For you loyal readers, you may recognize the journey-based subheading: it’s almost the same one I used on a post four years back—a lifetime ago, seems like, in the lead up to the last Presidential election. There I told about my immigration path in America. But there’s a life journey that goes back even further.
The way I was (and wasn’t)
It’s hard to believe—least of all to me these days—that I once called myself conservative.
OK, I wasn’t really, not by the standards in America today, or even those back then. I wasn’t even living in the U.S. at the time. In my case, I was really just copying (some) family and (some) community, folks who were more in the neoconservative mold like Marty Peretz or Paul Wolfowitz.
I was also an obedient, closeted nerd, and in my life back then, the liberals/libertines seemed to be my biggest tormentors. I was just a kid, not some celebrity journalist, but my journey was a lot like David Brock’s, whose book I read many years later and could deeply relate. Between that and (yes) a high-school reading of The Fountainhead, the worldview seemed set: progressive ideas are nice in theory, but in practice are always co-opted by mean, selfish or lazy people, and therefore have no chance of working. Only competition and the free market can channel human ugliness to its highest and best use.
I was never a social conservative per se, but as with a lot of fiscal and geopolitical neocons, some ideas seeped in. Since the party kids were such assholes, it made sense for me to live a life of abstinence. But that was as far as I went. I never disbelieved evolution, always believed recreational drugs should be legalized (going so far as to write a tenth-grade essay about it), and absolutely supported a woman’s right to choose.
As for the rest of those right-wing ideas, one part of my youth offered an escape.
A sci-fi view of life
I had my religion back then, and it was science-fiction. Even when others scoffed, I had my idols to guide me: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, even good old Albert Einstein. And in movie-land, Lucas and Spielberg, among others, were having their heyday. The authors I read put forward a vision of the world that could be better if only we were better. Actually, there’s another sci-fi franchise that borrowed from many earlier writers (such as H.G. Wells) and really perfected that paradigm: Star Trek. To this day, I’m still waiting for those Vulcans to land on Earth, and have us collectively grow the heck up.
It’s always been hard to fit science (and science-fiction) into the political spectrum. In America, commercialization of scientific discoveries has practically been the nation’s founding mantra—and the reason so many of us, including me, ended up here. From drilling for oil to electric light to the airplane, the discovery of DNA, and the microprocessor, science and industry have gone together. The military has funded many scientific endeavors, from the Manhattan Project to the Internet. Looking at the suit-and-tie-wearing IBM professional from the nineteen-sixties and you might be more inclined to associate science and technology folks with the conservative crowd instead of the wacky-doodle notions of Trekdom.
Harsh realities, new realizations
Maybe that’s why I never really thought much about how my big-picture world view collided with my onetime conservatism. Even discovering I was gay didn’t move the needle much from my straitlaced self—at least not at first. It did force me to confront how much my disdain for the partying life was really hidden jealousy—which I think animates lots of conservatives today still. Cue all those jokes about Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham.
But there was one book in particular that helped push me over the fence: Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On. Learning how Reagan-era conservatism basically left people to die because their disease at first disproportionately affected gays was a game-changer. Screw the virtues of the free market, or being tough on Soviet Communism. This facet of the Reagan Revolution was just plain wrong.
I think, back then, you probably could have called me a libertarian—that crowd that proudly calls itself “socially liberal yet fiscally conservative.” To be fair, the social/fiscal dichotomy of today’s conservatism has always been a weird marriage. But it took me a few more years of career and life tribulations to realize that there’s a reason so many well-off, often white folks are fiscal conservatives: hailing from elite career and/or socio-economic backgrounds, they cling to a narrative about the virtue of hard work, a hatred of inefficiency and waste, and a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that’s ingrained in the American psyche.
A lot more years of wandering, reading and exploring led me to question this notion as well—to say nothing of working with actual die-hard conservatives in the American Midwest. Some takeaways: for one thing, it’s not like conservatives have a monopoly on hard work; early left-wing labor movements celebrated it too. Likewise, the notion that we all start from the same place in life—so-called equal opportunity—has long since been debunked. If there’s one thing this pandemic has made clear, it’s that plenty of disregarded, poorly-paid workers not only work hard, they’re in fact essential to our economy functioning. Although most of us don’t truly support everyone getting the exact same wage, can the difference between an Amazon delivery driver and Jeff Bezos really be justified in anyone’s view of the world?
