The Shaping of the Political Mind

Hello, Right Wing readers.
I know we’ve been kind of light-hearted here lately, and we’re not going to stop that trend. But a thought came to me the other day: How do we come about having the political beliefs that we have?

My good friend Robert, from Skewed View, is a solid Democrat. He likes the term progressive, claiming it to be liberalism with a conscience. I’ve always aligned closer to the Republicans, but I’m more Libertarian than anything. Robert grew up for a few years in Florida and then moved to North Georgia. I’ve lived in North Georgia all my life. So how did we come up with such differing beliefs? When we were children it didn’t matter to us who the President was. So long as we had Voltron, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Thundercats, and Star Wars we were okay. We were the epitome of cool. You had the baby boomers, well, we’re the Reagan babies.

All was right with the world. Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union, rebuilt the American economy, and, if you believe the reports, single-handedly brought down the Berlin Wall. How much impact did these events have in shaping our political belief system? We probably didn’t think much about it at the time, but we were brought up to believe in the President as a force for good. Reagan ended the Cold War, essentially establishing the United States as the sole superpower on the globe. We were safe at home; we had defeated the big bad commies.

George H. W. Bush, the forty-first president, served only four years, and during his term the United States went to war with Iraq. Understand that we buddied up with Iraq while Iran posed the biggest threat to us in the 1970s. Suddenly, Iraq posed a big threat to the world’s oil supply as they tried to forcibly take over Kuwait. Bush 41 stepped up and, using his powers as commander-in-chief, drove back the Iraqi forces, though we never took Baghdad nor did we depose Saddam Hussein at that time.

Bill Clinton presided over the nation during a relative time of peace. The economy was going through the standard post-war upswing, something you’ll find economies do, regardless of who is in office. Clinton was praised as a great leader. He offered assistance in Kosovo, and he had an official position that Saddam Hussein be removed from power. Clinton was offered Usama bin Laden twice by the Sudan, for the low, low price of taking them off the terrorist watch list. Clinton refused.

George W. Bush was elected in one of the most controversial elections of all time. Recount after recount in Florida failed to swing the election to the Democrats, and the Supreme Court upheld the election results. Then, less than nine months into his term, the most devastating terrorist attack of all time came to be. The attacks of September 11 launched the US into what has been deemed the “War on Terror.” There are, however, plenty of people who refuse to believe it was a terror attack. Instead, they think that Bush orchestrated the attacks in order to go to war in the Middle East.

So there is a very brief synopsis of the four presidents of my lifetime. I still find it funny that people believe Bush masterminded the 9/11 attacks, yet they claim him to be so incompetent and stupid that he cannot even form a coherent sentence. But that’s another story for another time.

So I asked Robert what shaped his political ideology. His answer didn’t surprise me. He said it was seeing stock footage of FDR that took him down Democrat Drive. I’ve known for a long time that he claims to be a Roosevelt Democrat. He knows that I despise many of the programs FDR put into place.

Now, I turn to my own life. I never thought much of politics as a younger child. I really got into it in high school. I don’t remember hearing it, but somewhere the thought was planted into me that Republicans were all bad and Democrats were good. I think that thought more than anything made me dig into the parties. For the first few years I really aligned with the Republicans, but as I got older I knew that what I believed and what they believed didn’t gel at all. They’ve fallen so far from Reagan’s nest. Since the 2000 elections the Republicans had seemingly cast aside their belief in smaller government, opting instead for a spending mentality. I couldn’t go for it.

I went off on my own, searching for new ground. I didn’t like the Democrats saying that the Republicans would take away Social Security, but I also didn’t like the idea of funneling money into a broken system that wouldn’t pay me back in the later years. Somewhere there was a party who I could relate to. Then I found them. Libertarians. There are polls that reveal that 85% of Americans harbor Libertarian leanings, but the smaller, third-parties are almost shut out of the limelight.

But I haven’t yet answered my original question: what shaped my beliefs? Remember that I somehow learned that Republicans were the bad guys. Who told me this? I honestly don’t recall. I know my grandfather usually votes Democrat. In the 1992 election, my dad liked Ross Perot. So, obviously, my family stood on differing sides of the aisle. And then there was school… High school is essentially the formative political years. You actually can grasp the concepts of government now, and you begin to question your own ideas. You can interpret readings and information for yourself, meaning you no longer take everything at face value, which is good when dealing with Washington.

So what shaped my political beliefs? Parents, friends, school, society, the works, that’s what. I can safely say that my environment turned me into what I am today: a Reagan-Libertarian.
Tune in next week when a member of the Right Wing staff makes his triumphant return.