Sam Rocha
In Mexico one of the few radio stations with a clear signal was the EIB Network, starring The Rush Limbaugh Show. I listened to Rush religiously and enjoyed the sketches and the funky bass intro music. I considered myself a “dittohead.” I became familiar with terms like “environmental wackos” and of course the Clinton years were filled with strong opinions, but for whatever reason, nothing immediately made a huge impression on me in specific detail. Perhaps just as strong was the impression from The Laura Ingraham Show, which aired mostly on car rides, where her attitude and toughness led me to begin to associate this radio fare with the toughness and severity of our own Christian lifestyle.
Skits and moral platitudes from Focus on the Family were always enticing as well, but my interest was mainly in the stories in that case. All in all, this was media safely secluded from popular music stations and other immoral secular influences, which almost unwittingly included Right-wing news and conservative self-help commentary.
The other place where politics snuck in was in my grandparent’s neighborhood, where during the Ann Richards years in Texas, from 1991 to 1995, just about everyone supported her with lawn signs, especially my Tio Rene. Such strong support for a Democrat showed me a deep discontinuity between talk radio and my father’s side of the family. Something about that fascinated me and I even recall a tense discussion about abortion and Democratic politics between my father and grandfather where both stood their ground. During the first Iraq War we were pulled over at the border and our oranges were confiscated, but that is about all I recall in terms of opinions about Bush Sr.’s presidency.
Otherwise, the terms ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ were words I heard Rush use, and as time passed I also heard them being used by priests who mostly leaned conservative theologically. I had yet to meet a self-proclaimed liberal or much less a leftist of any kind. The ongoing politics of priests would confuse and fascinate me for years to come, but by the mid-1990s I was a conservative in disposition, lacking any conscious sense of conservative creed—those were reserved for my faith, which remained largely apolitical.
This apoliticism might seem odd since during my time in Mexico the PRI was losing its footing for the first time since the 1910 revolution. But this was the way things were in the Mexican colonias where we lived; only graffiti and party propaganda gave any clue besides the generally militant and revolutionary history curriculum I learned in the Mexican public school I attended for fifth and sixth grade.
Also during this time I spent many summers in Cortez, Colorado, visiting my maternal side of the family. Much of that time was spent fishing with my grandfather, a lifelong Democrat. He made constant political swipes at Republicans and sometimes even spoke at length about economics and abortion and he also refused to shop at big box stores or drive foreign vehicles. His politics were in some ways scandalous to me, but I also held them in high esteem for their consistency. I had a particularly long talk (where he mostly talked and I listened) with him about politics the summer before we moved to West Texas from the southern borderlands.
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In the mid 90s we moved to Brady, a small town in West Texas. During my five years there I grew more conservative in an ecclesial sense while also becoming less strict in the daily lifestyle now removed from the formal affiliation to the Charismatic movement. I also acquired a strong dose of the natural political conservatism of the Bush years as governor of Texas that seemed to hover in the air in West Texas.
I fell in love with competitive speech: first impromptu and then extemporaneous speech and competitive Lincoln-Douglas style debate. This led me to find philosophy, especially political philosophy and ethics, at Baylor Debate Camp and under the informal tutelage of a University of Dallas graduate who was the local district attorney and my post-confirmation catechist. We read the new Catechism and Summa of the Summa together.
In speech competitions many of our judges were easy to read. I learned how to accuse someone of Eurocentrism if the judge was a young college student. I learned how to wax moralistic and patriotic if the judge was a bus driver or a schoolteacher. In one final match I took a hardline against an opponent who left out the name of God in the Pledge of Allegiance. I knew the rhetoric of conservatism, but it was mostly rhetorical.
My religious roots in charismatic forms of worship gave me an easy entry to the local protestant churches and prayer meetings, where a more explicit Republican evangelical conservatism was already well established. But they also had strong doses of anti-Catholicism, so I was always wary.
My studies led me to an appreciation for the founding documents of the United States, which I saw then as a perfection of social contractarian political philosophy. The only book remotely philosophical in our high school library surely over-influenced me, titled An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. In my junior yearbook I am pictured wearing a red t-shirt with the Declaration of Independence written on it, a text I nearly memorized and of which I wrote my entry essay to my college honors program a year later.
Debate forced me to argue two sides of an issue, which sometimes bothered me. One debate resolution on abortion was too much and I didn’t compete that season. Baylor debate counselors were eager undergrads touting Nozick over Rawls, and led me down an anti-liberal path that verged on anarchism. The libertine girls who spoke openly about sex and my Jewish roommate who seemed brilliant and quite liberal also fascinated me.
For some reason I presented on the Communist Manifesto for my junior English book project. I was surprised to find it fairly unobjectionable and tried to make a case for it in class to no success and much confusion. I also read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which impressed me. These were the Clinton years but I was too busy with sports, school, and church to tune into a steady regime of political media outside of my readings. Debate and speech led me to find apologetics more and more enticing as a sort of religious rhetorical politics and I was always eager to argue with a Protestant.
