I am reflecting upon the topic listed as the title of the piece not as a political scientist (which I am not, even though I teach college level government and politics to high school seniors), but as someone with more than 5 decades of involvement and interest in both politics and government: my first political activity was passing out leaflets for Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection in 1956 when I was ten (don’t worry, by 1960 my orientation was Kennedy over Nixon, in part because my Republican parents had both known Nixon in the Office of Price Administration, and could not stand him).
So allow me to offer some not very precise definitions of the terms in question, as least I will consider them in this piece.
Political philosophy is a general approach to how one considers the various decisions and actions in the political sphere. Of necessity in accepts that there will be some inconsistencies and lack of purity, because in the real world we often experience what political scientists call “cross-cutting cleavages” — different aspects of who and what we are that can pull us in different directions. To illustrate, in 2008 Democrats came down to a choice between having our candidate be the hope for the first Black President or the first female President. A Black woman could in theory have experienced a real conflict.
Political ideology is a consistent framework, a global view, if you will a lens, through which all political decisions and viewpoints are filtered. For those outside the particular ideology it can seem rigid and thus at times inhumane. To those inside, it provides a clear and at times moral basis for making the hard decisions between conflicting priorities.
As I said, I am NOT using precise political science definitions.
In looking back over my 5+ decades of interest and involvement in politics, I have a clear, albeit it at times evolving, political philosophy. I have rarely approached having an ideology, and at present I clearly do not have one.
To be fair, one can say I do not even have a complete party identification, and that is not merely because I live in Virginia where we do not register by political party. I once wrote at this site that I do not swear loyalty to the Democratic Party. There have been times in the past when despite a personal identification as a Democrat I supported a Republican for a particular position. This was true even before I could vote. By 1960, I considered myself a Democrat, but in the 1960s supported Republican (at least at that time) John Vliet Lindsey for Mayor of New York City over either of the Democrats against he ran. More recently, there have been a FEW Republicans in Virginia for whom I have voted or for whose opponent I would not provide support, even by blogging. Most notably, that would indicate a man on Arlington School Board who was running for reelection against a Democrat I knew and liked. It included in one cycle a Ph. D. scientist running for a House of Delegates seat in a district defined to a large degree by the Chesapeake Bay whose scientific background was relevant on that issue.
To provide a clearer if hypothetical example, imagine the Democratic nominee were an outright racist (something not at all unknown in the South in the 1960s) and the Republican were an example of what we would now call the almost vanished Republican moderate. I have no doubt on which side of that divide I would fall.
If asked to describe my political ideology, I cannot, because there are ways in which I acknowledge my inconsistency. Thus, although I am a “Convinced Friend” (a Quaker by choice), I supported intervention in Libya, with the US providing logistical support and intelligence to those acting to stop the incipient slaughter of Benghazi by troops under the control of the former dictator.
While I do not consider myself a Capitalist, because I see many things wrong with a free market system too lightly regulated, I am also not a Socialist. Having worked in large bureaucracies in both the public (federal and local) and private (multibillion dollar retail giant) sectors, I am not necessarily in favor of seeing all the means of production in public hands. On the other hand, there are some things that given their importance to our basic survival need to be if not in government hands under strict government regulation. This should include things like water and sewer systems (where my preference is heavily for public ownership) and roads (Virginia had a private toll road to Dulles Airport, but it had to be taken over by the government).
I am an educator who at various times has taught in public, charter, and independent schools. I am a strong supporter of public education, even as I think it is in serious need of being rethought (and organized several panels to that regard at the 2nd Yearly Kos Convention in Chicago in 2007). I would not go so far as to effectively ban non-public schooling as is the case in Finland. On the other hand, I have a problem with those who want the schooling of their children to totally under their control (home schooled) and yet want access to the extracurricular activities provide by public schools, and express my disgust that the Virginia General Assembly is approving a “Tebow” rule that would require public schools to allow such participation.
So how would I describe myself? I have no trouble using the apparently abandoned term “liberal.” It is not a strict ideology. I support the rights of men and women to be organized into labor unions, and have real problems with the notion of “right to work” states, even as I live in one. I have always had a strong orientation towards increasing individual rights, particularly in cases where there has been a history of discrimination. Thus my active participation in Civil Rights on behalf of African-Americans started in the summer of 1963. My interest began a number of years earlier, as I watched on tv the events in Little Rock as Central High School was integrated. Similarly, having lived in New York City at the time of Stonewall (and having one year earlier having lived only a few blocks away), I have been supportive of civil rights for the gay community, including preventing discrimination in housing, adoption, family relations.
I do not support most religious exceptions — here I am shaped by the notion expressed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in the section on public accommodations, as affirmed in the Supreme Court case Heart of Atlanta Motel. If you run a business that is open to the general public you should NOT be allowed to discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Perhaps the one thing that is most consistent in my philosophy is that the profit motive has never been at the top of my list — were it, I certainly not have chosen to leave data processing (where I had already chosen to work in the public sector for less money than I could have made in the private sector, demonstrated most clearly when I was offered a job in Apple’s Washington office at the meeting of a professional organization at a time when I had just agreed to return to local government) to become a public school teacher. I certainly do not mind people making reasonable profits. Thus even though at times my wife and I have faced some financial restrictions, we will where possible get our medicines through a local independent pharmacy rather than through a drug store chain or a supermarket (the one exception we do not control, and that is her continuing chemotherapy, which is only available through CVS).
I believe that many areas of our life are too unregulated, allowing bad or irresponsible actors to damage what should be the Commons. That includes air and water to be sure. I also think it includes our political and governmental structures.
