Since I'm regularly challenged in one or another forum to explain myself--how can I be "so far left" is usually the gist of the question--I'll try to actually do it here. Or if not actually explain myself, I'll at least lay my cards on the table.
The terms "conservative" and "liberal" or "right" and "left" often aren't very useful, but I'll try to use these terms even so.
The problem for many people, especially people who've known me since youth, the thing they can't get their heads around, is that I'm a leftist. It's true, leftists rarely come from my childhood demographic. And then when these people discover I'm also a Christian, it makes even less sense to them.
In fact I'm culturally conservative and politically on the left.
As an American, I know, this self-definition makes me something like the opposite of normal, even to the point of making me a "bad American". This is because America as a whole is wired in almost the precisely opposite direction.
In terms of culture, America is largely what could be called liberal. It brings the world things like MTV, Facebook, "Sex and the City," hip hop. Though America is full of outspoken people who call themselves "conservative," this is hardly to the point when one looks at larger trends. America has long been a force of cultural liberalization.
In terms of politics, on the other hand, America is largely what could be called conservative. Its economic system is rigged to suit an oligarchy, its foreign policy is nationalistic, self-righteous, trigger-happy. America is far to the right of most of its Western allies and is moving ever further rightward.
Both these trends (America's cultural liberalism and its political conservatism) have only gotten worse since I've become an adult. Thus as my country's culture drifts further and further from any respect for traditional Western learning, its economic order becomes more and more a matter of unfettered capitalism. I would like to see the opposite trends.
Politics: If we assume that a far right position favors pure free-market capitalism and that a far left position favors a centrally regulated socialism, I'd position myself a few inches to the right of Fidel Castro.
Culture: If we take education policy as a central arena of cultural debate, I could make my thinking clear by saying that I've always (with some differences) supported the idea of education put forward by Allan Bloom in the 1980s in his book The Closing of the American Mind. I am strongly in favor of a book-centered, classics-centered Western education, starting in high school but including, certainly, anything that would call itself a "university education". This means I am against the political correctness that seeks to make the American education system a culturally neutral space where no tradition of thinking is assumed. Students in my America would start reading the Western canon in elementary school and would continue well into university. To imagine that a student could graduate from any university without having studied Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, the Bible, Enlightenment thought and the history of the American Revolution--to imagine this would be out of the question. Only on the grounds of a thoroughly Western learning would students be able to opt for study of other cultural traditions. Citizens in a democracy must first understand ideas before they can debate them. The pathetic level of discourse one sees in American political debates--whether between candidates, interested citizens, or pundits--is an embarrassment in a country with such a high percentage of university graduates.
Why stick so tenaciously on the study of all these old books? Because the Western canon is the only place where Americans might ground themselves in the crucial questions they need to consider as citizens. These questions include: the relation of the state to citizenry; the meaning of public and republic; the bases and effects of different economic orders; the question of freedoms and responsibilities in the context of a republic; the question of what in any political order is provisional and artificial.
Most of my fellow Americans are such hard-wired anti-intellectualists that they would probably howl in protest at my defense of a canon-based education. For them, university is a matter of job training on the one hand, football games on the other.
I've lived overseas since the mid-1990s--the country I'm living in has its problems too--but still I don't feel I've missed out on much in the US. And what can I have missed--the glorious Bush/Cheney years, the rise of the Kardashians, Charlie Sheen? Give me a break. Though I had some hope when Obama was inaugurated, I see I was mainly mistaken. In fact America is an echo chamber that gets only more idiotic with each passing year, and Obama, if he is re-elected, does not seem likely to stand up to the oligarchy and push for any of the actual change he once promised. So rather than watch four more years of Compromiser-in-Chief up close, I'm grateful not to have to live there.
Go ahead, compatriots and sports fans, go ahead and tell me--"If you like Fidel Castro so much, why not move to Cuba!"
My answer is simple: Because I'd rather not live in Cuba, thank you. An experiment in authoritarian socialism, Cuba has serious problems, probably the main one being that it was built on a Leninist model. But Fidel's Cuba with limited free markets--Cuba with elections and a range of political parties vying for who gets the right to manage a largely socialist economy, a socialist economy guaranteed by constitution, that would be something else. And so, though I'm glad I don't live in Castro's Cuba, I'm glad I didn't have to live in George W. Bush's USA either.
Before closing, I'd like to return to the question of Christianity. As noted above, I'm a Christian, and this seems odd to many who hear me talk about political issues. I really don't know why. In fact both my political leftism and my cultural conservatism are informed by my faith. As for the leftism, this again, I well know, is not the norm for American Christians. But so what? I myself find nothing particularly Christian about the things many other American Christians seem to support: free-market capitalism, militarism, greed as good, unbridled consumerism. Some Christians reading this now, maybe they'd want to say, "Hey, I don't support greed as good or militarism or unbridled consumerism!" Well, maybe you don't. But if you support the political status quo, especially if you have voted Republican, I don't see how you can imagine you're not supporting these things. Think about it. What is it that the policies of the American right are grounded on if not the belief that 1) greed is good and 2) American bombs bring peace, not war. Do you really think you don't stand for these things when you vote for the right? And do you really think my idea of Christian politics is somehow "weird" compared to yours? Have you ever read, say, the Gospels?
* * *P.S.-- But might I, to raise the sense of contrast even higher, add Marx to that list of Western classics that should be required study? Certainly Marx was wrong about many things, but he remains a massively important thinker, maybe even especially now. Terry Eagleton wrote a fine piece on Marx last year:
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027
