Regardless of the origin of the saying, older people do tend to be more conservative \u2013 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\u2019m sure there\u2019s some truth to that. But in my case, the older I get, the more liberal I become. And I think it\u2019s worth exploring why that is.<\/p>\n
I grew up in Tennessee in the 1960s and 70s, when the Democrats still controlled the South \u2013 before Nixon\u2019s \u201cSouthern Strategy\u201d 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.<\/p>\n At the time, I liked to say I was \u201cfiscally conservative and socially liberal.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Basically my politics weren\u2019t very well developed.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been about 35 years, but I clearly remember an event that made a huge impact on me.<\/p>\n I was an industrial engineer in a manufacturing plant. A major part of my job was line balancing \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 we were over the target by one person.<\/p>\n He immediately picked up the phone, called the Tool and Die supervisor, and said \u201cyou\u2019re going to have to lay off Tommy.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t have a job after all.<\/p>\n And that didn\u2019t seem to bother anybody involved in making the decision.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve seen this over and over again \u2013 ordinary people\u2019s lives disrupted not because business was bad and the company was losing money, but to meet some arbitrary metric\u2026 or more often, to meet some executive\u2019s bonus target.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been handed three layoff notices in my career. Because all of them had some notice to them (thanks to the WARN Act<\/a>), I was always able to find a new job before my old job went away.<\/p>\n But each time I had to move across the country to do it.<\/p>\n And others weren\u2019t so lucky.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re going to have Big Business, we need Big Government to act as a counterbalance.<\/p>\n When bad things happen Christians like to say \u201cit\u2019s all part of God\u2019s plan.\u201d Too many Pagans \u2013 who should know better \u2013 like to say \u201cthe Universe has a plan.\u201d Reality is that there is no plan and life is far more random than any of us want to admit.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Life isn\u2019t fair, and people who get hit with some of life\u2019s unfairness shouldn\u2019t have to try to deal with it on their own. Nor should it all fall on their families.<\/p>\n The more of this I\u2019ve seen, the more I believe the best approach to the randomness of life is one of shared risks and shared rewards. And that can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s one thing that keeps me voting for the most liberal candidates I can find, it\u2019s our dysfunctional health care system.<\/p>\n Honestly, though, we have a great health care system. You can get better health care here than any place in the world \u2013 if you can afford it. We have a lousy health care payment system.<\/p>\n Every year my employer has \u201copen enrollment\u201d for health insurance. Every year the costs go up. More importantly \u2013 to me, anyway \u2013 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.<\/p>\n If I\u2019m sick, I don\u2019t want to have to think about how much it\u2019s going to cost. People who are seriously injured shouldn\u2019t have to worry about how much an ambulance costs.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t afford health insurance on the exchanges.<\/p>\n Universal health care isn\u2019t a radical idea. It works (in one form or another) in every advanced country in the world \u2013 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\u2019s Democratic Party platform on health care<\/a>.<\/p>\n The older and more experienced I got, the more I realized that the candidates who promised \u201csmall government\u201d 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\u2019t have, they\u2019re for the biggest of governments.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Don\u2019t tell me I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a liberal. I think government should help people, not control people.<\/p>\n If I\u2019ve become conservative at all, it\u2019s in the purest sense of the term \u2013 I\u2019m reluctant to throw away something that works (even if it doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t care if some people are very rich. I care that anyone is poor.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want equal outcomes. I want equal opportunity \u2013 true equal opportunity that compensates for the effects of generational wealth.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n If I have to pay more taxes to support that, so be it.<\/p>\n![\"photo](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/243\/2024\/08\/0607-170-Juneau-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nIn the beginning I had a lot to learn<\/h2>\n
The callousness of power<\/h2>\n
The randomness of life<\/h2>\n
The cost and risk of health care<\/h2>\n
\u201cConservatives are for small government\u201d is a lie<\/h2>\n
I\u2019m a liberal, not a leftist<\/h2>\n
\u201cLife isn\u2019t fair\u201d<\/h2>\n