An Untidy Account of My Personal Political History

This is a first attempt at a blog post for my website. I'm still a bit unsure about this idea, but figured I'd give it a shot. I'd like to not put too much stylistic pressure on myself so I can just casually post here in a way that feels comfortable. I want to write with minimal to no editing, and that includes things like spell check or perfect grammar. This makes the writing process a lot less stressful for me, and I think it would be an important learning experience for me to sit and be content with the imperfections rather than neurotically editing and scrubbing away all the rough edges. Maybe sometimes I will produce more polished pieces but I’d love to have the option to make something more relaxed like this. Hopefully this style isn't too distracting or unreadable.

The idea for this blog post was originally to expand on the significance that each of the subheadings in my "Politics" page have for me, but I quickly realized that it would only really make sense with more personal historical background, which is what I hope to do here. At some point I may return to the originally planned post (hopefully with more brevity and coherence!). Determining what was relevant was incredibly difficult, and I left out an unbelievable amount. Maybe some day in future blog posts I can dive into more particulars and the variety of things I failed to include, but hopefully this very broad and loose outline isn't useless at assisting understanding.

For most of my youth I was pretty apolitical (as in, I ignored reflecting upon politics, in both the narrow statist sense and the broader relations of power sense). This was undoubtedly due to my home environment, both in the sense of my relatively privileged background and the attitude of my parents. My parents are both white, and we were upper-middle class growing up. [I know everyone wants to claim middle class so maybe that's not super helpful, but I want to say the annual pre-tax household income was somewhere around 200k+ (probably lower as I was growing up, maybe 250k+ now?) Certainly after my dad bought enough shares in the business his father co-founded to become president, lol.] Honestly though, I should probably be thankful that my parents were relatively "apolitical" (I am going to continue using this phrase and trust you can get the meaning I'm going for) though, since the rest of my extended family is much more right wing (maybe not my uncle Mark? but he is an outlier in the family for many reasons). In summary: raised as midwest white boy in the suburbs (we moved to get me into a more affluent school district when I was a kid, lmao) and had all the privilege to be able to ignore politics.

In middle school I liked to be argumentative debate-bro type of person, but didn't really know much and don't even know what I argued about tbh. High school is when my politics journey really started; The Trump election made it basically impossible to avoid. I remember laughing and joking about Trump in one of my classes: the type of joking you can really only do when you're oblivious to the impact things like Trump can have, particularly on the students in my class with immigrant families. Not gonna beat myself up for it, but yknow still a bit cringeworthy to remember.

High school was incredibly formative for me, and I don't really know where to start. The next few sections will likely be messy. I started dating someone, and learned an unbelievable amount from her. Having a personal friend that is a woman and a racial minority really opened my eyes a lot just through everyday interaction and seeing what she went through and listening to what challenges she was facing. Still, it took me a long time to pick things up and she was probably more patient than I deserved.

There's a lot more that I could unpack with high school, but it would all be a little obscure about how it related to politics. In terms of more direct influences, I started watching Destiny (Steven Bonnell II) religiously. I'm not entirely sure how to evaluate this, as I've moved a fair bit away from where Destiny was and is, but the influence he had on the course of my life is fairly dramatic. I really leaned into the debate bro personality that I had before, and was suddenly interested in philosophy and politics. My interested was mainly monopolized by Destiny though, and I didn't really engage a lot with other sources very much. Ultimately I actually think this ended up working for the best because I did not understand much of anything and would likely have been led down much worse routes (one time when scrolling through my old YouTube likes from around my high school time I found a Steven Crowder video digging into Hillary lol). Destiny isn't great, but in terms of accessible YouTube content for a white boy in 2016-2018 it could have been a lot worse. And the more lefty people I didn't really understand (like watching old IrishLaddie debates). I must have binged his whole catalog of videos at least 3 times over at least.

The reason I spend so much time talking about Destiny is that when I finally got to college I wasn't really sure what I was interested in. I thought I was going to be a business major because of the advice from my father (to be clear, he never imposed or demanded this of me, I just didn't really have much direction and his suggestion sounded as good as any). I ended up trying out some philosophy and political science classes as electives because of Destiny. I'm not even sure if I really enjoyed them to be honest, and I think I was mostly just overwhelmed with adapting to college (since I graduated a semester early from high school and started college right away, I was pretty alone). Anyways, I just kept taking those classes and ultimately decided to pick up philosophy and political science majors (and an economics major when my application to the business school got rejected [lol, embarrasing but lucky]).