I have studied political philosophy and ideology since I was a sophomore at Haverford College in 1964-65. I did an independent study in lieu of the final examination in one course, and came to the firm conclusion that unless one were willing to accept some degree of inconsistency we would have a serious problem, either anarchy or a totalitarian structure in which consistency were valued over the liberty necessary for a diverse population.
For myself, I think we are overall a low-tax society, but one where the taxes are inequitably distributed. Far too much of taxation, from payroll taxes to excise taxes to sales taxes, are by the way they are set up regressive, falling far more heavily in terms of impact upon those of fewer means. The exemptions built into our income tax system tend to rob it of being truly progressive (in an economic sense). I am absolutely opposed to the notion of flat taxes.
While I recognize a great deal of waste and inefficiency in governments from local to national, I think far more of the waste and inefficiency works to the benefit of those already advantaged, so that cutting programs that benefit the less advantaged does not solve the problem.
I know enough about economics (which I also teach at a college level, to students who this year are mainly juniors, last year in Maryland were seniors), to understand that pure economic efficiency is inherently inhuman and destructive of the long-term well-being of society as a whole. It is one reason I think that the issue for our economy is not that we are over-regulated or under-regulated, but rather that our regulations need to be reconfigured. It is inconceivable that we allow the development of economic power that is uncontrollable by government, that things like wage theft can occur without criminal sanctions upon those in corporate and non-corporate business entities responsible for it happening.
I do not believe in caveat emptor because there is too much of our economy that is beyond the comprehension of the ordinary person. That is why we need strict regulation of food, cosmetics, potables, consumer products.
I also believe that too much power in contract law is tilted towards corporations.
In some ways, I think my political philosophy is a mixture of pragmatism and radicalism. Because I am not an ideologue, I cannot ignore the cost to others when we attempt to rectify things that are wrong. To cite one example relevant to our current politics, were we to move directly to government funded medicare for all, we would devastate some communities where a major employer may be a health insurance company, and there are hundreds of thousands of people whose current income depends upon such entities. That being said, while I believe that government has a responsibility to ensure that there are employment opportunities for everyone one willing to work, that does not mean that one’s employment guarantee should necessarily be in the same field and the same location where one is now. If that were the case, we might be subsidizing buggy whip factories.
To bring this to a focus on making decisions about whom to support in any particular election, I find I cannot make that decision on the basis of ideological purity. Quite obviously, I am not ideologically pure. I am certainly in most of my opinions someone who would qualify as a liberal — or if you insist, a progressive. Yes, an ideology COULD serve as a shorthand for knowing how someone is going to act in the future, on an issue on which s/he has not yet expressed an opinion. Except that political candidates are often very inconsistent, despite advocacy of a particular political ideology. Hell, we see a parallel in jurisprudence on the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia claims to be an originalist, saying that the words of the Constitution (including ratified Amendments) must be interpreted as the words were understood at the time. And yet he can support an individual right to own guns through the 2nd Amendment (rather than the 9th, where it properly belongs) despite two key parts of that Amendments: the clause about the need for the well-regulated militia as a means of security of the state, and the fact that the right is assigned to the people collectively, and not to persons, is the guarantee of no deprivation of life, liberty and property without due process of law in the Fifth Amendment.
I have no problem with “inconsistencies” per se. Rather, the best I can do is to evaluate a politician across an entire panoply of issues. I can accept that a politician can evolve on issues over time. I have. It took me many years to finally get to the point where I could no longer support the death penalty under any circumstance. Ironically, it is an understanding of Christian theology that shapes that, even as I no longer consider myself a Christian. Simply put, if one believes in God, how can one posit that there is any action or series of actions that puts one permanently beyond redemption? Would not that make one the equal of God? That is not to say that there cannot be consequences. Here I think of a term that I believe entered our discourse as the result of Quakers. Philadelphia saw the building of a large place of incarceration, known as Eastern Penitentiary. Note the 2nd word of that name, a place of repentance.
Similarly, because I accepted the notion that the country from whose protection I had benefited could demand of me my life, I chose to enlist in the Marines at age 19, even as I opposed Vietnam. There were ways I could have avoided being drafted despite having dropped out of college in 1965, but felt that was unfair to other people. While i respect the Marines and my service therein, I would no longer make that decision, because I have evolved. I still accept that the government can demand of me in some circumstances my life, but what it cannot demand of me is that I take another life, even in the defense of the nation. Thus I cannot accept the notion of mandatory military service, even as I still wrestle with how we could require some sort of general service — and many schools now require a certain number of hours of volunteer work as a condition of graduation.
I have a general political philosophy. It contains elements of communalism, our responsibility to one another. I do not have an ideology, because there are ways that the person I am will find conflicts between strongly held beliefs, and I cannot resolve them without thinking through the consequences including to people other than myself.
I do not know if this reflection is of value to anyone else. It is one of the privileges of being older that one has a longer period of experience upon which to reflect, eve though the experience (and observations) of any one individual are by definition limited. I also have the further privilege of knowing that what I choose to write and post here will, regardless of the appeal of the title, draw some eyeballs in part because of my history of participation here.
I have no expectation that this posting will draw a lot of traffic.
I accept in advance the criticism that it may seem inchoate, diffuse, rambling — offer other adjectives if so inclined.
In part, I offer it because it serves as something of an explanation of how I operate, and why.
I also offer it as perhaps a means of inviting or prodding others to a similar reflection, even if in opposition to what I have offered.
Make of it what you will.
Do with it what you want.
Peace.