What Do I Believe?

I find labels to be very useful tools that allow us to easily identify people, and their ideas without the need to go in and explain every last little detail. However, labels can become problematic when people think of them as something that can describe all the nuances about someone. Humans are messy creatures who defy logic, and are often holding seemingly contradicting ideas.

As someone who is a fan of labels, I try not to get bent out of shape when labels are applied to me that don’t necessarily fit. People often call me a Democrat, and while Democrats can generally rely on my vote, I’m not particularly fond of the party, seeing them instead as the bast option in a field of bad options. Socialist is another label that gets thrown at me a lot, and while I’m certainly sympathetic and consider myself allied with socialism, I also have a generally better understanding of what socialism actually is, and don’t necessarily identify with socialism enough to wear that label. Personally, I tend to prefer the label of “leftist” which is where pretty much all of my ideology best fits.

But just what do I believe? 

On a very basic level, I believe in government, specifically representative democracy, as the best tool to give average people some leverage to ensure their concerns are addressed by the society they live in. 

Perhaps it’s something to do with human nature, but human civilization trends towards some people amassing wealth and power, which tends to put them in a position where they exploit the rest of us. Fighting back against those with power is something bigger than any individual can manage, so forming governments that can rival the powerful is essential if regular people want to live free of their tyranny.

That said, like any other tool, the government can be misused, or end up in the wrong hands. It isn’t unreasonable to look at our government in the United States and conclude that it’s in the hands of the very people it should be keeping in check.

While I can understand why our current state of affairs might sour some on the concept of government, I can’t help but think that that may be by design, with powerful entities taking control of aspects of government and using it to help them protect the power they already have while also amassing more, but also making the government less functional for the rest of us in hopes that we will go along with removing government oversight from them.

Economically, I lean pretty far left. I may not exactly be a socialist, as I have plenty of criticisms over centralized control over the means of production, but I generally think our economy should serve the average person more so than it serves the few at the top of the economy. In general that leads me to support having a robust public system for things like education and healthcare, and leaving luxury goods like consumer electronics up to the markets. Coupled with that would be a progressive tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a much higher rate than regular folks who work for a living.

Socially, I tend to look at what it will take to achieve equal rights for all people, not only under the law, but also in how our society treats them. Legally, we’ve generally been pretty good at this, but a big point of failure is that we often fail to address the historic harms done to minority demographics. Equality involves far more work than simply writing a couple laws and calling it a day. Things like redlining and employment discrimination have left generations of minorities disadvantaged, and those disadvantages must be addressed if we want to live up to our ideals.

On social issues, my stance is generally that I want to see all demographics get treated as equals. Functionally, this means expanding the franchise to see as many people as possible represented. Another caveat is that we have always had a lot of bigotry within our nation, and that as groups who were previously excluded find themselves seen as equal under the law, the reality of lingering effects from an unequal past still weighs heavily on people and policies to correct for those effects are necessary if we want to achieve equality.

Perhaps our founders said it best when they advocated that we create a government by the people and for the people. The founders didn’t have it perfect when they wrote our constitution and established our government, and there’s been no shortage of problems along the way. But it’s still worth it to try to live up to those ideals.

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