So You Wanted To Drain The Swamp…

How I became a Progressive after being a Tea Party Conservative

We’ve all been there. You were sitting at your computer, looking at your pay stub, and you got angry about taxes. You wondered what your money could possibly be doing in Washington. Maybe you turned on the news that night and saw the latest campaign finance violation, or the bill written by lobbyists that could generously be described as lining the pockets of those who never even had to look at their paychecks. Maybe it was the healthcare debate in 2008 and 2009, in the midst of the TARP bailout to end the Bush recession, that got you thinking about government corruption. Maybe you weren’t really into politics, the kind of once-every-four-years voter who heard what Trump was saying in 2015 and 2016 and thought that with his business knowledge and the people around him, maybe he could really help you. Maybe he could do it while really sticking it to those jackassed stiffs who have run the show so long they forgot about everyone else. Wouldn’t that have been something? The schadenfreude of seeing them have to worry about something like you have for years, to see them eat crow, would have been really, really fun and cathartic. When he said “drain the swamp,” he had your vote. That was it, he was your guy and he spoke for you, even if he wasn’t always the most pleasant or respectful person.

I’m not going to sit here and bash Trump, because Trump isn’t a failure. Trump’s the ultimate success of those jackassed stiffs, the final project of a Republican Party and movement of powerful and wealthy people who used your feelings to grab more power and put the screws to you even more than they had been before. They used words like “small government” and “liberty” and “patriotism” to get you on their side. They got you to fervently argue for “libertarian values” or “constitutional conservatism” or “Christian conservatism,” even as you lost family members, even as your job and healthcare were threatened, and even as you had friends and family get so fed up with you and your support of the President that they haven’t spoken to you in months. Maybe they even got you to believe that there are deep-rooted conspiracies, groups within the government preventing Trump from doing the things he promised he would do. After all, they did the same thing to the Tea Party.

I was where you are four years ago. In October of 2016, I was a libertarian Republican who spent years arguing for Reaganomics and the idea that the free market was the answer to all of our woes. I believed that our government was standing in the way of American greatness, and that the Obama administration was a regulatory disaster which prevented American businesses from really growing, and we needed a President who could get government out of the way and let the market explode. I caucused for Ted Cruz. I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. I argued for McCain in 2008, even as I couldn’t vote. I spent 2010 and 2011 speaking the gospel of the Tea Party, and arguing against Occupy Wall Street. I was really concerned with the rise of socialism and the anti-Christian Left. I was strongly pro-life, and I was fundamentally against big government. I didn’t trust Hillary Clinton, I didn’t trust anyone in the Democratic Party. I didn’t trust half of the Republican Party.

If you’re like I was, if you read that and you identify with it in any way, I want you stick with me here. I want you to understand that I know how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking about this year as you get ready to vote.

I want you to stick with me, hear me out.

I was wrong about everything.

I know you were probably bracing for it, and if you made it to this line, half of the people who agree with you have already closed this piece and moved on, maybe more than that. Thank you for hearing me out.

I just want to walk you through how I got to be a progressive Democrat from being a staunch, radical, conservative Republican. It has nothing to do with Trump, so I’m not going to talk about him from this point forward.

You’ve probably heard about progressives. We’re kind of the bogeymen on the right. If you're conservative or libertarian, you’ve probably heard about us on Glenn Beck or Mark Levin or Ben Shapiro. They tie us to everything the Democrats do, as though we are the masters hiding in the shadows rolling out people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. That this is really the party in the control of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, of AOC and Ilhan Omar, as if that is a negative thing. Let’s get a couple of things straight. First off, if progressives were in charge of the Party, we would probably not be rolling out Pelosi and Schumer as our leadership. Tom Perez probably wouldn’t be the chair of the DNC. Joe Biden probably wouldn’t be our nominee for President. The Democratic Party is a diverse party. There’s a thousand different ideologies, and no one group controls the Party. There’s no puppet masters, there’s no shadowy hand, it’s just a whole mess of people who agree on a few issues arguing about the things that they don’t agree on. That whole “Dems in disarray” thing you hear about every four years? That’s a good thing. That means that we’re just coming to a consensus. It’s how freedom is supposed to look. Everyone gets a say, and the thing that most people agree on gets to be what we do. If we agreed on everything, then sure, these conservative talking heads may have a point. But the fact is that “progressive” is just an umbrella label of many, many ideologies that exist to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party. They don’t hold much power, and that power they do hold is typically underpinned by a series of arguments and disagreements within the umbrella that expand out to the Party at large.

The reason I start with what “progressive” means is simple. If we’re going to have a conversation about how one gets from conservative to here, we have to know where “here” is. So what does it mean to be “progressive?” For me, it means that I support a government that works for the People rather than for a select group of privileged elites. I support using the government to maintain a fair market, with equal opportunity, and using its power to expand the potential for economic growth within its rules. It means using the power of government to defend the rights of people who couldn’t defend themselves from more powerful people or organizations if the government didn’t help. Perhaps most importantly to me, government should exist to make sure that the voters have say in who holds real power in the country, no one else. In short, I believe that government should protect the little guy from the big guy, not the big guy from consequences.

If you agree with me, first of all I’m glad you’ve read this far, second of all you may be more progressive than you thought. We’re not the big mean monster that conservative media makes us out to be. We’re normal, usually angry at the state of things, people who just want the best for our country and the best future for our kids. The bottom line, however, is that what I’ve just described are my beliefs. There are people who agree with parts of that and disagree with others. There are progressives who don’t believe that I go far enough. There are others who would say I go too far on some of that and not far enough in others. “Progressive” is a polyglot series of ideologies. We all say different things. The common denominator is that we all believe that government has a purpose, and there’s work for it to do.