My conversion completes
What finally clinched my ideological journey, however, came when I did those typical grown-up things a smidge later in life: marrying, co-owning a fixer-upper single-family home, and having a child. There were a couple of dimensions to this evolution: for one thing, same-sex marriage was a right we had to fight for, one that didn’t exist yet in this country when I met my spouse. In addition to the obvious side of the political spectrum that put me, there’s another wrinkle I seldom realized for many years: even though I’d been out and proud for decades, like so many LGBTs who’d come of age before it became so normalized, there was always a notion of existing on the margins, on the periphery. An apartment-dwelling single fellow treads with a lighter footprint than a family. Boy, did that become clear while embarking on a massive renovation in one of the most difficult housing markets on Earth. I started to see the side of human experience I sheltered from myself for so long: the bare-knuckled scramble for resources that sadly defines too much of our time in this world.
I suppose for some that would make them double down on conservatism. It’s a movement that appeals broadly to the whole night is dark and full of terrors outlook on the world. But I couldn’t go back there, not having seen the very clear elements of randomness and inequality of opportunity all round me. There’s too much of a luck factor involved for me to ever take the conservative view of the world seriously, or believe it manages our dealing with the world’s chaos and unfairness most effectively. Consider the obvious advantages of upper-middle-class peers who work in elite financial or tech firms after having a fully-paid ride from Mom and Dad to attend an Ivy League college. Also consider the behavioral changes our unequal world elicits—which I believe explains the nasty, cruel streak that can accompany high performers in the workplace. If this is the best the free market can do, then no question we need to do better.
The final nail in my conservative coffin, however, was the aftermath of the Occupy movement of almost a decade ago. It may have ended up a mess, but it was the first modern-day movement that actually kickstarted the conversation around inequality, drawing attention to its stunning rise over the past decades—years that almost exactly match the life trajectories of Gen Xers like myself.
But what, then, of all those familiar critiques, those made on Fox News every night? I can summarize: the poor are (mostly) lazy; the rich earned what they have fair and square; government taxation and spending never works; socialism—indeed any social welfare programs—only lead to lazy people gaming the system. When the MAGA crowd yammers on about the radical left agenda, it’s usually these talking points that stand out.
Thing is, these are mostly bullshit, oversimplifications or gross exaggerations. Nobody’s shilling for the hyper-statist lunacy of Cold War-era Communism; even Elizabeth Warren said of successful businessfolk: “keep a big hunk of it.” Meanwhile, Reagan’s welfare queens and crack babies barely existed at all, much less to the scary degree he represented. And, as mentioned, examples of the rich not deserving their lot are too numerous to mention—way, way more numerous, it seems to me, than there ever have been welfare queens or crack babies combined. While cheating and gaming the system are always a problem, that cuts both ways—the amount of tax evasion among wealthy individuals and corporations is off the charts these days.
It’s in the question of taxes and government where I still think conservatives have a shred of a point—but just a shred, not the diseased extreme of Grover Norquist’s wacky-doodle tax pledge. The point is this: large, unaccountable entities are often lousy at getting stuff done efficiently. This is true of bureaucratic corporations and government agencies alike—plenty of large firms are shielded from market competition by the unassailable position they already hold. How to make organizations and institutions better, or reimagine them entirely, is a totally valid conversation to have—but in all the rage and hyperbole, I really don’t hear conservatives making it. “Fiscal conservatism” is often just code for allowing businesses to behave unaccountably—precisely the opposite of what it claims.
The (hopeful) path forward
In the end, though, I look back at my past and end up with my old scientists and sci-fi writers—and a line from the Broadway play-cum-HBO mini-series Angels in America: “You believe the world is perfectible and so you find it always unsatisfying.” It’s something the closeted Mormon character, who’s working for Roy Cohn in the story, says to the liberal Jewish gay guy he’s secretly dating.
That’s where I realized I’d always been progressive even if I didn’t know it. People like me may be less happy with the world as it is than those who think it can’t be changed—or those who don’t give a fuck. But that what motivates us to want to make it better, and never shakes our belief that it’s possible to do so. It’s not so much a rebellious rejection of the status quo as it is an unceasing quest to make things better.
Way I see it, the political side that’s moving in that direction will always get my vote.
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