My Most Recent Political Realignments

Note to a friend:

So, my politics tend to realign themselves by a threesome of visceral reaction, standing where I sit and a degree of moral principle. 

My second last realignment came with Clinton H’s email imbroglio. She was so high handed, dismissive, prevaricating, hypocritically smug, holier than thou, sanctimonious and ensconced in her own privilege that she disgusted me with her and all elements of elite privilege endemic to Democrat Party politics. So I moved away from her and the Democrats generally insofar as I had a notional say that mattered—I do know I never did. I tended to drift right, was happy—and I was a former #nevertrumper—when she lost, was thrilled to see her writhing in excuses to rationalize her defeat. I became anti anti Trump. I defended him against foaming-at-the-mouth haters. I turned my back on and became revulsed by liberal elite media—CNN, MSNBC, and their personae. I watched more Fox. I started to become more absorbed in certain right wing positions. 

Now I’ve just gone through another visceral sea change brought on by two main triggers.

One is my complete disgust with post-election Trump, his conduct marked by among other things the transcendence of his ego above all considerations, his ego becoming the slave master of nearly all semblance  of norms, which he was willing to trash in service of himself, his lying and false claims, his willingness to torpedo Republican electoral chances by lashing them to his ego driven desire for more limelight and not be seen as a loser, all complemented by an unhealthy dose of Republican subservience to his post-election efforts. When in office all these tendencies in him were muted by the demands and constraints of his office and by his solid accomplishments. He has now vindicated those less-than-hysterical, ie sober, thoughtful, concerns about him and has soiled his legacy. He has cast his post-election shadow back over it.

The other is the issue of vaccination and less so policy approaches to dealing with the virus. The stupidity of the anti vaxxers and their fetishizing individual liberty at the expense of trammelling the public good has likewise disgusted me and has sparked an insight, too long coming, into the irrationality of liberty-extremism. The issue has become for me microcosmic of various other positions held by the right that place individual liberty on so high a pedestal it becomes attenuated by reason of the thin air. 

One sign of my shift is that my wife and I at long last have a political/cultural issue with which we strongly agree.

I’m still put viscerally off by what I despised in Clintonia. And so I have moved I think more solidly to the independent centre, giving more room to what was always latent and nascent in me, the politics of the Third Way. https://www.britannica.com/topic/third-way