I Could be Wrong, But I Doubt It

I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

I have gone  through five years of grammar school, three years of middle school, four years of high school, four years of college, three years of law school and nearly two years of work experience.  I have stayed consistently in one side of the political spectrum.  I studied politics for four years and focused on it in law school.  I made friends with diverse opinions and lived in areas with polar opposite ideas from mine.  I’ve read about politics, wrote about politics and spoken about politics.

It’s safe to say that I’ve had sufficient exposure  and have sufficient intellectual capacity to make an intelligent judgment about politics.

And I simply can’t comprehend why anyone would be a liberal.

To be fair, this statement comes with two caveats.

First, it’s not that  I don’t see where liberals come from.  These days, my favorite phrase when I talk politics is, “I understand, but I disagree.”  I’ve befriended enough liberals to understand their thought process.  I found them to be perfectly logical, their conclusions based on sound reasoning.

But since I can’t make myself come to an agreement with them, I’ve realized that liberalism is based on false assumptions and misplaced values.

That’s the only explanation I could come up with for why two perfectly reasonable people (I consider myself reasonable although undeniably also emotional) could come to such different conclusions.  The way I see it, if  you start out with false assumptions, it really doesn’t matter how many logical links you connect.  You’re going to drift astray.

And then there is the issue of what exactly constitutes “conservative.”  The modern Republican Party is a hotchpotch of strange bedfellows.  Somehow, in the last three decades, those who believe in small government, lower taxes and market economy  joined together with those who think government should ban abortion and restrict marriage to traditional notions.  There is no rational connection with all of these ideas, yet that is the modern Republican Party.

Be that as that may be, I am a proud, card-carrying member of the Republican Party, wholly aligned with its current policies and ideals with very few exceptions.  I am a fiscal, social and legal conservative.  I make no apologies for it.  I see no need to.

Being a conservative has been a blast.  I received my higher education surrounded by people who were clueless and I now work with people who are hopeless.  I find great pleasure in the every day I live knowing that I stand alone being right while those so much smarter than I am are debating the different ways in which they can be wrong.  It does wonders for my ego.

My conservatism has also been a nice way to distinguish myself from the crowd of the accomplished.  I have taken liberties with introducing my politics almost immediately after I introduce my name because it turns out that my conservatism is a source of great fascination with many people.  My college roommate  loves telling the story of how we became great friends because he, from Denver, had never met a conservative until he met me.  I’d like to think the first conservative he met was also the nuttiest.  Now that I work, I’m meeting colleagues who love listening to how a person who seemingly led a normal path to a legal career in the Big Apple veered so far off the standard political spectrum.

Of course, it’s not always so rosy.  Especially now that I have a career, I have tried to become more discreet about when and where to disclose my politics.  It’s a difficult balance.  On the one hand, I have no interest in making enemies over matters so trivial (and yes, unless either you or I are running for office, political discussion is trivial because all the talk ain’t makin’ much of a difference).  On the other hand, I have no desire to sit quietly while people discuss the divinity of Obama and the depravity of Bush as if they were matters of fact rather than personal opinion.

The fact is, the mockery of Bush and the Republican Party that I am increasingly subjected to is something I am tiring of and no longer have any patience to tolerate.  I work for a fine New York City law firm with a juris doctor from a first rate law school.  I may have come to a differing conclusion than most in my shoes, but I’m confident I have the intellectual capacity to coherently analyze the situation.

And for that I think I deserve some fucking respect.