[Originally posted to my blog, Library Grape.]
I recently received a message from a friend from law school in response to a series of posts I've been exchanging with some Facebook friends on the topic of how our political beliefs have changed and how we view the modern GOP.
I wrote a long reply (which I've copied in and cleaned up below), which expands on some of the themes I touched on in my earlier post, The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Today's GOP. I decided not to post in his original message but I think you'll be able to follow my thinking without reference to it.
Dear X,
Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful message on the subject. I've been pondering it for a bit now and wanted to take the time to sit down and write out a worthy reply.
First of all, I'm glad to see that the last eight years have also led you to a crisis of faith. I consider it to be a leading indicator of wisdom to be able to question and abandon views and movements that prove to be on the wrong course. So, for this, I salute you.
As a general matter, when reading your message and thinking about it later on, I kept coming back to the idea of faith. This is pretty strange coming from me, considering that I'm a rabid antitheist, although I really shouldn't say that because, of course, "faith" exists outside the confines of religion, but it's still pretty remarkable that the key concept I keep coming back to is faith.
I'd first like to address this point:
"If you believe President Obama is deploying the correct strategy to combat the economic crisis, doesn't it follow that you have evolved away from fiscally conservative economic principals that I imagine drew you to the Republican party at some point?"
To be honest with you, i really don't know whether Obama is deploying the correct strategy to combat the economic crisis. At one time, a tenet of my "faith" was that, generally speaking, less regulation, lower taxes, free enterprise, constrained spending (etc., etc.) were the proper prescriptions in order to support the health of our economy. I considered myself right-of-center on economic issues and well left-of-center on social issues (ergo the tag I generally used to describe myself was 'libertarian'). I generally didn't place too much emphasis on social issues because i subscribed to the notion that the right changes would come over time as the calcified elderly in our society died off.
I describe the above as a "tenet of my faith" because ultimately that was what it was: faith. It was not informed by a personal expertise in economics, it was informed by reading various sources who claimed to know what they were talking about and synthesizing it into my own fundamental set of tenets.
[ Read the rest of my article on why I lost my faith in the GOP by clicking here.]
