I have created and will be maintaining this website under a pseudonym. The reason for this anonymity is because of my real-life circumstances.
I live in a rural part of a “red state” (using the modern parlance – I first became politically aware in an era when “red” still meant something rather different). Most of my local friends, neighbors and coworkers are unabashedly Trumpist. At worst, they are openly racist, gun-hoarding xenophobes, and at best, they are anti-government, Randist “libertarian” or “prepper” types.
In fact, I came to my current political position as a self-described libertarian. I am sympathetic to libertarian ideals, but the question must arise: if libertarianism is advocating maximum liberty, exactly what sort of liberty are we speaking of trying to maximize?
The current American libertarian right is interested almost solely in maximizing a “liberty of conscience” (and thus of behavior) and perhaps a “liberty of opportunity.” It tends to exist in flat denial of what I prefer, which is a maximization of actual human liberty on the ground. Paradoxically, oftentimes, if you embrace this latter ideal, you realize that in fact government serves a very important role: it helps you keep the playing field level.
Therefore although I consider my core political instinct to be libertarian, I lean leftward with respect to the role of government. This is in line with anodyne, centrist movements such as “State Capacity Libertarianism” but can lead in the directions as extreme as Libertarian Socialism or Anarcho-Syndicalism. I would simply say I am a “left-libertarian” without any hint of contradiction and without trying to pinpoint where on the leftward spectrum I want to stand.
I find the current Manichaean arrangement of political parties in the U.S. to leave both poles philosophically incoherent. Both parties espouse both interventionist “big” government in some respects and espouse laissez-faire “small” government in other respects.
I have become something of a single-issue voter, though, and when confronted with a choice between Democrat and Republican, I let that single issue control me. That issue is the raison d’être for this website: open borders. For now, because of this, the Democratic Party has my loyal support, straight down the ticket. The Democrats are not an “open borders” party, by any stretch of the imagination, but they are at least not xenophobic wall-builders, as has become normalized for the Republican Party in recent years. I assert the need to accept a “least worst” approach to voting, and will not throw away my vote on a third party just due to some stand on principle.
I do have other views on other political issues. I expect the blog part of this site will focus on my trying to work out, in real-time, a consistent “human-liberty-maximizing” platform for myself, always bearing in mind that for me, the ethical imperative for this century is that migration is a human right.
I have started using Mastodon