So by now you've probably figured out that I'm not of the same political or philosophical persuasion as most people on this site. So what the hell am I doing here, on this openly partisan site?
I grew up in a Democratic household, in the most Democratic city in a solid Red state. When I lived there, I got used to being more liberal than most of my fellow citizens. Growing up in the shadow of Washington DC also gave me a keen sense of the ridiculousness of politics in this country.
Several of my family members were pacifists and Quakers, and several were student activists in the 60's and 70's. Some of them had been living on communes for longer than I had been alive.
I can remember being in a car driving with my mother when I was 8, ranting to her about how the drug war was stupid, and how we should simply legalize and tax every drug. I've always been fond of poking the powerful in the eye, and I found some philosophical fellow travelers in the Anarchists, but I was always troubled by the tendency of anarchists to self-disenfranchise themselves. This eventually led me to identify with (small-l) libertarianism, which is pretty much simply a compromised, realist version of anarchism.
Since the Goldwater/Reagan years, libertarians have had an alliance with the Republican party, held together by a vision of small government. However, in my political lifetime, the Republican party has been taken over by the social conservatives of the Religious Right, and the nationalists of the Neoconservatives. Both of these groups hold views anathema to my own, especially with regards to their anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and warmongering positions. This has left me without a home in mainstream politics.
So why am I here, openly disagreeing with many of the people on this site?
Brink Lindsey put it extremely well in a roundtable discussion recently:
Bottom line: I'd rather hang out with the liberals and argue about economics than hang out with the Republicans and argue about Darwin and stem cells.
Liberals are just much more pleasant people to debate with, as they are far more tolerant of dissent. The right-wing in this country has turned into an extension of the fundamentalist church, only with nuclear weapons.