My Political Evolution

How my life experiences shaped my peculiar outlook

“Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.”

— Walter Lippman

Once in a while, you will come across an insight that, in a single moment, seems to make sense of nearly everything. I had that experience when I was 18 years old.

I always had a passion for learning. But I hated school — especially my public high school. My high school had 4500 students packed onto a campus built for about one thousand. The buildings had to be about 60 years old and had not been renovated or even maintained. The water fountains didn’t work. There was trash everywhere. Much of the campus was surrounded by barbed wire.

School, to me, was a life-sucking institution. Yet everywhere I went outside of school, things were different. When I went to a restaurant or a store of any kind, the building wasn’t falling apart and the choice was abundant in products and services. The services themselves felt worth consuming.

When I became old enough to drive, I got my first taste of the DMV. And I noticed that the DMV seemed to have a lot in common with my public school. It also was over-crowded, looked like it hadn’t been renovated in about 60 years, and provided mediocre service — well, on a good day anyway.

The AAA office where I learned I could go for my car registration was a different world: clean interior, friendly staff, fast service, and free coffee!

I hadn’t made any connections yet. All I knew was that I hated my school, and I hated the DMV a little more.

In my senior year, I took a government class that I loved. Eventually, that led me to learn more on the internet where I came across an article by the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian think tank.

I don’t remember much about the article, except that it was making a radical proposal: full privatization of the K-12 education system. One sentence I can remember almost verbatim.

“The reason the public schools suck is the same reason the DMV sucks. They’re both run by the government.”

For a young kid trying to make sense of the world, that statement seemed to make everything click. Suddenly, all the frustration and drudgery of the last four years — and to an extent, the bulk of my childhood — seemed to have a coherent explanation. So I kept reading from the FEE.

I learned about how Social Security was on track to become insolvent, despite being the largest entitlement program in the richest country in the world. Medicare was facing a similar fate. I learned about the failure of the War on Drugs and how it had contributed to crime and poverty. I learned about the dismal failure of the welfare state and how it created perverse incentives that kept people trapped in poverty.

Then I stumbled across a few articles that explained some reasons for all of this. I remember reading one piece, which explained that “government is funded by taxes. And taxes, being mandatory, sever the relationship between costs and benefits.” (That single insight would inspire a post I wrote recently about the Elusiveness of Effective Government, which explores this concept).

Suddenly, I didn’t just have an explanation for my experience with society’s institutions. I felt I had an explanation for many of society’s problems.

In my youthful zeal and idealism, I became a dogmatic apologist for libertarianism. I joined internet forums and turned online debating into an art form.

I spent hours every day reading from libertarian thinkers: The FEE, The Cato Institute, and of course, Libertarian Jesus himself, Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman (as a libertarian I’m obligated by an unspoken code of conduct to mention Friedman at least once in every discussion and the fact that he won the Nobel Prize in economics).

As I got older, I calmed down and became more focused on adulting — finding a girlfriend, making a living, and pretending to like wine. I eventually drifted with the cultural tide and found myself identifying as either a moderate liberal or conservative, depending on my mood that day and who I was trying to sleep with.

I spent four years working at an amusement park where they forced us to watch Fox News in the employee cafeteria every day, which seemed to push ever so slightly to the left. I didn’t bother voting much until 2016 when I found myself terrified by the Great Orange Menace and cast my vote for Hillary.

Everything would change after the pandemic hit.

Life in the People’s Republic of Lockdownistan

When California went into lockdown, I found myself out of work but I was every bit as worried about contracting COVID. By June I was in a full-blown crisis. I went long periods without having real interaction with a human being — days without seeing a smile, weeks without touching another person, months without the sense of purpose and dignity that came from having a job.

I took long drives in my car just to escape the prison of loneliness that had become my small apartment. A few times I broke down in tears or in fits of rage. I pounded my steering wheel until there was a dent in the right side that can still be seen to this day.

I did what I could: I volunteered to help with food drives. I started doing yoga in the park. I reached out to my friends. I remember one night as I was struggling with an almost oppressive sense of isolation, reaching out to one friend of mine on Facebook and mentioning off-handedly that it was “kind hard to get together with people.” What I got in response was a paragraph-long lecture on avoiding risk and how she wouldn’t dare interact with other humans until there was a vaccine. At the time, I remember Anthony Fauci’s warning that a vaccine could be up to seven years away.

I knew something was really wrong the day I met one of my yoga instructors after class. The some-odd 50-year-old woman reached her hand out and smiled at me. “Hi, I’m Chanda,” she said. Without even thinking about it, I shook her hand.

It was a first for me, but that handshake made my day.

There would be several moments after that when, by chance somehow, I would be touched by another human. I remember every instance because each time it sent a warm, euphoric, tingle through my body that made me realize in an instant what an inhumane dystopia I was being subjected to by my peers and their almost religious obedience to the infallible health authorities and political elites.

I began researching. I found that suicidal ideation among young people increased fourfold in the first six months of America’s pandemic response. The CDC estimated that 1/3 of excess deaths in 2020 were because of deaths of despair and healthcare disruptions. Not to mention the financial ruin that many have been forced to endure.

As I began to look at the numbers worldwide, I saw that there was little correlation between the severity of civil liberty restriction and control of the virus. This could be seen in places like Florida, Sweden, Japan, and Hong Kong who took relatively liberal approaches and have either comparable or significantly lower death rates than states/countries that took the opposite approach (Italy, Belgium, Spain, California, New York, etc.)

It made me realize political values like liberty are not just abstractions to debate on the internet. The nanny-statism of my governor had an actual effect on the quality of the one life I had to live, not to mention that of others whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed as collateral damage in pursuit of the greater good.

I felt utterly confused why so many of my Facebook friends seemed to refer to freedom as some kind of antiquated, redneck value. I mean, I get it. Some of the loudest advocates for liberty these days have been anti-maskers, COVID deniers, and Trump fanatics. It’s not a good look for those of us concerned about the nanny-state.

But politically, liberty is nothing more than the principle of consent — the notion that every individual is sovereign over their person and property (the only justification for claiming that slavery or rape is immoral) — scaled to a societal level.

Sure, that sovereignty is almost impossible to uphold absolutely. But so are all values. I know a few people who insist on uncompromising honesty at all times. They’re all unemployed. But does that mean we toss honesty aside as an antiquated value? Far from it. We uphold it to the greatest practical extent.

And so I found myself returning to my roots — exploring how libertarian ideas might inform our philosophical approach to sensible government. Thankfully, I don’t live with my mom anymore, but I still spend a lot of time “being a bad-ass on the internet.” (sarcasm intended). Only now, I’m using my polemic skills to make a part-time living.

Funny how life works.

Final Thoughts

I thought this was interesting to write about because if we’re all honest, much of our political outlook is influenced by our personality and personal experiences. This has been shown by political scientists. Even our childhood experiences have been shown to be influential in our politics later in life.

That is not to commit the genetic fallacy. A viewpoint isn’t less valid because it can be connected to a biased source. A belief must be evaluated independently from the believer.

If anything, taking an honest look at the source of our beliefs helps us to evaluate them more effectively and have more confidence in them. That is what I hoped to do in this post.

Thanks for reading.

Credits and Sources:

“Lockdownistan” is a term I borrowed from historian, activist Tom Woods