I think it must have been around late 2019 early 2020 when I actually started getting more political. That might sound strange given the fact that I had been talking about political science classes and Destiny, but to be honest that was more of just vague information collection. I didn't really have an established position of my own, and most of the time was just parroting things I had heard. I knew how to reject certain narratives and arguments with my classroom knowledge and time watching Destiny, but that was about it. It's a little embarrassing looking back now, but my start in gathering more political opinions was to expand the type of YouTubers and Twitch streamers I watched. I don't think this had a ton of influence on me though, as it was still a bit more passive information gathering.

Edit from something I remembered while finishing up this post: Some of the YouTubers I watched were Cuck Philosophy, Red Plateous, and Zoe Baker. These stuck out to me at the time due to giving me the impression of being more well informed, and even when my interest in YouTubers overall waned eventually, I remember consistently being impressed by their work. Even if I didn't understand it all right away, I was exposed to the fact that Anarchism and Marxism were more complex than twitter discourse implied.

However, something that did have a larger impact on me was joining Twitter. I think I must have joined to post on an Overwatch account and encountered the politics things there. I learned a lot a lot from just watching people interact. Plenty of it went absolutely over my head, but I picked up bits and pieces and would look things up to try and understand better. I was exposed to different factions and groups within the space and the fueds that would take place between communities. I developed an affinity towards certain users and took note of their ideological sympathies. Early on, I was still just observing a lot, but it was intensely interesting to me to have all sorts of arguments to evaluate.

Mostly I aligned myself with people who had the sock emoji: SocDems, "liberal socialists", "evidence based leftists", etc. etc. It fit nicely with things that I was learning in economics and political science classes as they heavily referenced social science data and nerded out about the cool little things. Not to mention ideologically they didn't challenge me too much from the sort of left-liberal milieu I found myself in with Destiny and his orbiters. Basically this time period was just catching up to liberals in terms of political orientation through sociological and economic data. However, the other group I found myself consistently impressed by, despite not really having enough pre-requisite knowledge to engage with properly, were anarchists. I thought they had really good value judgements particularly on social issues and thought that they were really well read (though sometimes they seemed too radical and I didn't understand what they were saying). At the time I didn't really know what to make of these different strands of interest. To clarify again, I basically did no reading whatsoever at this time. Purely vibes based off Twitter interactions and YouTube videos. That might not be entirely true, as I was familiar with the Anarchist Library and had read several short articles on there, but nothing too substantive.

To give you a sense of my 2020 politics, this was my Twitter bio for the longest time: "• Studying Political Science, Economics, Philosophy, Education • Liberal Voting, SocDem Wonking, Anarchic Ethics •". At one point I added "Posthumanist Critical Pedagogy" at the end LOL. What a horrendously confused mish-mash, incredible. When I made a mastodon account (for some reason?) on October 20th, 2020 by bio was "He/They • Economics/Philosophy Student • Social Democracy •".

I suppose this as good a place as any to talk about gender and sexuality given the pronouns reference. In high school I didn't really question my gender identity much, but never felt too attached. Having anorexia made my relationship to my body a little odd, and I spent a lot of time aspiring towards feminine body standards for myself. Because I was in a long term monogomous relationship with a woman, I didn't really question my sexuality much, though in the later years I definitely was attracted to boys in class. I was open about that, but described it as just finding them pretty and that it wasn't like I was gay or anything (cope). People on my Overwatch team would call me gay and I leaned into it and liked to joke around in that way. A specific Destiny video influenced me a lot during high school titled "Am I Gay? A Stupid Question". This loose attitude kinda just persisted into college and probably just continued to loosen slightly over time. As I became more political in 2020, this amplified a lot and was one instance of politics being very personal for me. The more I learned the more I changed individually, and that personal aspect to politics continues to this day to be one of the most inspiring things about it for me. Anyway, over 2020 I became a lot more queer in terms of personal orientation, distancing myself from identifying as a man and started openly saying that I was bisexual. This process was not smooth and I have plenty of misgivings about how I handled things with my partner at the time.

Because of my influence from Destiny, I was very keen on emphasizing the ethics-first approach to political theory, and had a really difficult time struggling through analytic philosophy. Positions didn't ever really feel satisfying or incredibly compelling, but given the school I was in that was basically all that was on offer. I was something like a utilitarian social liberal in favor of more redistribution.

