August 5, 2003

• One of the things I've been thinking about while watching too much CSPAN on cable TV is this: Where do I sit on the political spectrum, and why does it matter?
  
  I'll answer the second question first: It matters because you have to take sides. In order to get anything done, you have to find an audience and/or a consituency and/or a consensus. This is a real problem, because if you want to be taken seriously, you can't just put the tip of your toe in the water. You have to dive off the diving board. The problem is that the process of partisan politics shears away anything interesting from those involved. For instance, no partisan neo-conservative will give an inch on the fact that Bush lied out his pie-hole during the state of the union address. And no partisan Democrat will admit that there's any value in occupying Iraq (there are a couple of valid reasons to be there, but none are being pursued by BushCo).
  
  The point being that to change minds you have to quit being yourself, and you're not going to change any minds anyway.
  
  Politics is such an intellectual and spiritual dead end, but if you want anything better for society, you have to take sides.
  
  So to approach myself from the point of view of political taxonomy, I'd call myself a liberal libertarian. I guess I'm a fan of individual liberty, and not a fan of power and priviledge ending up in the hands of legal entities like corporations. This makes me a 'classical liberal,' which means that in modern parlance, I'm a conservative. Except that in present-day useage, the term 'conservative' also carries a whole set of cultural baggage.
  
  I'm a fan of Wendell Barry's 'agrarianism,' as it applies to local and sustainable economies. Berry has put these ideas into their most eloquent forms, and somehow manages to poetically tie his economic vision into the mythos of the American breadbasket. He cuts to the chase: If you don't know where your food comes from, then you don't know how you're staying alive. And if you don't know where your money goes when you buy your food, then you don't know how your community is staying alive.
  
  I'm also a fan of natural capitalism, which seeks to use technology and the profit motive to, in the short view, solve environmental problems, and, in the long view, bring about another industrial revolution, with greater profitability and higher standard of living.
  
  Being a fan of these two things means that conservatives call me a liberal, and that liberals call me a conservative. That's just one example of how screwed up partisan politics are right now.

  • 9:05 pm
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