Confessions of a Former Liberal

Yep, that was me. If any of you have taken the time to read my ‘About This Blog’ tab over on the side, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. Growing up, politics was not on my radar whatsoever. I was a Dean’s list student and also a nationally competitive two-sport athlete. I had a part time job. I didn't grow up in a very political family. My mom wasn’t overtly political, although she was one of the original feminists from back in the 70s and would pass off some of those beliefs to me. But I wasn't always passionate about politics. It took two disastrous presidencies, a decade of continuous war, and the systemic erosion of our civil liberties right before my eyes before I finally "woke up" as they say. 

I remember as early as 8^th grade, I was sitting in my science class and that day was a special day because instead of class, we all had to take some sort of big long survey. The survey included questions about your behavior and beliefs at the time, things like “How often do you smoke?” “Do you do drugs?” “What kinds?” “How often?” “Have you ever had sex?” and so forth. These were completely anonymous to ensure honest answers. In my view, the anonymity gave me complete cover to lie through my teeth. I guess I was pretty cheeky even back then because I answered all the questions about as falsely as you could. Some statistician out there was probably horrified to learn that there was an 8^th grader out in the world who had sex every day in her mom’s bed after school but only after getting high and raiding the liquor cabinet. Not to mention the 3 cartons of cigarettes I smoked per week in between all of my Satan worship. 

I was having a giggle at my minor act of defiance, even tapping my lab bench partner to point and snicker at all my off color answers. She just looked at me partially horrified even though she knew I was kidding around. Finally I got to a question that stumped me. It asked something along the lines of “Politically, do you consider yourself a conservative or a liberal?” That one made me furrow my brow. I’d never thought about it. I was13, what did I know about politics? But the little sheet demanded an answer so I reasoned it out. Well, I’m pretty funny and generally outgoing. I’m captain of my soccer team. I ran for student council. Heck, according to these answers I’m a little misfit! And even if I really wasn’t, the mere act of filling it out as such must merit something. Given my 8^th grade knowledge of the definitions of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, I surmised that I certainly wasn’t conservative, or shy, by any stretch of the imagination therefore I must be a liberal*! 

Fast forward all through high school where I had zero political knowledge or interest outside of a watching a few snippets of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal unfold and now I get to college. Being at the end of the alphabet lottery for that semester, I got my last choice for freshman year seminar, Violence of Everyday Life of Latin America. Boy was it an awakening. It was taught by probably the most liberal professor on campus (and that’s saying something for a college campus) and I learned all about the dirty little wars the US had been in and the role the US played in installing dictators and puppet governments all throughout Latin and Central America who then turned around and killed or disappeared thousands of their own citizens. Talk about something you never, ever learn about in your normal K-12 education!

I went to a good public high school and was in all of the Advanced Placement classes, yet had never acquired this depth of knowledge, nor were these type things discussed in my household. My professor would pepper our lessons about Latin America with other typical liberal hot button issues: garbage and climate change, evil corporations, poverty, and so forth. It was everything I thought college would be: an intellectual revolution. I was learning about concepts and events I'd never studied before and the veil that shrouded the world during my public school education had finally been lifted. Or so I thought. 

I wasn't so lucky.

See here's the thing. If you think back about your education, what is the one constant that you get whatever grade you're in? You get some form of social studies, government, or US history class, right? Every public holiday like President's Day or Columbus Day or Veteran's Day provides multiple excuses per year to remind every school child in America just how great America is, how great every president we've ever had was, why every war we were ever in was good and justified and how we made the world a better place by being involved in such wars. We honor State figures. We don't honor entrepreneurs and innovators like Steve Jobs, who has probably done more to better America and the world than almost any president, the same way we do statesmen.

This freshman seminar of mine was eye-opening. It was the first time I had heard in any phase of my education that maybe America wasn't all around great, grand, and wonderful in every aspect. I finally heard about the seedy side of American history, the stuff that the 80% of Americans who don't attend college were never taught in all their years of K-12 schooling. I learned big words like 'hegemony'. Which is cool, I mean, that's what college is for right? And I was so enamored and excited to finally be learning, as opposed to the usual school method of memorizing and regurgitating, that I soaked up whatever I was told. My professor would trot out other liberal talking points and by virtue of my almost never having studied them or learned about them all through public school, I soaked them in like I did all the info about America's dirty wars and pursuit of worldwide hegemony. And thus a liberal was born. 

Apparently it wasn't just me, however. What I find interesting is that, while I still don't think that my university would rank as one of the most liberal universities out there, nonetheless I'd say that out of the people I'm still acquaintances with from college I would say that fully 75% of them or more are liberals. Did they start off that way or did they become that way through the university process? I don't know. But I'll take a guess as to why this is in just a minute.

Several years later after enduring a terrible Bush presidency and excited for some Hope and Change, it took just a couple of years into Obama's first term when I started to realize that he didn't seem to be cashing in on any of his campaign promises. In fact, I recognized him as engaging in the same behaviors, or even exacerbating them, as his predecessor. In the interest of being intellectually honest, I realized that I couldn't support Obama for doing or saying the exact same things that I criticized George Bush for. So I found myself in political limbo. I was seeking answers. I was confused. I turned to my comfortable liberal haven, reading books by Ralph Nader and agreeing with what the problems were but feeling his solutions were lacking.

My husband suggested expanding my circle and reading something outside of the box, perhaps on the other side of the spectrum. I had a think and remembered a friend posting a few things about Ron Paul during the 2008 election. At that time, I looked at his webpage for about 2 minutes in an attempt to "inform" myself before deciding his ideas didn't make any sense and dismissing him. Other than that, I didn't know much about him. So I picked up his book, Revolution: A Manifesto, and much like my first course in college, my mind was blown. 

