I was thinking over the weekend...

...about my own personal political evolution from Libertarian to Whatever-it-is-I-am-Now (I spent a lot of time alone in the car). I tried to determine the exact point at which I first began to have doubts about my small government, free-market philosophy, but evolution is a murky thing. I think I was still completely on board as recently as 1994 and the Contract With America. When Newt Gingrich & Company shut down the Federal government in 1995, I felt like our time had finally arrived. The Revolution was imminent! But the maneuver proved to be hugely unpopular and backfired. Gingrich never really regained his footing and the Movement was fatally wounded. In hindsight, I think that was the beginning of the end for the Reagan Years. The Bush administration was just the Gotterdammerung. I also think it was at about this time that I realized on some level, maybe from reading David Stockman's book, The Triumph of Politics, that Americans want a certain amount of government in their lives and it's unrealistic to think otherwise. Stockman's book was published in 1986 and, whatever else you may think of him, he realized that "starving the beast" was a fallacy; America was incapable or just unwilling to cut spending. His conclusion was that people should at least pay for their services with taxes. It took twenty more years, but Americans (including many Republicans) decided that they want to keep Social Security and Medicare. After all, how many Republicans would really like to see their elderly parents show up at their front door with nowhere else to go?

Stephen Jay Gould, the famous evolutionary biologist, said that people are naturally uncomfortable with evolution. It's messy; they want to know when things began. Thus the whole myth of how Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Gould wrote a great piece once on how baseball didn't just begin one day, but actually evolved from English games such as cricket.

And so do we as people also evolve, in our thinking and otherwise. I was still rereading Ayn Rand well into the 1990s and voted Libertarian up until 2006, although by 2004 I was rooting for John Kerry after rooting for Bush in 2000. In 2008 I voted for Obama, the first time I voted for a Democrat since 1987, when I voted for Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago. After the disastrous Bush years and the economic crisis of 2008, I'm rethinking a lot of my views on the proper role for government. I guess evolution is an ongoing process.