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August 05, 2007

Epiphany: I am a Progressive. My story

A little bit ago I was reading at Blue Oregon, one of my favorite reads and a self-described Progressive blog, and as I typically do before posting a comment I was running what I wanted to say through my mind... sorta like a one-sided conversation. It helps me clarify exactly what I want to say, when it occurred to me to ask myself whether I might be a Progressive, a label which I've long viscerally rejected placing upon myself.

I think maybe I am a Progressive, and that's no easy thing for me to say.

I first became politically aware during the Nixon Impeachment hearings in 1974. I was 10 years old and had somehow acquired a crystal radio with one of those single earplugs that were common back then. To my young mind it was readily apparent that this Impeachment thing was pretty major. I've always had a very high EQ and I could tell by the tone of the voices I was hearing through that earplug that this was a momentus thing that was happening. I was instantly hooked and followed the issue on that radio as much as I could.

After that rather rude initial introduction to the wonderful world of American politics I quickly figured out that although there was no doubt in my mind that what Nixon had done was wrong, that I nevertheless identified with the Republican point of view... and rather strongly at that. I saw Nixon as a great man who had done good things, but who had been corrupted by power and made a very grave mistake. This must have taken a couple years to really process because my next memory of really immersing myself in politics was two years later. We were living in Cave Junction in the Southwest corner of Oregon and I once again had a radio. I don't remember what kind of radio it was but what I do remember is that I was able to receive a consistently strong signal from the Sanfrancisco Bay area's KGO radio station which at that time had a talk radio format with a heavy emphasis on politics. Maybe it still does... I don't know. I haven't listened to it in decades and don't even know whether it still exists. But what's relevant here is that the more I immersed myself in politics the more strongly I self-identified as a Republican. Issues of conservative versus liberal didn't really occur to me until a number of years later. I just knew that I was a very partisan Republican at heart and I particularly loved the partisan aspect of it. It was us versus them and I definitely wanted the good guys to win.

Somehow I intuitively knew that most folks weren't as fascinated with politics as I was. So I just assumed that my parents didn't share my keen interest in politics. At the very least they never talked about politics. I knew that they voted but had no idea who they voted for. In my niavety I just assumed that as apparently rational people they surely must vote for Republicans. One day we were driving somewhere in our customized Chevy van (this was the 70's after all...) just after the Oregon Primary and the subject came up. My dad said that he'd voted for Gerald Ford - the only rational choice from my 12 year old's perspective. Then my mother utterly floored me by announcing that she'd voted for Jerry Brown!!! Jimminy Christmas... my mom was a flaming Liberal!! My first thought was that she'd lost her mind. I'm serious! But that didnt' last long because she's always been one of the smartest, most rational people I've ever known in my life. Deeply perplexed and utterly unable to wrap my young mind around this profound dichotomy I filed it away in my mind as an unexplainable mystery and continued on with my partisan Republican worldview.

I wish I could say that Reagan's Iran/Contra scandal is what startled me out of my lazy political assumptions, but for some reason it was Bush 41's declaration that he had been "out of the loop" on the whole issue which broke the proverbial Camel's back. As a political junky I knew perfectly well that he'd been the CIA Director and Ambassador to China prior to becoming Vice President. Directorship of the CIA simply does not go to people who are ever "out of the loop" and clearly the ambassadorship to a hugely important nation like China would only ever go to the very best connected individuals, for patently obvious practical reasons. That's how I saw it then and it's how I see it today. Faced with this, IMHO, bald-faced lie by my Republican Vice President, coupled with the excuses for the entire sordid mess which I was hearing from Rush Limbaugh (yeah... I was a Dittohead back then) I did the only thing that I could and concluded that I'd been duped. After a couple years of mounting frustration and anger I severed my formal relationship with the GOP and reregistered as an Independent... which I remain to this day. There is another, arguably more critical chapter to my ideological evolution during this same period but I don't want to wander too far afield here.

Even as an Independent I continued to prefer moderate Republicans at the ballot box by a roughly 2 or 3 to 1 ratio over Democrats. More importantly, I self-identified strongly as right-of-center ideologically. Then I met Carla.

I got recruited off an AOL message board devoted to "discussing" (yeah, that's a mighty generous description but it's what it was called...) the 2000 choice between Bush/Gore to join a now defunct Senate Simulation game being hosted by AOL. The recruitment email was geared towards recruiting players to join either the SIM Democratic or Progressive parties, but to my mind there was only one choice - the SIM Indies! Ironically, although that didn't become obvious until much later, Carla was half of the two-person recruiting team which had emailed me. I should add that the Senate SIM is also where I first met Alan (a listed PK writer who hasn't written here for a long time), Donald (another AWOL former writer at my other (dead) blog - Indie Castle and Burnt Orange Report co-founder and ex-writer Jim Dallas. Oh, and occasional PK commenter Chris C. was, along with Donald, another fellow SIM Indie.

Living just a few miles from each other, Carla and I eventually met in person and instantly became fast friends. In fact it was during one of our many meet ups at Starbucks that I first coined the phrase "Preemptive Karma." It was originally just a sarcastic/ironic wordplay on Bush's preemptive war philosophy. But the more I thought about it the more I liked the term. Anyway, through many a discussion over Starbucks coffee she managed to yank me to the left and I slowly changed my ideological self-identification to simple Centrist. But that's where I drew the line...

The problem is that although I didn't like it, I couldn't evade the inherent logic in her argument that "Centrism" is ideologically meaningless because the goalposts are constantly changing. So over the last year or so I've grudgingly conceeded to myself that I am ideologically ever so slightly left-of-center, but I've continued to cling to that "center" part. Prior to that my self-identity as right-of-center must have been readily obvious because one of the early blogs to link to PK described my political voice as Slacker Conservatism, whatever that means...

So this morning I was reading an exchange in comments over at Blue Oregon between self-described progressives. Having an opinion on what was being discussed I was doing my usual pre-comment routine and running what I wanted to say through my mind... As I said at the inception here, it's sorta like a one-sided conversation... as if I were really speaking to the group in person. I dunno why I do that but I always have. Somehow it helps me clarify exactly what I want to say.

Anyway, for whatever reason it occurred to me to ask myself if I am a progressive. See, it's an issue that's always there in my mind when I join in a conversation with a group of progressives. In the past I've usually gone out of my way to couch myself as not actually a progressive. So it's always there when I read Blue Oregon. But this morning the answer was different.

I went to Wikipedia and went to the section on Progressivism in the United States and read, trying for the first time to honestly guage whether it's description of the tenets of Progressivism really do fit me. For the most part they do.

What doesn't fit is the advocation of Socialism by some (but not all!) Progressives. Nor do I particularly buy the Laissez-Faire tenet, another less than univeral tenet of Progressivism. And while I readily agree with the philosophical underpinnings of the labor union movement and do believe that they serve a useful purpose, it is my personal experience, having been a union member, that in practice unionism is most often a "pot, meet kettle" thing. But, other than those exceptions the rest of it I can confidently endorse and support.

I guess I am a Progressive. A staunchly Independent Progressive. But a Progressive nevertheless. And THAT is going to take some getting used to...

Posted by Kevin at August 5, 2007 07:17 AM