Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I don't know what I am. Politically, that is. (Well, okay, in some other respects as well, but that's not what I'm talking about right now.) There hav been a few times when other people's classifications of me made sense, but I wasn't quite certain, and a very long time ago I thought I knew but was undereducated at the time (for one thing, I thought there were only two labels and that they only had the American meanings). Right now I don't really have any clear idea of my political identity.

Oh, I know who I am, and what I believe (including which things I need to learn more about before taking a position), and I remember whom I voted for earlier this month, but I don't know what to call that "who". How to describe me. Well, how to describe me concisely in relation to a set of widely known memesets. That is, yeah, "label".

I can remember a time when I was unaware of parties and labels and division. I remember when "what made sense" politically was pretty much whatever my father explained when I asked what a headline meant. Those memories are distant and vague, but what came after them wasn't a whole lot more sophisticated ... I knew that "some people think Nixon should be president and most of my parents friends think McGovern should be," and that American politics and the war in Vietnam were somehow related, and that every so often my father came home from his job at the University of Maryland with his eyes red because the police had teargassed a demonstration on campus somewhere upwind of his office and he hadn't gotten his window closed in time, and something about the candidate who got shot not too far from where I lived having been a racist (and I didn't hear his name again for many years, until after his conversion and repudiation of his earlier views, so there was a bit of a mental double-take as I verified that it was the same person), and there being something fishy about the Vice President who was our former Governor ... but apart from knowing that there were sides called "Democrats" and "Republicans", I was kind of fuzzy on how all these tidbits hooked together. And I kept mixing up which group was which.

But hearing my friends arguing -- as playground surrogates for their parents -- about Nixon vs. McGovern, did plant the idea in my head that politics was somehow important and that I should start taking notes; after all, I had gotten the idoctrination that "in America, anyone can grow up to be president," and that being president was the highest goal one could reach for. So shortly after that I started gathering, piecemeal, the facts and opinions about issues and people that started to shape some sort of political stance. By the time Watergate broke, I was reading the front page of The Washington Post, not just the comics and the sports section. And asking my parents a lot of questions about the words I didn't know and the paragraphs that left implications unstated where grownups would be able to fill in the blanks for themselves. That's where I got my habit of, where a swearword is called for and I'm not in the mood to actually use one, typing "[expletive deleted]"; because I saw that phrase all over the transcripts published in the Post. Anyhow, I slowly started reaching awareness of politics and why it matters. And forming opinions that didn't completely line up with those of my parents (though I don't think we were ever directly opposite each other).

So I had this notion that Hippies were for peace and love, both unquestionably good things, and had all the good music (which seemed seems significant somehow), and were about moving society forward and doing cool stuff and had pretty, long hair and were colourful, and were being Oppressed By The Man ... and were the liberals. And therefore The Establishment must be somehow bad (or at least not to be trusted) because it feared the goodness of the hippies and tried to keep them down ... and that The Establishment was therefore conservative. Liberal and conservative were purely social constructs to me, with no economic dimension attached at first. I did get a slightly more nuanced understanding of the roles when I took American History in high school, but my preconceptions distorted what I was being taught a bit. Anyhow, back then I thought things were simple, and that I was a liberal because I liked electric guitars and bluejeans and peace and psychedelic imagery (with no clue as to the origins of the style) and trying to change the world for the better, and hated racism and repression and hidebound thinking. I wasn't sure about the "dropping out" [of society] thing, which seemed like an obstacle to getting a PhD (an early goal which I have not reached) and getting a good job as a scientist or using computers; nor was I sure about the drugs, or the not bathing (which one of the magazines my mother read ... Popular Health perhaps? ... and a bunch of talking-heads on television said about hippies), but I thought the hippies were probably pointed in the right direction despite being aware that I was too young to be a part of that movement. (By the time I was forming such solid opinions, it was clear the movement was already waning and would be mostly an historical note by the time I was old enough to do anything like that; so while I have sympathized with the hippies, I have never thought of myself as a hippie.)

But am I "a liberal"? I identify enough with liberalism to be offended when I hear the word 'liberal' used as an insult, as a reason not to take the person so labelled seriously, or when I hear liberal politicians trying to run away from the label because they've allowed conservatives to turn it into a bad word. But can I really call myself one? After all, once I learned what conservatives really thought, as opposed to my flower-power impressions of them, I realized that they had some good arguments, especially with regard to responsible spending. I was still awfully confused about the social agendas and fiscal agendas of the two camps being sort of at right-angles to one another, until I found out that the words have different meanings in Europe than they do here. (Okay, I'm still confused, but now I understand that it's my culture that's screwed up, not the language or political science as a whole.) I never identified as a conservative, but I saw a few of their points.

