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Still waiting: can we agree to agree? — 2 Comments

  1. Hi – here via Austin Bay.

    My life has sort of mirrored my politics, I find – an uncomfortable observation because it implies that I’m just a creature of my environment. (I’m going to trust that it isn’t so, because in contrast to earlier times in my life, I’m paying attention now!)

    I achieved voting age and attended college in California, then moved to Seattle for seven years. During this time I considered myself “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” – which I now recognize as “wanting to pay as little tax as possible, and not wanting to offend anyone.” Then, accompanying my husband to grad school, I moved to Texas (and, maybe not so incidentally, out of true urban life and into the suburbs). After five years in Texas, which encompassed 9/11, Afghanistan, and the Iraq war up until the 2004 US elections, we moved to the far-out suburbs of Philadelphia – I mean, you’d have to be nuts to commute from here, so we’re really in a community outside Philly. And now, having spent a WHOLE lot of time reading, researching, and examining my position, I find myself… fiscally conservative, socially still on the liberal side – but in the classical sense. I’m FOR individual freedom, AGAINST speech codes, FOR voting in Iraq, AGAINST nay-saying about it, FOR optimism and idealism (that’s really what sets neocons apart from “paleocons,” I think), AGAINST reactionaryism. (“Reactionism”?)

    I think we were right, on the basis of information we had, to go into Iraq; the lack of WMD stockpiles changes nothing about what we thought was there – to say nothing of the fact that of our multiple reasons for going into Iraq, only that one isn’t entirely vindicated now. Watching the spread of the Iraq grand idea throughout the Middle East is one of the great joys of my adult life, I think. I hope, I hope it takes root everywhere it lands, and in our lifetimes we can see that benighted region experiencing the dawn!

  2. Good post! Given your therapist background, don’t you think politics for many people has to do with personal style? The NE/West coast liberals I know think optimism is unsophisticated, clear principles are simplistic, patriotism is low-brow, and that fighting for principle and country is crude and vulgar.

    Also, label/designer/party identification is terribly important to some who are convinced that Democrats are the cool “in” crowd and Republicans the to-be-snubbed ones. To these people, believing in the transformational politics of the Bush administration is as hopelessly declasse as buying one’s clothes at Sears or eating at The Olive Garden. Rational reconciliation of principle and fact does not factor into their strong stylistic prejudice.

    The irony is that Democrat cynical chic is so passe that it almost hurts to watch those who care more than anything to be cutting edge actually look more like yesterday’s bargain bin cast-offs. Your optimism is the “new black” for seasons to come!

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