My Political Journey

Liberal, to Communist, to Authoritarian, to Conservative.

The purpose of this essay is to explain my journey through political ideologies so that hopefully those who read my other works will have a better understanding of why I think the way I do.

Past:

Although I’m an American from birth, I was born in China and grew up in Taiwan. My family moved to the US when I was fourteen.

It’s such a different culture over there and I will have to do a whole essay on everything I learned comparing Taiwan and America. But I can say here that being fully immersed in two distinct and unique countries taught me the importance of thinking globally. Also, Taiwan is independent. Just saying.

I only started thinking about politics after moving to the US, and mostly as a result of the 2016 election. But I had been into philosophy for a while before which is probably the main reason I first supported Bernie Sanders; he represented a lot of the ideals I had concluded from thinking philosophically: equality, unity, honesty, etc.

I liked it when he spoke about a world without poverty, where everything was shared, and people lived in harmony despite their differences. And I liked that he didn’t change his beliefs to become more popular; he was consistent. In my mind, the point of government was to provide these ideals to the people, so I wanted him to be president.

When Trump won I was worried. I’ve always been an inherently optimistic person so I wanted to give him a chance, but what I had seen of him on the campaign trail made it difficult. Still, I knew we’d have him for the next four years so I decided this was the time to properly learn about politics. I wanted to be able to make educated judgments about the new government, but also, I wanted to learn so that one day I could bring about the better world that Bernie spoke of.

I quickly realized that the best way to learn about political ideologies was to try out believing in them and then find people who would challenge them; that’s how I went from Liberal, to Communist, to Authoritarian, and then to Conservative.

I first took my philosophical beliefs to their extreme; Communism fulfilled my utopia perfectly. No one would want for anything and everyone is perfectly equal. However, learning about world history taught me the dangers of attempting to install Communism. It taught me that the part of human nature that desires power needs to be constrained, not encouraged by a dictatorship of the proletariat.

That led me to become Authoritarian. Maybe, I thought, a good person who just wants to make the world better could use the immense efficiency of a dictatorship to achieve utopia. I liked Plato’s idea for a philosopher-king; I liked that maybe it could be me. But learning more about political freedom ruled out that notion. Everyone deserves a voice in how their country is run.

How I got to Conservatism was by learning about the Founding Fathers and their Constitution of the United States. I realized that they had built a system that harnessed human nature for political efficiency and accountability, that they had designed a whole country on the philosophical values I respected, and that they had thought through all the different types of leadership, sort of like I had, to come to a unifying conclusion.

Present:

Although I have come to despise political labels as I think they hinder understanding rather than help it, I have chosen a broad one for myself just to make conversations easier: socially conservative and economically liberal.

Especially after the stupidity of the far left’s backlash to Trump, doubling down on identity politics and extremism, I settled into socially conservative beliefs like valuing personal freedoms and seeking less government intervention. I believe the Founding Fathers intended this philosophy too.

However, after concluding that America’s structure of government is the best type around, I got into questioning the specifics of it and how it’s been used and changed over time. I think many small alterations could make our country even better, and most of them involve some form of economic redistribution.

Future:

That’s one reason why I’m economically liberal, the other is because I still hold that some aspects of Communism are inevitable, especially with the rise of autonomous manufacturing.

One of my favorite sci-fi books is Childhood’s End by Sir Arthur C. Clark because it presents a utopia that I dream of seeing one day. Everyone gets what they need to survive, few need to work anymore, and most people spend their lives on schooling, research, or exploration. I believe this is the future of humanity and I want to help bring it about.

I plan on pursuing a career in politics; hopefully even running for president one day. While many politicians choose to hide, ignore, or alter their pasts, I want to show mine to prove that my beliefs change, nothing is set in stone.

I no longer support Bernie, I believe he is too radical for our times. If he had been born 100 years later he would be more successful. But that belief too may change again. The world changes, why not change with it?