Dr. Paul was talking about things no other politician ever talked about, like the Federal Reserve and how it contributes to all of our economic instability. It made perfect sense in context of our recent housing bust. If I had heard anything about the Federal Reserve at all before (very seldom), it was usually talked about as just another integral part of the government like the Supreme Court or House of Representatives, not some insidious institution created in secret for the benefit of a few bankers and their well-connected friends. 

I appreciated Dr. Paul's policy of non-intervention in foreign affairs. Finally, someone who sounded like he practiced what he preached! I was pleased to find out that he thought the War on Drugs was a waste of time and money as well. Furthermore, he didn't pull any punches when talking about the debt, entitlements, or anything else and he didn't demagogue the issues like a standard politician usually does. 

Lastly, how many politicians can you say genuinely inspired you to learn more about economics? Economics was yet another hole in my education that a mere one semester as a high school senior hardly filled. No more! Hayek, Hazlitt, Mises and more now filled my reading list due to the interesting and common sense ideas of theirs that Dr. Paul touched upon in his book.

You see, here's the other thing about the typical American public education. As I mentioned before, we get educated about government and US history and important political figures almost every day for the entire duration of our primary and secondary education. Government did this, government created this program, this President was responsible for this, and so on. Yet in all your years of education, can you remember any significant schooling on free market principles? On entrepreneurship? Did you learn about how capitalism has improved the standard of living for people worldwide or were you taught that businessmen like Carnegie and Rockefeller were robber barons who exploited workers for personal gain? Were you ever taught about the Constitution? If so, was this put into any real world context i.e. well according to the 4th Amendment we have an expectation of privacy and the government can't seize our belongings or spy on us without a warrant but the Patriot Act violates that? Did you ever do a thought exercise encouraging you to brainstorm private sector or individual alternatives to government run institutions? Are you ever taught at any time and at any level that government just might be the cause of and not the solution to many of the problems we face today? I bet not.

Even in my senior year econ class, all I remember learning about is There Is No Such Thing As a Free Lunch and some general supply and demand curves. Econ was just something you had to take for a few weeks as almost a crash course in "here's how the world out there operates" before they shoved you out into the real world. As for the rest, well, I wrote a lot of papers in school. I did many presentations, both group and individual. I did some chemistry. I took lots of tests (oh Scantron, how I don't miss you). I read lots of Shakespeare (why is Shakespeare still considered required reading?). And yet something that I learned almost nothing about was running a business. You never learn anything about prices and wages, about how and why they rise and fall (hint: it's not by government decree). You don't learn about taxes and taxation or how to file a tax return. You don't hear anything about inflation. For all the time we spend on government for 12 years you never hear boo-diddly about the Federal Reserve (at least not back then, I don't know if things have changed more recently). No, it's not one of the official branches of government but for an institution that controls the monetary policy for the entire country and, by default, the world, it certainly does a good job of remaining in the shadows and out of the realm of public discussion (by design, I'm sure). 

Supposedly that's all considered "higher education". The basic functioning of an economy, how it grows and why it crashes, is way too complicated for the majority of the citizens to understand, or so we're made to believe. It's reserved for university study and only if it's in a field of interest for you. If it's not part of your field of study, then even with all your higher education you still have no knowledge of capitalism or a free market. You get 12+ years of government education at government schools and maybe about 4 total months of any sort of business or economics education in your life. Given all this, is it any wonder that the vast majority of people look to government for the answers to everything? Is it any wonder that there are so many economic illiterates out there who think that prosperity comes from the barrel of a gun pointed at you by the government? Who think that the way to enrich everyone is to just steal the wealth and property of anyone and everyone and hand it out to those specially protected government groups and businesses? Is it any wonder that generations of people who've systematically never been exposed to the ideas of liberty are reluctant to embrace them? Not really. But all that is slowly but surely changing.  

It only took me one reading of Ron Paul's book for the liberty light bulb to switch on in my head. Here were some ideas that had never been presented to me before and yet they immediately took hold. They filled in the gaps where I felt the liberal ideology fell short and what I saw as a flaw in government when I recognized Obama as pursuing many of the same misguided policies as Bush, despite his promises to the contrary. It only took me a few election cycles to realize that no matter who you put in office, nothing really changes, and libertarianism explained why. 

I felt that, like me, most people just had never been introduced to the ideas of liberty and once they were informed about them (I mean, as Americans we're supposed to cherish freedom and liberty, right?) that most people would see the light. Boy have I been proven wrong. One does not overcome a lifetime of government indoctrination as easily I did. But then again, I have a history of marching to the beat of my own drum. That doesn't mean I will stop trying. That's the purpose of this blog. It's not big, but it gets enough hits every time that I hope it will open some eyes along the way. Freedom is worth fighting for. Liberty is achievable. The free market is beautiful. I hope that I'm able to do my small part to help open some eyes and create a few "former liberals" or "former Republicans" along the way.

Are you a former something or other? What did you or didn't you learn in school that shaped (either rightly or wrongly) your views? Leave a comment and tell me about it!

*As an aside, I think the names used to describe political ideologies themselves i.e. "conservative" and "liberal" work against anyone who believes in limited government. The connotations are all wrong. Much like what my experience taught me, what normal teenage kid, whether they know a lick about politics or not, wants to think of themselves as "conservative"? Adolescence is nothing if not a series of events trying to prove how cool, avant garde, and rebellious one is. If a teenager were to organically drift over to the political realm and were curious to find out more, do you think they would be enticed to learn more about "liberals" and "progressives" or "conservatives"? The labels work against us. Perhaps the label of "libertarian" will garner a few more inquisitive minds but I think something liberals/progressives/Democrats do substantially better than the conservative/Republican side is branding and messaging. It's something limited government supporters need to figure out if they have any hope of growing their ranks.