Winston Churchill is often credited with the quote “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
Like so many famous quotes, this one is incorrectly attributed – it has a rather uncertain origin. Still, it’s understandable why it’s associated with Churchill – he changed parties from Conservative to Liberal at age 29, and then back to Conservative at 49.
Regardless of the origin of the saying, older people do tend to be more conservative – though this is far from universally true. The usual reason given is that as people get older they accumulate more wealth and they want to do whatever they can to hold onto it. I’m sure there’s some truth to that. But in my case, the older I get, the more liberal I become. And I think it’s worth exploring why that is.
In the beginning I had a lot to learn
I grew up in Tennessee in the 1960s and 70s, when the Democrats still controlled the South – before Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and before the two major parties flipped on civil rights. By the time I started voting my main concerns were national security (this was the middle of the Cold War) and low taxes.
At the time, I liked to say I was “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” I supported civil rights and the ERA, but I wanted taxes kept low, and felt like there should at least an effort to balance the federal budget. I tended to vote Republican, although I genuinely tried to vote for the person and not the party.
Basically my politics weren’t very well developed.
The callousness of power
It’s been about 35 years, but I clearly remember an event that made a huge impact on me.
I was an industrial engineer in a manufacturing plant. A major part of my job was line balancing – figuring out how many people we needed working on the assembly lines to achieve a certain daily production rate. We had just rebalanced the lines for our fall busy season, which required hiring new workers.
A mandate came down from corporate headquarters that the ratio of indirect labor (people doing jobs like maintenance, warehousing, and such) to direct labor (the people who were actually driving screws and plugging up wires on the assembly lines) could not exceed a fixed target. I ran the numbers and showed them to my boss – we were over the target by one person.
He immediately picked up the phone, called the Tool and Die supervisor, and said “you’re going to have to lay off Tommy.”
Tommy had just been promoted to Tool and Die Apprentice. This was his chance to learn a skilled trade and to make more money. A week earlier we all agreed we needed more people in Tool and Die. But because some executive decided that the indirect to direct ratio was of critical importance, now he was bumped back to the assembly lines, and someone who had just been hired was told they didn’t have a job after all.
And that didn’t seem to bother anybody involved in making the decision.
I’ve seen this over and over again – ordinary people’s lives disrupted not because business was bad and the company was losing money, but to meet some arbitrary metric… or more often, to meet some executive’s bonus target.
I’ve been handed three layoff notices in my career. Because all of them had some notice to them (thanks to the WARN Act), I was always able to find a new job before my old job went away.
But each time I had to move across the country to do it.
And others weren’t so lucky.
If we’re going to have Big Business, we need Big Government to act as a counterbalance.
The randomness of life
When bad things happen Christians like to say “it’s all part of God’s plan.” Too many Pagans – who should know better – like to say “the Universe has a plan.” Reality is that there is no plan and life is far more random than any of us want to admit.
What do you do when a tornado hits your house? When a drunk driver kills your spouse? When the child you desperately wanted arrives with severe medical issues, requiring care costing hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Life isn’t fair, and people who get hit with some of life’s unfairness shouldn’t have to try to deal with it on their own. Nor should it all fall on their families.
The more of this I’ve seen, the more I believe the best approach to the randomness of life is one of shared risks and shared rewards. And that can’t be done at the level of voluntary societies. Only government can muster the resources needed to manage the levels of risk we all face without allowing some people to lose everything.
The cost and risk of health care
If there’s one thing that keeps me voting for the most liberal candidates I can find, it’s our dysfunctional health care system.
Honestly, though, we have a great health care system. You can get better health care here than any place in the world – if you can afford it. We have a lousy health care payment system.
Every year my employer has “open enrollment” for health insurance. Every year the costs go up. More importantly – to me, anyway – every year the deductible goes up. I have no option at any cost for what used to be an ordinary policy with modest co-pays. My only options are for high deductible plans, which means that unless I have surgery, I have to pay for everything out of pocket.
If I’m sick, I don’t want to have to think about how much it’s going to cost. People who are seriously injured shouldn’t have to worry about how much an ambulance costs.
And because we tie health insurance to jobs, we tie people to jobs. If it was just a question of paying for my living expenses, I could retire today. But I can’t afford health insurance on the exchanges.
Universal health care isn’t a radical idea. It works (in one form or another) in every advanced country in the world – except for this one. I supported Bernie Sanders for President in 2016 mainly because he pushed for Medicare For All, and I support this year’s Democratic Party platform on health care.
“Conservatives are for small government” is a lie
The older and more experienced I got, the more I realized that the candidates who promised “small government” only meant that when it comes to doing things to promote the common welfare. When it comes to who you love, what language you speak, what books are in the library, what medical procedures you can or can’t have, they’re for the biggest of governments.
How can I vote for someone who might save me a few hundred dollars a year if they want to put my friends in jail?
Don’t tell me I’m overreacting. I live in Texas, where the Attorney General sent CPS after some of my fellow Denton UUs because they love and support their trans son. I live in Texas, where women with unviable pregnancies have to leave the state to preserve their health, and where those without the resources to travel are left to hemorrhage on their own because doctors are afraid of being prosecuted.
I’m a liberal. I think government should help people, not control people.
I’m a liberal, not a leftist
If I’ve become conservative at all, it’s in the purest sense of the term – I’m reluctant to throw away something that works (even if it doesn’t work perfectly) to try something radically different. Or, as I like to tell my leftist friends, if you want my help to burn it all down, show me your plan to build something better in its place.
I don’t care if some people are very rich. I care that anyone is poor.
I don’t want equal outcomes. I want equal opportunity – true equal opportunity that compensates for the effects of generational wealth.
I want a relatively high floor beneath which no one is allowed to fall, no matter how badly they screw up, or how many times they screw up.
If I have to pay more taxes to support that, so be it.
“Life isn’t fair”
Children quickly learn that life isn’t fair. When we become adults we have to deal with that unfairness.
Some insist that life really is fair, that if you just work hard and obey the law everything will be fine, and if it doesn’t it’s your own fault. They’re lying to themselves, because deep down they know they’re one corporate downsizing, one cancer diagnosis, one drunk driver away from having their lives turned upside down. Or maybe they did work hard and things turned out fine for them, and so they say “I got mine, screw you.”
As for me, I decided that while we can’t make life perfectly fair and we certainly can’t make it painless and risk-free, we can do a lot better than we’re doing now. We can share risks and share rewards. We can support people being who they are and living their lives the way they want to live them. We can use the power of government to keep the worst of Big Business in check.
The older I get, the more liberal I become.
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