I’m going to flagrantly rip off Marvin and write my own “political autobiography” post, for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s.

As Marvin points out in recounting a conversation with his right-of-center friend, location, if not everything, is something. I spent the late 90s and early 00s in two of the most left-wing environments imaginable: academia and Berkeley (though not at the same time). Naturally I became a conservative. 😉 I don’t know if it was the insufferable complacency of my lefty colleagues or a natural disposition to being contrarian, but I started reading National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and First Things (as a concession to liberalism I also subscribed to the New Republic). I started digging into conservative political thought: Kirk, Weaver, Hayek, von Mises, Nisbet, Sowell, Friedman and other stuff you don’t typically find on your grad school syllabus. (The one political theory class offered in my graduate program was pretty much all Marxism and John Rawls was about as far right as the spectrum of permissible political positions seemed to extend.)

At this time I was a religious agnostic, but found myself gravitating toward a conservatism heavily tinged with libertarianism. In 2000 I voted for George W. Bush with some trepidation, but my concerns were mostly from the Right. In my view the Bush campaign represented at best an uneasy alliance between ideological conservatism of the National Review variety and the old-fashioned Rockefeller Republicanism of his father. I voted for him primarily on the grounds that he was, ostensibly, committed to free trade and a less interventionist foreign policy (oh how naive I was!) and seemed to be a moderate social conservative.

Then came the move to Berkeley in early 2001. If conservative thought was not so much unwelcome as ignored in my grad school experience, in the Bay Area a registered Republican ranked somewhere just above a child molester in the scale of popularity. I also sat through some sermons at our very left-wing Lutheran church that set my teeth on edge, as you might imagine.

But 9/11 changed, if not everything, at least some things. Though I supported the campaign in Afghanistan at the time, I was alarmed by what seemed to be the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude toward civil liberties and, eventually, its obvious desire to widen the theatre of war well beyond the pursuit of al-Qaeda and its confederates. By the time the run up to the Iraq war began I was firmly in “opposition” mode.

Another important change in the way that I looked at the world was a embrace of Christianity after wrestling with the question off and on for the better part of a decade. I started to reevaluate certain positions I held, realizing that secular conservatism sometimes seems more interested in religion as a prop for the social order than in its truth claims. And whatever the correct policies were for addressing, say, poverty or the environment, it occurred to me that a Christian approach to them was not necessarily going to coincide with the ones favored by many political conservatives. At the very least I was willing to look at liberal positions with fresh eyes. (I also blame my wife for forcing me to take bleeding-heart liberal positions more seriously.)

At this point I haven’t really re-thought a lot of my fundamental views on, say, economics or the scope of government so much as I’ve been continually dismayed by the way the GOP has behaved in power. I’ve become sharply attuned to the failures of “actually existing” conservatism you might say. I don’t think I need to rehash all that for anyone who’s read this blog over the last couple of years. Suffice it to say that I now find myself agreeing with the analysis coming out of liberal and Left organs much more frequently than those of the establishment Right, at least on the (to me) crucial issues of foreign policy, civil liberties, executive power, and the treatment of prisoners. So, I don’t know if that puts me on “the left” or just makes me a disgruntled conservative. For the forseeable future it may not make much difference.