Finding myself, Part I

As part of my quest to figure out once and for all which of the two main political parties I should belong to, I took the same quiz as Daniel Drezner, and learned that I am totally a Democrat. Since there's no candidate socially liberal and pro-Israel enough to make for an obvious pick, I'm left about where I was at in 2004, unsure of what a Democrat or Republican's foreign policy would end up looking like (I'm still convinced that if Gore were president in 2001, we'd now associate fighting terrorism and defending Israel with the Dems), but quite sure of where things would go in terms of domestic nonsense if almost any of the Republicans came out ahead. I do not believe that "biology is destiny." So, to the left I go.

But something holds me back. Among Republicans, it's a given that people vote for one issue or another, and that someone might be against abortion, for an aggressive foreign policy, or against tax increases, and simply willing to accept whatever else comes with their issue of choice. Whenever someone on the right who's clearly on the right on account of just one of these reasons claims to truly care about another, it comes across as disingenuous, and as a pragmatic attempt at getting a Republican, perhaps himself, into office. Among Democrats, there's this sense that you a voting for the left, and that every issue within the movement is supposed to have some logical connection to every other other. If you care about gay rights, you must not only accept a candidate's opposition to Bush's War on Terror, but must see the two as part of one and the same struggle. When, quite clearly, they are not. Feminism, meanwhile, is supposed to have some inherent connection to anti-racism, but once again, no such luck. One form of identity politics is more likely to conflict than coincide with another. Yet a coalition of the oppressed (or various groups designated as oppressed, roughly coinciding with actual oppression) is supposed to channel poor immigrants and native-born workers, the pro-choice and the anti-gun, into one coherent cause. If for whatever reason your oppressed group is not among those in the established canon, you are better off heading to the right than taking the left's list as a work in progress, as general principles that could as easily be applied to any situation.

But more to the point: I have been far from delighted by the Bush presidency, but now that opposing Bush so often means opposing anything (see Comment #2: Hilda and I both knew what Edwards meant) that could be perceived of as Jewish politics, I'm reluctant to consider myself on the left.

I should point out, to preempt contrarian comments, that the above paragraph is an impression, poorly explained and probably wrong. As I argued a hundred years ago, the problem with the right-left, two-party divide is that issues with no obvious connection to one another get lumped together on both sides, making it difficult to enthusiastically support any one candidate without compromising principles. But my sense, largely anecdotal (via articles, blogs, books, and, yes, face-to-face conversations), is that it's far more startling to hear someone on the left grudgingly accept rather than enthusiastically embrace the officially leftist stance on an issue than it is to witness someone on the right doing the same. So much so that when someone on the left doubts one of that side's tenets, it's hard to believe that they wish to still identify as on the left, while few are doubting Jonah Goldberg's right-wing-ness, although his book is about as far from the mainstream right as some of the Dissenters are from the mainstream left.