Learning a bit of history (never my strong suit (ironic that I've since gotten involved in historical re-enactment, no?) and political theory in school, gave me the notion that "left" and "right" might actually be points on a circle, and that the furthest extremes of each meet. Maybe. It did teach me that there are degrees of each. And I spent some time thinking about forms of government, and which I thought was the ideal. I realized that if reduced their most pure, most fundamental forms, the only difference between democracy and communism was the economic model, which kind of played with my notion of "left and right" as applied to those labels. And I decided that my ideal form of government was one form of anarchy, but that I didn't think it could work in the real world above a certain size (that of a large household or small commune, and even that only if only the right people were included); that democracy was my second choice and representative-democracy a third-choice concession to matters of scale; and that I favoured capitalism but didn't quite trust it to always do the right thing on its own. Civil liberties, social justice, those seemed to be the most important part of politics.

When I got annoyed at Rush Limbaugh but hadn't yet figured out that my only healthy way to deal with him was to ignore him as much as possible, I poked my nose into a few Limbaugh fan newsgroups on Usenet and got into arguments there. When I posted a lengthy essay about why separation of church and state is good specifically from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, one of the cooler-headed people in the newsgroup emailed me praise for being "an intelligent conservative." I was startled: nobody had ever called me a conservative before in my life, and I had trouble believing someone could see me as one. But that did get me thinking ...

At some point I was talking about feeling like I was in between the two camps, and someone -- it was probably about half of A Certain Mailing List, actually -- pointed out that there were more than two labels, and more than one dimension. They suggested that perhaps I was neither liberal nor conservative, and certainly neither Democrat nor Republican, but possibly libertarian. I liked that because it was an escape from the increasingly artificial-seeming binary (and we all know how uncomfortable I am with constraining binary concepts of identity), but the more I've learned about libertarianism the less I feel I can call myself one. There are things I still don't trust capitalism to automagically get right (and others that I don't think it will do quickly enough), and as much as some of my friends will wince at this, I don't consider "social engineering" an absolute evil in all cases. I think Noah Webster may have been correct about public schools even if we've screwed up the implementation. So far, the party that makes the most sense to me is the Greens, and I'm not really sure I fit in there either.

Shortly before the recent election, when a bunch of big-name conservatives came out against Bush on conservative grounds, not only was my heart lifted by a whole 'nuther set of arguments for opposing him, but I found myself agreeing with an awful lot of their reasons. More confusingly, I found myself identifying with many of their reasons for being conservatives in the first place. Not all, but enough to raise a fresh set of doubts. Could I actually be a conservative after all and simply never have known it? I don't think so (especially not in American terms!), though it's clear that there's more conservative philosophy in me than I'd previously realized. Part of this may simply be that Pisces trait of seeing more than one side to most arguments, but I'm still on board with some important liberal ideas and goals, and I think the Libertarians have some ideas that everyone else urgently needs to steal. I'm still moved most quickly by civil-liberty and social-justice issues. It's easy to see that I'm not a "neocon", but I no longer think the neocons are really conservatives anyhow, so they're probably not relevant. (I'm still sorting out whether "cryptofascits/pseudofascists" are synonymous with neocons or a subset -- I suspect they're a subset but I need to do more reading. But I digress.)

So I'm back to having no idea what I am. It's easy to refer to myself as a liberal -- and I have an awful lot of liberal and libertarian friends -- but I'm not sure that I am one. I don't think that I'm a conservative, but I'm not sure that I'm not one. I'm sure I'm not a libertarian, but I'm awfully close. I might be a Green but I'm not completely convinced. I'm an anarchist in theory but not in practice. I'm not convinced that communism is inherently evil, just that it's not likely to work in the real world above the size of a kibbutz and has never actually been tried on the scale of a whole country despite what some countries have called themselves -- and that my personal preference is capitalism. And I'm not comfortable with socialism, but I think it gets a few things at least partly right. I'd like to know what label fits, because labels are frequently convenient (for quickly finding others of like mind with whom to join forces, if nothing else), but I don't want a label badly enough to change my positions simply to step in line behind someone's banner. That is, I want to find a label that fits me, not try to fit some label. Am I *gasp* a "moderate"? (Weren't those, like, outlawed or something? Oh wait, I've been reading the "biased in favour of dramatic interpretations to sell more papers" media again.) Does the word "moderate" actually mean anything other than "non-extremist, not otherwise categorized"? (For that matter, am I non-extremist? Is the mere fact of being openly and unashamedly transgendered still automatically extremist, or has society grown up enough to include me yet?)

Maybe I'm "interpolitical" much as I am intergendered? (Hey, that word has the additional benefit of suggesting "interpolation" between the different clumps on the poitical spectrum ... Hmm ...) Or "polit-eclectic" or something. Or will additional education on the conservative and liberal philosophies and their respective histories eventually make it clear that I'm one of those after all? Maybe with more education I'll be able to say, "I'm a such-and-such, in the European sense"? I don't know.

What do y'all identify as, with what degree of confidence or enthusiasm, and why? If I'm what you are, how would I know? And if I'm "none of the above", how many more of me are there?