That being said, I did have one philosophical/political position that started during this era that started as an analytic philosophy thing that I've actually kept up with despite changing so much since 2020, which is veganism. There's a lot of funky personal motivation stuff surrounding it because of my eating disorder as well, but I'm going to ignore that for now and focus on the more event based history. I took an ethics class in which one of the units was about abortion. This led to me considering the qualifications for moral personhood, which led me to veganism as animals fit the criteria I ended up being sympathetic to. I have maintained the position of veganism, but my reasoning behind it has shifted a lot over time, but I'll come back to this later.

Now back to the main timeline. In early 2021 my partner broke up with me. It was not hostile, more of a "we're just not a very good fit for each other" type of thing. We both kinda knew it was coming for a while, but it still hurt a lot and I was shocked that it was actually happening when the breakup happened. Something odd happened during the breakup as I was speedrunning through the stages of grief though: at one point I started bargaining by saying that I would be fine to have an open relationship in which she could get some of her additional emotional needs met (one of the reasons we were breaking up is that I was rather distant). She dealt with the entirely unfair burden I placed on her gracefully and was able to go through with things, but that stuck with me. I was mostly confused about how to deal with the emotions I was feeling about the breakup and somehow remembered something about "relationship anarchy" from either scrolling through Twitter or the Anarchist Library. At this point I began to read, but I think it was mostly limited to Anarchist Library entries and not complete books yet.

I started keeping a Twitter Diary on a private account right before the breakup and started using it extensively after, so I actually have some documentation on the progression.

This time period was a lot of reflecting on my relationship and I picked up a lot of conceptual tools to help me out. Actually beginning to internalize a lot of basic feminism stuff and just a lot of personal growth overall. I still struggled a ton with anxiety, depression, and eating stuff and being forced to take care of things for myself rather than relying on a girlfriend as caretaker made me make a lot of progress really fast, both personally and politically.

Something you'll notice as a repeated trend here is a very confused framing and motivation for certain things, and a very distorted application of the ideas I'm playing around with. Like what I'm saying there isn't *wrong*, kind of. Monogamy as an all or nothing model kind of really sucks and doesn't adapt fluidly, but that doesn't mean that relationships have to remain or that breaks can't take place. If I'm being very charitable I could say that I was under the impression that we both liked one another quite a lot, even at the end, but that the expectations of a partner as partner just didn't work for us. But more realistically, I think I missed having a lot of the emotional support and other benefits she provided and resented having to give that up. Needless to say, not the greatest motivation or way to approach the pain I was feeling. Again though, I'm just including these tweets to show my progression, and primarily to show that what might seem like niche side issues like relationship anarchy or youth liberation or queer nihilism were actually the starting places for my interest in reading more radical theory. I thought they were interesting and compelling, and because I knew I didn't know enough to completely understand them, I was motivated to read more into things.

However, as these next tweets demonstrate, this was not a clean or linear process, and was fairly gradual yet haphazard, and extremely uneven in terms of commitments and conceptual clarity.

There's a lot I could say here and critique about my past self, particularly about carcerality and "restorative justice" in that last one, but I won't diverge more. I just present these as a way to show you where my head is at politically during this time and the very tepid, slow, shallow, and confused process of changing politically. While I did start reading books at some point during 2021 it's a bit difficult to say exactly where and what. Certainly by the middle of the year it picked up. Looking back at my pdf archives I think maybe it could have been as early as March or April? In any case it was rather chaotic in terms of who I was reading, when, and what I got out of it.

I don't think I got into reading Marx directly until maybe August? but he was rather late relative to other things I was reading, as I was intimidated because of what people said about his complexity and the amount of misunderstanding I had seen. Overall I think this skepticism was a good thing: not taking anyone too dogmatically because I saw the amount of disagreement in interpretation and was hesitant to commit myself before reading myself, even though it did take a bit to muster the courage.

Over the course of 2021 reading increasingly crowded out watching YouTube political personalities, as I found it much much more rewarding. Slightly embarrassing it took so long, but we got there in the end.

I think early 2021 was just a collection of vague sympathies with various particular issues and just a lot of figuring out what things I absolutely did not like. For example, I knew I was not a fan of the NeoKaut DSA people that I went to club with, and I did not like the anarchists that had very surface level engagement with issues. On the other hand, I felt strong affinity for youth liberation, animal liberation, relationship anarchy, and queer nihilism.

