Ideological Transformations

I will tell you about the day I became a libertarian.

It was the summer of 1997. I was stationed aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter ACTIVE, where I served as a boarding officer. Most of the time I was enforcing fisheries regulations off the coast of Washington and Oregon, but this time we were on a counterdrug patrol off the coast of Mexico. We were off the tip of the Baja peninsula, in international waters—more than 12 miles offshore.

We came upon a U.S.-flagged sailboat, probably about 50 feet or so. Some rich guy and his wife. Not sure what you know about maritime law, but a U.S.-flagged Coast Guard cutter has jurisdiction over U.S.-flagged vessels anywhere, even in international waters. So we boarded him. A friendly, middle-aged guy. Mostly I talked to the owner of the boat, quizzing him on what kind of activity he had seen in the area, trying to pump him for intel, while the rest of the boarding team did a safety inspection.

It turned out that he did not have a marine sanitation device. A marine sanitation device is what turns the brown trout into rainbow trout, so you aren’t dumping turds into the water. A boat of that size was required to have an MSD. He didn’t. So I wrote him a ticket, and told him that he might have to pay a fine. “How much?” he asked. A thousand dollars, I told him.

He didn’t speak a word to me after that.

I motored back to the ship in the small boat with the rest of the boarding team and went straight to my stateroom and looked in the mirror. What are you doing? Guy minding his own business in the middle of the ocean and I come along and write him a $1,000 ticket for dropping a few BMs in the water, which in the context of what gets dumped in the ocean every day, is inconsequential. But that’s not all. In boarding officer school, I was trained to give him a beatdown if he got frisky. I was carrying a gun. I suddenly felt a wave of revulsion for state power.

I should point out that I never was, or became politically active. I didn’t join the Libertarian Party. I never voted after 2004, and still don’t. I dabbled in Facebook groups and Twitter follows and reinforced my own libertarian beliefs. Really, I was an old-school libertarian from the 70s and 80s—pro-choice about everything. A Reason Magazine libertarian. No tinfoil hats, please. I did donate to the Johnson/Weld presidential campaign in 2016, and got a T-shirt—and proudly wore it. That was the most successful Libertarian presidential ticket—ever—getting 3.5% of the vote. Most of the time, the LP ticket is an embarrassment, and 2020 was no different. That was the year of the “woke” libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen, a professor at Clemson, with Spike Cohen as her running made, a podcaster with a high school education. 2024 will be worse—the party has been overrun by the Mises Caucus, which sounds good—who can argue with Austrian economics? But they are all pretty much openly racist, and effectively became a more extreme offshoot of the Republican party.

I will tell you about the day that I became a conservative—October 7^th, 2023. That was the day that the libertarians lost their minds, engaging in both sides-ism at best, and openly siding with Hamas at worst. You should have seen some of the conspiracy theories coming out of Spike Cohen. That guy lives in Myrtle Beach, by the way. I imagine that he lives in a tenement on the south side of town, amidst the streetwalkers and the heroin dealers.

I believe that most people go through ideological transformations over time. There is that saying that if you’re young and conservative, you don’t have a heart, but if you’re old and liberal, you don’t have a brain. We watched the Baby Boomers go from burning bras to wearing MAGA hats. That is some crazy shit. We’re watching the Zoomers with some consternation, because allegedly, 48% of them support Hamas, but they’ll drift over time, too. Or maybe not. The Millennials aren’t really drifting, like other generations—they’re staying liberal. I don’t spend a lot of time hashtag worrying for the future of our country, but there are a lot of actual and potential young despots out there. I’d say that cooler heads will prevail, but we don’t seem to be tracking in that direction.

I’d broadly say that I’m a conservative now, but I’m no fan of anyone who wishes Kim Jong-Un a happy birthday, if you know what I mean. I’m of the belief that Republican governors of blue states make the best executives—Larry Hogan, Mitt Romney, Bill Weld, Gary Johnson, Charlie Baker, and others. I’d even take a Democratic politician from a red state, like Joe Manchin. This No Labels movement emerged as a response to people saying they wish they had an alternative between the two parties, and Trump and Biden. Don’t listen to what they say—watch what they do. People say they want a centrist alternative, but inevitably, they will migrate towards the extremes. Fully 10 percent of people will vote for what is essentially an anti-vax YouTube comments section running for president. We don’t want sane centrists. We want the maniacs, and the polemicists. The best election in our lifetime was 1996: Bill Clinton vs. Bob Dole. Turnout was 49 percent, the lowest in any election in the last 100 years. Some people tend to place a high value on civic participation, so to them, people being disengaged from politics is the worst thing in the world. You want to know what turnout was in 2020? 62 percent, the highest since 1960. You might call it civic participation—I call it people voting for their lives. I am nostalgic for the days when politics didn’t matter. I am nostalgic for the days when you couldn’t tell Democrats and Republicans apart. I seem to remember people being a lot happier back then.

I think a lot of people feel politically homeless these days. Even though I may be a conservative now, I’m certainly not a doctrinaire conservative, though I am an anti-tax warrior, like Grover Norquist. Very few people agree with an entire party’s platform, and the people who do, tend to be the thoughtless red team/blue team flag wavers. I have heard that DC has gotten so partisan that even the think tanks require people to wear red or blue into the office, like in ice hockey. Like I said, I am not politically active. Maybe I should be. There is a saying that if you don’t take an interest in politics, politics will take an interest in you. I used to have a platform, at Bloomberg, to write about the issues that were important to me. After a change in leadership, I was asked not to continue. I have no interest in running for any elected office, but I would like to be sort of an advisor on the down-low. I have actually done this twice before, both to moderate Republicans. Whatever gets us back to 1996, I’m all in favor of. And that’s not just old man nostalgia speaking—things were objectively better in 1996.

I think a lot of folks would like it if not-crazy people ran for public office. Crazy people are running because crazy is what we want. There was a time when the furthest-left person in Congress was the late Paul Wellstone from Minnesota. He’d be a moderate by today’s standards. The firebrand Newt Gingrich and his angry white men would all be moderates today. Paul Ryan didn’t survive polarization—he’s out of politics altogether. So yes, in theory, No Labels can run straight down the middle, through the goalposts, and sanity prevails in the end. Not a chance in hell. We want the crazy. We thrive on crazy. There are some ding dongs out there who get sweaty palms and a woody whenever you mention civil war, but that is not out of the realm of possibility.

We’re just not in enough pain yet. Like with the deficit. For the first time since the 90s, the deficit is becoming a political issue, and if you work in finance, and you see that every bond auction is a misadventure, you know it is a problem. But we won’t do anything about it until we are in enough pain. Then we will elect the deficit hawk. Then we will elect the sane centrist. But things have to get worse before they get better.

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