directional-wingers

I'm apparently now a crazy liberal.

Or at least it seems that way whenever I talk to people about anything other than economics.

Here's the problem.

"Liberals" as a whole are far less "liberal" about social issues, ethics, or the expanse of civil liberties that should be protected than I am. Liberals as a whole are greatly annoyed at the Citizens United decision for example. I applauded it. Most liberals may be in favor of marijuana being legalised or at least decriminalized. I am okay with even heroin being legal. Liberals are more in favor of civil liberties that should extend to homosexuals. But they're not comfortable enough to say that this should include the term "marriage" as applied to the unions of their couples (this is at least the position taken publicly by Obama for example). Many such liberals don't even have consistent views on these. They may be okay with equal civil privileges and liberties for homosexuals but not okay with drugs or not adequately and categorically opposed to torture and indefinite detention regimes for example.

When I took a political compass test, I come out so far on the "social liberal" scale that I don't exist on the American political scale (I tend to get somewhere around a -6 or -7 on that axis). Ralph Nader comes the closest, with Kucinich or Ron Paul maybe in the next standard deviation after that. "Democrats", labeled in this country as radical leftists by their opposition, come in as modest conservatives on social matters (on average or as a whole). They're hardly liberal enough for me to take them seriously as a result. As an example, I suppose if I took Obama's civil liberties positions during the campaign more directly, I would be disappointed. He has largely ignored those positions since. I would be more so if I had taken them directly because they were more in line with the anti-terrorism views I have and thus voted for him. It was this that I felt most likely to actually change through executive action alone. Passing the other stuff like health care or extracting us from Iraq or Afghanistan was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Besides Obama ran on committing more troops and support to the Afghan front. I didn't vote for him. I'm too cynical for that. The disaffection I have is more on things like the support of the Afghan war and his opposition to free trade, positions which he did run on and has kept his word on. Which makes it a lot harder to get annoyed or surprised.

But for me there's usually a further political problem than merely identifying people with even a modest amount of respect for civil liberties and limitations on social and individual restrictions placed by law. I see the same sort of limitations as unnecessary to restrain businesses and markets. Republicans claim a sort of "right" of center conservative nature on markets. And yet they constantly exhibit the same sort of ridiculous corporatism or interferences caused by anti-market biases that Democrats use in their rhetoric. I've had to spend the last two years explaining that this country is and has been for a long time a far more socialistic enterprise than people are aware. That path was started a long, long time ago. It didn't change because we elected some radical leftist to the "throne" anymore than it was beaten back by the ascension of some "radical" conservative in 2000 or even in 1980 (with their patron saint Reagan). Americans are viewed by Europeans and other developed nations as having a vastly more market oriented economy than they have (with a couple exceptions like Hong Kong and Singapore). And yet when they observe portions of it, often key portions, it's nothing like an unfettered market at all (and sometimes less of a free and open market than they use). Health care, the supposed road being taken down the socialist path of hell, is the main example here. If you wanted to design a market for health care based on "free market principles" it wouldn't look anything like the tapestry of regulations, mandates, monopolistic barriers, and so on that we've deliberately put place even before discussing that we provide health care as a form of wealth transfer from the young to the old (and often as a result, the poor to the rich). I have no objections to people spending their money on the care of their elders. I guess that's considered noble and good and one assumes that one reason is that we would like our progeny to care for us in our advanced age and retirements. But do we really want to claim that the methods we use to do so are guided by "free markets" as the proscribed cause of our ills in the health care sector's economic performance (or lack there of)? I think not, maybe that's just me. And this is the precise program that was defended all last year from cuts and changes in the mandates or recommendations over what procedures to use and pay for by this supposed "party of markets" on the right. It goes on down the line from this, with things like opposing different methods of open markets for schools or the ending of food subsidies (both of which are things that most Republicans do not actually support). It goes further into things like immigration, where Republicans are far more likely to spout belligerent nonsense that ends up being anti-market and protectionist.

I typically get around a 6 on the economic scale. Republicans rhetorically are sometimes nearer to me on this axis than Democrats ever are on civil liberties, but in fact Democrats are not that far behind on this one (whereas Republicans usually are pretty far away on the social scale, enough to be diametrically opposite rather than merely annoyingly so). The idea that they're radical leftists puts a lot of undue impression and importance on the amount of distinct policies they support. Supporting corn subsidies to produce ethanol to prop up energy companies instead of propping up agricultural corporate giants isn't much of a big deal from where I sit.

I guess that makes me a radical politically. But I'm not sure what direction that goes.

More examples: I live in Ohio, which is considered a swing state, but which to me sits firmly as a conservative one. We barely passed legal gambling (other than lotteries and scratch offs) after several tries. We have laws restricting the behavior in strip clubs (private businesses which could enforce their own rules quite well through social customs), dry counties, what seems to be an absurd church to house ratio in some towns, and are one of the poster child states for the worst forms of abstinence only education (those that defame condoms and methods of birth control as harmful and more dangerous than unprotected sex). Despite this apparent "conservativism" or otherwise right-wing behavior, this is also a state that passed amendments to its constitution providing for farm price controls and subsidies (glorifying these laws with the difficulty of reform or repeal rather than merely passing them as temporary measures). It spent an absurd amount of time and energy passing a public smoking ban on restaurants and bars (rather than allowing the continuing trend of consumers to make these decisions themselves and impose them in the de facto sense instead of the legally binding method). Assessing to the state more power is hardly a "right-wing" paradise in my view, or at least it doesn't seem to be consistent with the vision of a small and modest purpose for government as espoused by such conservatives.

It doesn't exactly endear me to a vision of supporting either side of "wingers" when they merely change the form those powers will take over individual choices and preferences when they change sides.