Dan McCarthy invited me to contribute to this blog two weeks ago, but posting has consistently slipped my mind since then up until now.  Since this is a blog that is–to a certain extent–devoted to questioning what the right is, I think it is appropriate that I explain some of my experiences with that term.

I first became politically aware (at least in any meaningful way) shortly after the election of Bill Clinton.  Despite still being in grade school, I was soon a committed conservative Clinton hater.  And when the so-called Republican Revolution of ’94 rolled around, I was certainly one of the most excited eleven year olds in the country.  While it was always obvious that the primary animating force for the right in the ’90s was an almost rabid loathing for the Clintons, it was still evident to me that there were ideas and principles like limited government, adherence to the Constitution, and a strong work ethic informing those political battles.

As the ’90s wore on and I matured, I began to doubt that those principles mattered more to the Republican Party and the conservative talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, who were so influential to me a few years earlier, than winning elections and political power.  Additionally, and without getting into specifics, during high school I engaged in a number of activities that ran afoul of what most would consider to be “conservative behavior”.  By the time Congressional Republicans squandered all their political capital on the quixotic Monica Lewinsky crusade, I no longer referred to myself as a Republican (although still occasionally as a conservative) and had found a new name for myself: libertarian.

My years in college only served to cement my distance from contemporary conservatism.   First, I quickly became a much more radical libertarian, adopting the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard by my second semester.  Second, I opposed the Iraq war, which further alienated me from the vast majority of the right.  Third, I extensively studied the modern conservative and libertarian movements (which led to this article on Murray Rothbard and the New Left) and came to believe that American conservatism since William F. Buckley has been a schizophrenic movement, dedicated to a number of incompatible goals: small government and militarism, virtue and coerced “family values”, republicanism and empire.

So I’ve gone from passionate right-winger to someone who questions whether being right wing–as it is currently understood–is even possible without a high degree of cognitive dissonance.  That’s where I’m coming from; feel free to take it into account when reading my subsequent posts.