I just recently noticed you've gone from centre-left to staunch left, going from your PM score. And when you joined this forum, you were on the centre-right. How have your political views been shaped over the past couple of years?
Well, I must admit part of it would have to do with the influence of my upbringing. See, a few short years ago, (something I rarely talk about on here) I was Homeschooled, (and even before this attended Christian schools) and thus because of the instruction my parents gave me, along with the curriculum which was based on fundamentalist evangelicalism, I became extremely conservative in my younger years.
I guess even when I left homeschooling in high school, those views sort of stuck with me for awhile. Now, by the time I joined Atlas, being exposed to many different types of people in public high school, I had certainly moderated from when I was in middle school (I was practically a little Sean Hannity back then
) and became more of a socially moderate/fiscally conservative Republican, but still considered myself a conservative overall. Then sometime around last spring I started identifying more as a libertarian Republican, with a strong distrust of the Tea Party/Fox News element of the Republican Party. I believed that while most conservatives were good people, there was a dark element of bigotry within that faction of the party. Then sometime around last summer I started identifying as a liberal Republican, but with many libertarian leanings, which is why I loathed the label: "Rockefeller Republican" because I viewed Rockefeller as a sort of Michael Bloomberg of the past, someone who wasn't a champion of individual liberty, or even someone who valued liberty.
My economic views continued to become more left wing, and ironically that had something to do with the very thing that made me conservative in the first place: my upbringing. Last fall my family was beginning to fall apart, my dad was out of the house, and my mom was working extremely hard while my dad struggled to find a job. There was only one thing saving us at this point: my father was receiving social security payments to help provide for me and my brother. To me I finally started to think: "If government can be do this for us, it can also be used to help people in a far worse hole than us." I began to identify as a Democrat, not because I believe that conservatives are evil, (I still have many conservative friends and loved ones), but because I believe in the principles of populism, and in some aspects, socialism.
Now, in many ways I still think of myself as a libertarian, and identify as a civil libertarian, and most of the time I don't identify as: "liberal" but rather as a progressive or left-libertarian. The fight for personal and individual liberty is probably still the most important fight to me, because what good is receiving: higher wages, assistance for living, and Healthcare if you aren't free to enjoy your life the way you want to. For instance, I oppose most forms of gun control, smoking bans, prayer bans and religious reading (Bible, Quran etc.) among individual students, bans on public intoxication, junk food and soda bans, bans on the purchase of games and movies for youngins etc. Things that many liberals seem to have no problem with.
So yeah, that's kind of how I feel about things, sometime I might write up something longer, but for the time being this is what I've got.
