I remember asking my mother what political party with which she and my father were associated during the 1980 Presidential election, and she responded, "I think Republican." And so that was the political identity that I adopted--something else that was inherited from the parents. During the discussions that we had in kindergarten and first grade I was the Republican cheerleader, proclaiming Reagan would win and that Carter was a loser.
And so that is how things were for the first 20 years of my life or so... is it normal for children to just adopt a political affiliation just like that? (And if they end up rejecting it, is it often on account of their parents? Another form of rebellion... though some may have sound reasons to disagree with their parents and their lifestyles.) Iran-Contra? How could the Reagan administration do any wrong? Wasn't the money being used to support noble anti-Communist guerillas fighting for freedom in Nicaragua? Isn't that what Americans were about, protecting freedom? So what if the Congress was opposed--they were probably a bunch of Communist sympathizers. Actually, I don't think I believed that--just that Congress was full of Democrats who were opposed to Reagan, even if Reagan was right. "Trickle-down economics?" It had to be right. The gap between the poor and the rich? A fabrication.
There weren't too many obvious Republicans at 'Tino--so when the US decided to go into Kuwait and Iraq, most students were opposed to it. While I don't recall anyone saying, "No blood for oil," at that time, many students were disgusted by what seemed to them an obvious defense of American oil interests, rather than a genuine concern for the Kuwaitis. And there was one pacifist in our class, MF... who annoyed me then. Would he annoy me now? I suppose it depends on whether he has changed his views since that time or not. At that time I remember telling xiao Jimmy that even if it were just for oil, oil was something Americans could not live without, so they shouldn't be tossing about such slogans in a carefree manner, as if their entire way of life did not depend upon it and they themselves were not implicated.
In college, I was at CAL and while politics did not come up too much in the dining room or in the dorms (though I remember most of the residents at Clark Kerr being Democrats, and this especially came out during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings) I started listening to Rush Limbaugh at that time, and would listen to him almost everyday, since here was a sympathetic voice, out in the middle of crazy liberal land. (Which reminds me... when the philosophy department was still over in Carney one of the professors, RT, would play Limbaugh on his radio and turn up the volume, so it could be heard in the hallway. I'm not sure if he did it in order to make a point to his liberal colleagues, or if he just wanted to irritate them.)
I hadn't given much thought to economic policies, Federalism, or the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, but I did think that abortion was evil, Roe v. Wade had to be overturned, the Communists were evil and had to be opposed (I also believed that we should have done more in Vietnam to fight Communism), lower taxes were good, the welfare state was bad. The Democrats were generally not to be trusted--look at all the things that the Clintons had done! And then there was multiculturalism and the push for alternate lifestyles by the social libs... if it went against Christian teaching, my judgment of it was quick and decisive.
As for states' rights... when I was in elementary school reading through the _____ series on the Civil War (which had nice illustrations/maps of the battles--these I would focus on for long periods, looking at the small figures in their long lines of blue and grey, though there would be bodies on the battlefield here and there)... I supported the Federal and the Union. After all, the ones in grey were rebels, fighting to keep slaves and breaking up the Union.
But during my college years, I also started reading more philosophy and Catholic theology. And this was catalyst for the change...
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