So you know where I’ve been, you know where I ended up. The natural question is how does someone go from being a pro-life, small government libertarian Republican to being a progressive, pro-regulation Democrat?

The answer is a series of questions. One that was asked of me, and many that I asked myself. In the past, I’ve attributed my movement left to a moment of clarity right at the end of the 2016 GOP primary. This isn’t true. My change in beliefs really changed in earnest beginning in 2017 and into 2018 when a professor asked me a question. He didn’t provide the answer, and he wasn’t the first to ask this question, but he was the first to get me to really think about it.

He asked me if I thought government had a purpose, and if I knew what it was. I had been arguing a conservative viewpoint, making spot arguments against specific policies that classmates had brought up, and he stopped me to ask me the question.

If you’ve never had a singular, identifiable moment that renders your entire worldview to a crumbling, devastating pile of rubble, I don’t recommend it. That single moment, those two sentences, destroyed who I was and became the seed for the person I would become politically and ideologically.

“If you don’t think that we should do any of this, then what’s the point of government, what’s the purpose? Does it have one?”

I still think about that moment. The embarrassment, and the stark, suffocating silence as I didn’t have an answer. I casted about for weeks. I questioned everything I once held as truth. If I was wrong about this, what else was I wrong about? How wrong was I? Is there a point to government? There has to be.

My professor didn’t know any of this, he just asked the question. I went on a two-year-long chase for answers. I re-read the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the anti-Federalist Papers, the Declaration. I read a book full of Supreme Court decisions and found only what other people thought we ought to do, but I couldn’t find the answer. I read Thomas Paine, I read Karl Marx, I thrashed about and asked questions of every conservative and libertarian in my circles.

“Do you know what the purpose of government is?”

I asked every one of them. I didn’t get an answer from any of them. I asked my parents, I asked my friends, I asked mentors and teachers. Nothing. Then I came back to John Locke. Locke, a famously large influence on the American Founders, said that the purpose of government in a democratic society is to defend the right of those who could not defend those rights effectively in a state of nature.

Suddenly, my whole life clicked into place. The turmoil of the last year and a half came to a sudden, organized stop. Every part made sense, everything I’d read and tried to pull answers from was pulling their answer from the same place. The whole system of government was built around defending the rights of the most vulnerable among us. That was its purpose. I had found my philosophy, my guiding light, my North star in politics. We needed to build a government that served that purpose.

On the first page of Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, I found my motto, my mantra. Salus populi suprema lex esto. “Let the health of the People be the supreme law of the land.”

It’s not hard to see this idea not only as one that shouldn’t be debatable, but one that is foundational to our society. When reading what the Founders read, and understanding that this way of government is timeless and responsive to a people in need, everything comes into clarity. The antitrust action of the government, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Acts, these were all corrective actions taken to help our government better fit its purpose. Actions like Glass-Steagall, like the establishment of the EPA, SEC, and FTC, these were actions designed to correct blind spots within our government. Ideas like universal healthcare, like automatic voter registration, like government regulation of the markets, like criminal justice reform, these are all ideas that call us to build a more perfect Union within the purpose that our government was built into. Even something as simple as funding infrastructure to help expand the economic potential of our nation helps us reach that purpose.

And this is where I must stop to explain the contrasts. I had argued against all of these things in my youth. I felt lied to as I came to these realizations, I felt as though I had been used by a system of individually powerful people trying to destroy a government trying desperately to reach for its purpose. Through the anti-democratic measures like voter suppression and gerrymandering, through opposing common-sense government regulations, through ignoring blatant corruption in order to appoint pro-life and conservative justices, I was used to further the gains of people who did not care if I lived or died, as long as they got their power and wealth. So when you say you want to “drain the swamp” and get these Washington elites out of power, that’s great, and I support you in that. We should want less elites in power and more average people. But their actions betray their words, and they use conservative and libertarian voters as pawns in a game to advance their own interests while the rest of us give them the power to do it at our own expense.

When you look at it that way, progressivism advocating for lessening restrictions on voting and for programs that help poor people and the most vulnerable people in our society looks a lot less like a bogeyman and socialist Trojan Horse, or whatever Glenn Beck is calling it this week on his chalkboard, and a lot more like a group of people who just want the country to live up to its potential and its purpose. We’re not the enemy, we’ve just been made to look like the enemy while we try and help you, like an illness that makes the doctors look evil even as they’re trying to save your life.

This isn’t to say that you should do what I did and change your whole worldview. I wouldn’t ask that of anyone who didn’t already have doubts. But I would challenge conservatives and libertarians who manage to get this far to ask themselves the question. Everything has a purpose, and that purpose determines how it acts and what it does. So what’s government’s purpose?

Ask yourself that question. And ask yourself one more. Keep pulling the thread. Think, really analyze why our government was built the way that it was. If you come to the same realization I did, every political argument or debate will change for you. It will allow you to think critically about every issue and put it through a new lens to answer other questions with real life impacts.

But most of all, don’t be afraid of changing your mind and admitting you might be wrong. No one has all the answers. Progressivism isn’t the only answer. The only way we can fulfill any purpose is together, with everyone’s voice being heard. No restrictions, no exceptions. An equal society, with our rights to a voice and an opinion defended by law that holds everyone equally.

In my experience, conservatism and libertarianism just don’t offer that kind of vision. I welcome a challenge to that experience.