Apostasy and Heresy: How To Achieve Political Unpopularity in Modern America, Part One

(This is going to be a long post; it includes a partial summary of my political purview, and a sampling of some of the issue positions I presently hold. An overview I need to get out of the way, to give readers some idea of what they’re in for. The more I put here, the less I’ll feel obligated to repeat myself. Hopefully.)

So, you want to be a Pariah!

All I can do is offer some suggestions, from experience and observation:

1. Hold the status of “political independent.” This will not only lead to consternation by partisans of the two major American political parties, it will also inspire attempts to fit your political identity into various hackneyed pigeonholes, before you’ve even had a chance to explain your views. “My kind” (as if there were only one kind of political independent) has been referred to as everything from wishy-washy moderates, to stealth operatives for the Opposition Party, to covert disciples of Third Way neofascism…anything but taking us at our word, and allowing any of us to provide an individual rationale for refusing to identify with any extant political party on the contemporary scene. Whatever the unflattering caricature set up to frame you, it’s intended to decrease the number of people open to taking any of your views seriously. That way, the conversation can resume without your input.

2. Disdain attempts to communicate your ideas in any dumb-ass platform that enforces a 280 character limit on their explication. Because a) Twitter is super-hip! And super-superficial. b) “everyone” knows that a preference for “text walls” is bo-ring; c) hating on Twitter is most often taken for granted as snobbery (rather than sanity, which is the actual case). As a result, you’ll be guaranteed to cull the readership, thereby boosting your Unpopularity.

   Fuck Twitter. (In the parlance, I mean. Not literally. I don’t even want to watch it as porn.)

3. Insist on Nuance. As if politics were about clarity, substance, and detail, instead of slogans and symbolism. Who do you think you are?

   An example of the deal-breaking type of Nuanced postion I’m referring to:

   I support total decriminalization of drug use and personal possession (Goodbye, Punitive Moralist Social Conservatives and kneejerk anti-substance use paranoids.) As long as it’s uncomplicated by other offenses; people should not be allowed to use their drug use as an extenuating circumstance in order to evade personal responsibility for serious criminal misbehavior (Goodbye, Bliss Ninny Liberals.) That attitude is akin to my support for DUI laws- but I don’t think BAC or substance ingestion alone is probative for a DUI offense; at most, it’s supporting evidence. Impaired driving behavior is probative, and we’re in the era of police cameras. (Goodbye, everyone who thinks that “impure body fluids = impairment.”) I support a legal market in cannabis- but I’m skeptical that it should include high-THC concentrates, or beer with THC in it- or even edibles at all, actually. People can make their own edibles. (Goodbye, cannabis entrepreneurs with dollar signs in their eyes. Goodbye, cannabis Consumers insisting that maximum convenience supersedes all other priorities, including harm reduction.) I support prescription opioid maintenance, for addicts only- get them out of the criminal marketplace and social milieu first, stabilize their living circumstances next, and deal with the process of breaking addiction later. Getting out and staying out is always an addict decision, after all. More of them want out than is popularly supposed, but it’s time-sensitive situation, and the longer one stays addicted, the harder it is to get out. (Goodbye, anyone who imagines that drug dependency is so bad that being abused by criminal suppliers, other desperate users, and other exploiters in the criminal marketplace is merely a necessary and important part of the process of showing the addict that “drugs are bad, m-kay?” I know there are quite a lot of you who hold that viewpoint, wittingly or unwittingly. Until you interrogate it honestly, I guess you’ll just write me off as a “pro-drug” legalization advocate.) I think that any drug addict who finds themselves reduced to living on the street and a life of petty crime needs to be given the ultimatum to stop their recividism or else be committed to long-term involuntary confinement in jail facilities specifically dedicated to addicts who find themselves reduced to committing crimes- a category that isn’t to be confused with that much smaller but more troublesome cohort, of predatory criminals with violent tendencies who happen to be drug-addicted. Dysfunctional street addicts convicted of crimes like burglary or serial trespassing offenses should be sentenced to compulsory treatment in a confinement environment for the good of the civil order and public health of the law-abiding majority, as well as offering an opportunity for long-term supervised treatment that’s probably the only option available to enable a chance of recovery, for most of the street addict population. (Goodbye, most doctrinaire Left “homeless advocates”, and all “anti-incarceration” activists.)

   [ See how easy that was? Iconoclastic nuance has a way of confusing the hell out of most Americans. It presses so many buttons! And that was just one issue category. More of my heretic views are featured below. ]

4. Admit that you might be wrong, when you aren’t sure of your position. (You’ll be attacked for being weak and indecisive.)

5. Admit that you don’t know enough and that you might be wrong, but acknowledge the requirement to make (or endorse) a decision or course of action anyway. (I mean, take a look at the record of official responses to covid. You can’t win!)

6. Be willing to change your mind when new facts emerge, or when you’ve reviewed a strong argument that’s lead you to re-evaluate your position. (You’re guaranteed to be shunned by at least some former allies as “unreliable”. In some cases, you can lose friends overnight by stating that you’ve changed your mind on a given issue. On one single given issue.)

7. Refuse steadfast allegiance to any Ideology. This will bewilder that large number of Americans who insist on framing their political views ideologically (often notwithstanding rampant contradictions in practice, in their own lives.) Many of them will simply see you later, kthxbai.