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I left Brady my junior year, seventeen years old with an October birthday, headed to a relatively more urban high school entering the election of 2000. I followed the primaries closely, and by default I paid more attention to the Republicans. I also wore a Green Party button on occasions, but it was mostly to confuse people and look hip to some of my speech and theatre friends. I became fascinated with Alan Keyes. His debate with Alan Dershowitz struck me as being inspiring and his refusal to cede his campaign to George W. Bush seemed principled. McCain impressed me as well. I ignored the Democratic ticket.
When Keyes was asked why he refused to suspend his campaign, seeing that was surely going to lose, he replied saying that politics was not about winning and losing, but about defending an ideal one finds to be true and offering that as an option to voters. That statement resonated with me deeply. It reminded me of The Alamo and of a philosophical politics and ethics. I wrote him in as my first vote for the US presidency and to this day the principle of my vote leaves me with no regrets.
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I attended Franciscan University of Steubenville for four years starting in 2001 and there my political views truly began to become more conscious and confused. Until then I embodied a roughly conservative outlook, but I was unaware of it explicitly and had no clear idea of what the term meant other than its vague ideological grip on my imagination. I did assume that a faithful Catholic would always be a conservative of some kind.
September 11 took place during my freshmen year and I was agnostic about the war in Iraq until I saw a report of bombings in Bagdad on a small television playing in a food stand in Honduras. I was struck by a profound sense of disgust and since then have dismissed the hawkish side of conservatism out of hand. I also began to distrust pro-lifers who celebrate war and death.
I joined the only fraternity on campus, a rebellious move. In that rowdy group, conversations on politics were sophomoric, but earnest. We had libertarians of all kinds, an anarchist or two, and plenty of dyed in the wool Republicans testing out the limits of their conscience. Abortion was a universal harm we mostly agreed on, but even that seemed less stable as time went on in discussions.
There was also something of a dissident intellectual culture, composed of philosophy majors influenced greatly by one particular professor on campus and a few other professors who were critical or openly opposed to conservatism. An indie publication, The Gadfly, was where we tried our young pens on critical essays and satire.
I flirted with strong authoritarian ideas that led to a unique but tortured antimodernist critique of the nation-state and debated a Hawaiian native, Dallas Carter, on the legitimacy of American colonialism, which I defended.
My metaphysical ideas were always in flux, profoundly shaped by a course on the philosophy of Dante and augmented by two consecutive semesters of honors with Fr. Conrad Harkins, OFM, whose politics were positively not conservative. When asked if he would sponsor a student group called “Democrats for Life” he replied, “Not until they have a ‘Republicans for Social Justice’.”
During the 2004 election I was part of the group that spearheaded a protest of John Kerry, which took his campaign by total surprise and resulted in staff firings. This was late in the campaign in the swing state of Ohio. I did this with no sense of support for Bush’s reelection. In the end, I chose not to vote, for mostly apathetic reasons.
Alan Keyes was appointed to the advisory board of the University and came to give a talk that was mostly red meat conservative culture war ideas. I confronted him in the public questions period and his response was clearly a dodge. Afterwards, many of my friends said I was being cynical, but one person I didn’t know told me afterwards I was brave and should keep asking those questions. When George Weigel gave a talk on campus for C-SPAN, on his new biography of John Paul II, I asked him about capital punishment and he reacted in a strongly negative way, which put me off.
I also discovered First Things during those years and read back a long ways in the archive. Neuhaus’ work was a revelation to me in terms of letters and ideas, and above all wit and erudition, and RR Reno’s essay “Theology After the Revolution” provided me with a much-needed corrective critique of criticism. I was feeling less and less conservative in my identity as a Catholic and as person in general, but I was also discovering and appreciating the intellectual heritage of conservatism in a deeper and more profound way. Ironically, conservative ideas led me, in part, to explore other ideas, which, in turn, gradually replaced the conservative ones.
A mentor since high school, Fr. Sam Homsey, taught me about the life of the mind, especially during the summer before my junior year, which included a disposition to liturgy and ecclesial politics that was firmly against rigorism. He also taught me to read in a systematic and voracious way. He trusted my instincts and opinions and pushed me to refine my arguments. Other priests I knew who flaunted a macho conservative ethos, and used the word ‘liberal’ as an insult, seemed to liked me a lot, but their spirit and attitude led me to find them empty inside. That emptiness carried over in part to myself.
Some of that emptiness was related to a heightened sense of racial awareness, fueled in part by a small social group of Latin American students, an activist Spanish professor from Mexico City who taught us Mesoamerican anthropology and colonial history, and my work in founding the student group “Latinos por Cristo.” During this period of time I was working through experiences from West Texas related to race and racism and also trying to make sense of other insecurities I encountered while at Steubenville. More and more, I had a sneaking sense that Republican conservatism had no vocabulary or interest in these concrete existential questions.
