About

When I was a teenager (back in the late 60s/early 70s), I was an unapologetic radical lefty; anti-war, anti-government, anti-military/industrial complex. I wore my hair long, I smoked a lot of dope, I went to every anti-war (and anti-anything else) rally I could get to. I read Marx and Alinsky.

I stole that book.

I was young and naive enough to believe that the radical revolutionaries I idolized (Students for a Democratic Society, Weather Underground, Youth International Party, etc.) were truly committed to peace, despite the violence of their rhetoric (and, often enough, of their actions).

Needless to say, my own anti-war feelings got much stronger when I was required to report to my local draft board for a pre-induction physical on or around my 18th birthday. I had my sights set on Montreal (like nearly 100,000 of my contemporaries) and had convinced myself that it was the only principled thing to do (as it turned out, push never came to shove; the fall of Saigon happened before my number came up).

It wasn’t until the US pulled out of the Vietnam War and the mass murder committed by the now effectively unopposed communists there and in Cambodia came to light – and my “anti-war” heroes had nothing to say about it – that I started to waver in my devotion to the “cause”…

Despite being a little late for the summer of love, I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out in the early 70s, and, as a result, wandered from one dead-end job to another for the next 10 years.

I spent the worst of the Ford/Carter years working as a gas station attendant, a landscaper’s laborer, and a lawn mower operator/gravedigger in a cemetery; the best job I had that entire decade was mounting/balancing tires and doing oil changes at a Firestone store for barely a subsistence wage.

10 years of reality chipped away at my revolutionary resolve until I started seriously entertaining the idea that maybe capitalism wasn’t completely evil, after all; it was clear to me that the soft socialism of the Carter era was wreaking economic havoc on the country and something had to change.

Then, the most extraordinary thing happened: I decided to actually vote in a Presidential election (my first), and to the horror of my lefty friends, I voted for Reagan.

I voted for him again in 1984, and, despite extreme ambivalence, I voted for Bush 41 in 1988 (I’m not sure the Democrats could have fielded a candidate I would have voted for, but they didn’t even really try; I mean come on: Dukakis was the best you guys could do? [Actually, I just looked up the other Democratic contenders from that cycle: pathetic]).

Bush 41 turned out to be a pretty huge disappointment after Reagan, and Perot seemed like a crackpot to me at the time, so I didn’t even bother voting in ‘92. Then the Republicans picked Bob Dole to put up against Clinton in ‘96, so what was the point?

Despite even more ambivalence towards the son than I’d had for the father, I voted for Bush 43 in 2000 (actually, I was voting more against Gore than for Bush) and I voted for him again (actually, once again, I was voting against someone; this time Kerry) in 2004.

It didn’t take long for me to become totally disgusted with that choice, and long before 2008, I started looking for alternatives.

I was a Precinct Captain for the Ron Paul 2008 Presidential Campaign, and would have voted for him in the general election: when he withdrew, I ended up voting for Bob Barr, as I thought he was the next best choice.

(I now believe that the idea that voting for the candidate you believe to be best-qualified – unless they happen to be the official Republican or Democratic candidate – is “throwing away your vote” is pure nonsense. I also believe it’s one of the primary misconceptions that keeps us locked in to the “one party with two names” system that’s been running this country into the ground for the last 100 years.)

With all that, you’ve probably realized that I stopped being a Democrat 30 years ago, that I pretty much gave up on the Republican party sometime in the last 10, and, since I voted for Bob Barr in 2008, you may be thinking I’m a Libertarian. And you wouldn’t be far off, although I’m not sure I can say that I’m totally in agreement with the Libertarian Party, either.

When people ask me about my politics, I usually say that I’m a “small ‘r’ republican”, because I believe in the founding principles of the republic as the founders intended, and I believe the modern Republican Party has strayed much too far from those principles, so I want to make it clear that I don’t support – or belong to – the “big ‘R’ Republican” Party.

I believe Jefferson summed it up best in his first Inaugural Address:

“[A] wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government…”