8. Despite that personal refusal to identify ideologically, be educated and conversant in the basic precepts of the most popular ideologies nonetheless. Grant their valid points. There’s tons of deal-breaking fun to be had in a conversation on political economy through, by turns, bringing up the indisputable validity of observations made by commentators as diverse as Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Henry George, Alf Hornborg, Naomi Klein, J.D. Vance, Michael Hudson, etc. Give credit where credit is due! Adherents to dogma hate that.

   By using ideologies as templates and paradigms that have overlaps and specific utilities rather than enshrining them as Unified Field Theories, you’ll be able to reap a maximum of practical benefit from the best work, without the requirement to reinvent the wheel based on your own ad hoc suppositions. Ideological frameworks are like geometry; consider that there’s no insistence by mathematicians that Reimannian geometry has overthrown Euclidean geometry, or vice versa, etc. It’s about practical applications. This perspective discomforts anyone who views Ideological Allegiance as litmus test for Team Loyalty. Thereby working to ensure your Political Unpopularity.

9. Settle on positions based on thinking for oneself as an individual, rather than acceding to demands for uncritical team loyalty. There’s no end to the Deal-breakers, once you do that. To provide some personal examples:

   I revere the natural world, I think that anthropogenic climate disruption is real, and I think some forms of nuclear power generation are imperative in order to transition to a clean energy economy. Atomic power has the potential to be much safer than most people think. (Goodbye, dogmatic Greens.)

   I support a carbon tax on fossil fuels, with offsets for lower income households. (Goodbye, dogmatic climate change deniers and hand-wavers.)

   I think markets and arbitrage are an intrinisic component of economic existence- there isn’t even a “pro-” or “anti-” about that. Markets are like the atmosphere, or the oceans. All profit-seeking behavior is not Wrong. (Goodbye, dogmatic Marxists.)

   I think unfettered capitalism is inherently inertial; the process can’t be trusted to regulate itself. If it is allowed that power, the result will be a multilevel catastrophe for both the natural world and the human society incorporated within it. The wealthiest private interests in human society have too much power as it is. After a given amount of accumulation, wealth has a way of distorting and even deranging perspective, and turning toxic; it isn’t even good for the wealthy. (Goodbye, dogmatic Libertarians.)

   I support a national sales tax (with a rebate) which would offset a flat tax on income (above a certain level), and a flat tax on dividends and capital gains (above a certain level.)

   (Goodbye, Democratic Party dogma on tax policy.)

   I support a voluntary national service program linked to a benefits package akin to what people who enlist in the military receive, rather than “free college for all.” (Goodbye, free-lunch social democrats and knee-jerk libertarian “anti-statists.”)

   I oppose the Child Care Credit, as presently formulated. Mitt Romney supports $15,000/year per child- and he’s a GOP Senator, so imagine what the Dems are after. (Goodbye to everyone who thinks that opposing this measure amounts to depriving “the weakest and most vulnerable in our society.”)

   Instead, I’d like to propose a Good Citizen Financial Bonus of, say, $25,000, for all American citizens who reach age 25 without any misdemeanor or felony convictions, no alimony or child care payment delinquencies, and a record of steady employment as indicated by their tax filings. And maybe an even larger one at age 30. The devil is in the details, but I think the goals are clear. (Goodbye to everyone who thinks I’m overly presumptuous, by suggesting a policy that they’ve never heard of before.)

   I support experiments in Universal Basic Income- most inclined to pay a UBI at a level intended to supplement gig work, side hustles, community college and vocational training enrollement, half-time employment, etc. rather than an amount sufficient to pay for housing, utilities, food, etc. as a full ride that might encourage perpetual non-productive malingering by able-bodied people. But I’m flexible. And I’m not reflexively opposed to the lowering of the minimum wage as part of a UBI dividend economy. (Goodbye, everyone who refuses to open themselves to even a hypothetical discussion of the merits of UBI, preferring to shut down the conversation with ridicule. There are quite a lot of you, I’ve noticed.)

   I support ranked-choice voting at the national level. (Goodbye, Democrats and Republicans with a vested interest in perpetual Duopoly.)

   To resort to the dreaded Nuance once more: I think the ranked-choice voting process might be improved by limiting the allotted votes to two, for a first and second choice. (Goodbye, ranked-choice idealists who abhor any such limitation on voter agency as a “compromise”, and refuse to even consider the practical merits of the idea.) I find a two-party majoritarian system preferable to parliamentary coalition politics, and don’t see any compelling reason why ranked-choice voting will do anything other than reinforce it. (Goodbye, political reformers who would prefer the default American system to be replaced by a parliamentary system. And also goodbye to ranked-choice opponents who insist that the ranked-choice reform will upend the two-party system per se, when all it will actually do is to allow the potential for the two current status quo duopoly parties to be supplanted by a more responsive majoritarian dynamic- which is what most of the opponents really fear.)

So many Dealbreakers!

I have lots more positions like those. That’s how it is, when you don’t go all-in with any one simplistic Final Answer. Few people want to stick around long enough to hear you out, and most of the ones who remain rely on cliched objections that they haven’t bothered to examine before parroting them.

For those of you- if any- who have made it to the end of this screed: if you really want to uncouple yourself from group allegiances in politics, attempt to craft a set of definitions of the “left-right spectrum” that’s based on a consistent logical framework- and which acknowledges the critical differences between the spectrum applied in its economic aspect, its political aspect, its cultural aspect, and its personal aspect. Etc. A project that, for me, will have to wait for another post.