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After graduation and marriage in 2005 I went in full searching mode. I was religiously curious, ideologically experimental, and digitally expressive in my first blog titled Debate, Relate, and Pontificate. There I tested half-baked ideas. I took leftist principles to argue conservative causes and vice-versa and also tried to recover the sense of freedom implied by the word ‘liberal’. This was mostly a mess, but I also wrote a few pieces on Latino politics and even interviewed for a freelance position in a small political Spanish-language periodical in Minneapolis.
I began to fiercely critique the cultural Catholicism I grew up in, partly for real and serious reasons, but also for strategic and therapeutic ones. I moved from blogging to Facebook notes and back to blogging over a period of several years and finished a master’s degree at Saint Thomas University, where I met true leftists for the first time, a few of them faithful Catholics.
I added bell hooks, Cornel West, Weber, Durkheim, Dewey, more Marx, and plenty of cultural criticism to my readings and also studied Birmingham School critical theory with Stephan Brookfield. My reaction in that setting was fiercely critical of criticism, and chiefly conservative in its style and mood. Against relativism I defended a universal ethic of love, and searched the leftist literature to find a vast archive of Christian and crypto-Christian activist texts and figures.
By the time I departed for doctoral studies I had become a pariah of my own conservative upbringing, from church to state, and deeply skeptical of the program of the left, especially the doctrine of political liberalism. Collectivism attracted me, as did class and race critique.
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During doctoral studies, I became more and more firmly politically dissatisfied for reasons that were not entirely arbitrary. I attended as many rallies as I could in Columbus, Ohio for the 2008 election and got to see McCain, Clinton, and Obama. I began reading Zizek’s political philosophy and could recognize the Christian element he asserted, and was led in turn, by Zizek, to read Chesterton and from there Belloc. A short phase of distributism had to be endured.
I join the nascent Vox Nova blog, where I took a fairly centrist position amongst a Catholic left perspective. I often tried to use conservative rhetoric to drive home communitarian ideas or to simply drive the right-wingers into the ground. The basic insight we came to there was this: political liberalism and present-day conservatism are philosophically identical and theologically bankrupt. Anarchist ideas were also in the mix there and to this day I have a strong Catholic anarchist streak.
I voted for the socialist candidate that election and observed McCain/Palin’s defeat with gusto and felt no enthusiasm for Obama’s triumph. I saw it as an uninspired historical accomplishment.
My studies drove me into a particular pocket of sub-field humanities where everyone basically agrees on a left-leaning platform, but some build it on a conservative method and other try to destroy that method and eat their tail in the process.
Tim Leonard was the first person who told me that Capitalists want to turn us into consumers and Socialists want to turn us into workers when in truth we are children of God. He is a Quaker-Catholic and former priest and a mentor and spiritual father to me. I have seen the pain he feels for rejecting and being rejected by the Catholic Church. He studied theology under Bernard Lonergan.
At this time my Catholicism truly took on a political and even theocratic dimension. I began to work with my theological tradition and philosophical training in a more robust way, writing all the time at Vox Nova. Fr. Joseph Goetz, my priest, treated me to lunch once a month where he outed himself as a full-blown liberal, women priests and all. He was a classmate of John Milbank and we spoke of New Orthodoxy and its limits and my ongoing dissertation.
My doctoral advisor has gone through a personal political upheaval as well, raised in a Catholic Democratic labor family in Michigan, driven right by feminist academic politics in the 80s and voting for Dole and then supporting Bush’s war only to be totally betrayed by the aftermath, returning him to a staunch and even dogmatic Democratic Party line in 2008. He admired Catholic intellectuals and had me continue reading First Things along with MacIntyre, Taylor, and many others. Taylor’s essay, “The Agony of Economic Man,” left a tremendous portrait of what the word ‘neoliberalism’ meant in my mind that has not faded. A documentary on Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative,” he made me watch also left an impression. My other advisor was a brilliant liberal Mormon, who introduced me to William James.
Philosophers of education set themselves apart from cultural studies or more critical scholars of education in a theoretical approach that is, essentially, conservative in a different, but not altogether distinct, sense. I embraced this approach. I read Foucault and got a sense of the limits of politics for radical thought and subsequent politics. Jean-Luc Marion instructed me personally to read more Nietzsche and during those years at Vox Nova we pored over Benedict XVI’s writings to show how radical and anti-conservative they were. When Weigel wrote his red and gold pen conspiracy theory, I satirized him as a poststructuralist.
I ended my studies with a robust renewal of my faith in part fueled by having found it to be both philosophically and politically rewarding in a way I didn’t experience it through the Charismatic Renewal. Oddly enough, my liturgical tastes also became traditional at that time while my experience as a musician led me to play electric guitar for a Pentecostal Black church and a Lutheran contemporary service, along with club and festival gigs in jazz, blues, and neosoul Black music where politics were anything from apathetic to Black (and Afrorican) radical empowerment.
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