taking a life.

   For the anti-death penalty advocates, they say it’s mostly poor black people who receive it, and sometimes people are exonerated years or decades later. And I agree. The death penalty isn’t fair to all people.

   But there are some narrow cases (i.e., mass murder) where it is obvious. I don’t understand the pro-death penalty argument of putting someone in prison for life without any chance of parole. That’s just the death penalty in slow motion. It seems more like an attempt by anti-death penalty advocates to distance themselves from applying the death penalty, as if to say “Throw them in jail. Let them die there of natural causes in 40 years. Whew! My conscience is clean!”

   I don’t buy into that but I understand the psychology behind it.

   Similarly, for abortion, even among Americans who support it, most support with some restrictions (i.e., more support it if it occurs in the first trimester than the second trimester, and few support it if it occurs in the third trimester). Those lines seem arbitrary but at least they are lines.

   Some people are 100% against abortion one second after the moment of conception, while others argue that the cells do not have any consciousness for several weeks. But it doesn’t seem moral that a woman who does get pregnant but doesn’t want to carry the child to term, to be forced to do it so she could give it up for adoption at birth 9 months later.

   So, neither of those issues is clear cut.

2. Those two issues are not neat. But one thing that identifies someone as a Republican is owning a gun and support for the 2nd Amendment. I have never had a gun (my dad owned a couple of rifles but I never used them, don’t even think I ever touched them), but I’m okay if Americans want to own a gun. I’d be okay with owning a gun but I have no plans to acquire one.

   But I think there should be reasonable levels of registration and restrictions that make sense, similar to how people have to take tests to drive a car, and register it when they own it. So on this issue, I play both sides.

3. The right-wing places great emphasis upon religion and the value of family in daily life, and even in politics. The left-wing wants to keep religion out of it, and the family is important but it’s more important that government helps out.

   On this one, while I see the right’s point that religion is important in people’s lives and addresses needs that aren’t filled by other things, I don’t agree that Christian policy – or any strongly religious set of beliefs – should be setting government policy.

   One clear example of this is Young Earth Creationism. This is a set of beliefs that has been completely debunked by modern science, yet there is still a sizeable part of the population that believes it. That’s fine, but it should not be taught in public schools because the only reason people believe it is not because the science says it may be true, but because people try to align their religious beliefs with science.

   But on the other hand, I do think that the breakdown of the modern family is bad for society. While the left says “It was never the nucleus anyhow”, weak families do lead to societal problems.

4. The right-wing is about lowering taxes and achieving balanced budgets by reducing social spending, and not military spending. If you want to balance budgets, I say you need to raise taxes and cut spending and no government program can be immune – neither social programs nor military can be exempt. But raising taxes can’t be so high such that people decide the risk/reward ratio isn’t worth it.

   Many right-wing capitalists say that free market capitalism is the best way to run your economy and I agree, but there are different flavors of free market economies. US style? Libertarian style? Scandinavian style?  China style? Japan style?

   It’s not so clear cut as the American right-wingers think.

5. One way I depart from the political right is on environmental regulation. The free market economists tell us that industry will self-regulate and can be trusted to do the right thing since they don’t want to kill their golden goose (i.e., don’t pollute the lake too much). I, on the other hand, think that people are creative at rationalizing their short term returns at the expense of long term outlooks. They will pollute the lake if it leads to short term profits and there is no harm to them (but there is to others but others are too weak to stop them), or the effects manifest later on.

   I think environmental protections, and regulation in general, is required because people can’t be trusted to police themselves in all circumstances. That’s not how humans work.

So you see, the way I view things is on an issue-by-issue basis. I’m not in one camp vs. the other. I probably lean a bit closer to the Democratic party in the United States but only because the Republican party has leaned so far in one direction. But in the Democratic party, there are a lot of different ideologies competing for the dominant view.

But if I were in Canada, it wouldn’t be an easy decision. The Conservative party is less ideological than its American counterpart, and the Liberal party borrows ideas from the left and the right. So while I always used to vote Conservative, nowadays I probably would not and would depend on who was running and what they believed.

Politics is not so simple.