I'm sorry this part is so disorganized. I would have liked to present a more coherent thread, but to be honest this disorganization reflects where my mind was at. I was picking up a lot of disparate things without a very concrete commitment or overall orientation. To be fair though, I'm pretty glad that I didn't commit myself needlessly and was able to be comfortable being a little ideologically homeless. I feel I've maintained a similar lack of complete world-view after this point too, although I've certainly acquired a better understanding of subject matter in various areas and feel a lot more confident committing myself to certain philosophical and political perspectives.

Late 2021 was just a lot of reading from a lot of different sources. I was extremely impressed by "Seeing Like a State", but also ready a lot of different other anarchist sources like Malatesta and Avrich. I read Marx too, and even read Mannheim for a class which was very cool (we were assigned a passage but I decided to read the whole book). Read some Graeber, read Aphro-ism, basically just a lot of very influential texts for me even to this day. I also read a lot a lot of things that were totally uninspiring, uninteresting, and didn't stick with me at all. I'm now consulting my GoodReads as I started tracking books in November 2021 and theres just a lot of rough and not a lot of diamonds lol.

A lot of important political reading happened in the winter break of 2021/2022 for me. I was re-reading Marx, and somehow picked up Raymond Geuss. Early in my reading journey I had read Paul Raekstad's book on prefigurative politics, and Geuss was an academic advisor type person for Raekstad. Zoe Baker also mentioned him in several videos as well, but I'm pretty sure the recommendation didn't come from there. I actually think I started reading Geuss because one of my classes had an article from Enzo Rossi that I was very impressed with for incorporating James C. Scott. I then looked up Rossi and found his project with Raekstad, and I'm sure Geuss was cited lots in the Rossi article so that's probably how I ended up reading him?

Regardless, the first book I read was "Public Goods, Private Goods" which is a very bad starting place in my opinion lol. It only really makes sense once you have a bit more background on Geuss and see what he's doing, as he doesn't explain his genealogical method and the purpose within the book. I think I rated it 3 stars. However, I did read "Philosophy and Real Politics" in the same day and immediately fell in love.

I interrupted my Geuss sequence by focusing more on Marx though. I read through Zoe Baker's suggested reading order (or did I do that the first time? I can't remember. Either way, I re-read a lot of the things on that list in this January period) along with additional things like the Grundrisse and Marx's Ecology by John Foster. I did finish Outside Ethics before the break was up though.

Personal reading slowed down a bit since school started up, and the reading I did was not so much exposing me to new things as just dealing with subject matter I was familiar with (anarchist education mostly). In March I decided to pick up "Who Needs A World View?" by Geuss and was absolutely enamered. The contextual approach was incredibly freeing, and I finally felt like I had some place to stand that was not trying to hopelessly reconsile analytic philosophy with the more continental Marxism/anarchism that I was fascinated by. In one month I made it through the rest of his books and was deeply deeply influenced. He just has such a wide treatment of so many different areas and doesn't confine himself to one narrow field and I admire that so much (politics, philosophy, ethics, aestetics, history, psychology, etc). I don't think the significance sunk in all the way at first, but over time with practice and application and approaching life in a partially Geuss inspired way it sunk in a lot better.

To be honest since reading through Geuss I have just been exploring a lot of the nuances of the world view :^) and have not radically deviated greatly since. The reading I have done has been a lot of Geuss inspired things like Bernard Williams, Robert Paul Wolff, Nietzsche, and dipping my toes into Hegel (it's a work in progress). A little bit more tangential was getting much more familiar with Marxist history and associated things like Lenin, Kolalowski, and some more marginalized Marxists like council communists.

Most recently I have been familiarizing myself with Wertkritik, which is a type of value theoretic approach to Marx which I feel captures a lot of my intuitions nicely and I am very impressed by. That's not to say that I had this brilliant understanding from the start, its more like I was influenced by people that were influenced by this theory or something similar, so it makes sense I would find it amenable.

I think reflecting like this on one's political journey shows just how many circles there are like that, where you're emotionally primed to think a certain way and then the theory follows. For example liking Zoe Baker and then reading about anarchism and Marxism later and liking them, and then eventually finding Raymond Geuss in which she was at least partially informed by (if not always directly explicitly, at least implicity by the type of people she associates with). Not to mention other people from Twitter like Anarkismus, Riotlinguist, Postliterate, etc. Certainly that has dangerous potential if you're unreflective about your emotions and the type of people you engage with, but to be honest I don't know if its entirely avoidable or whether it would even be desirable to attempt to avoid.

In any event that's just about where I'm at now. Anarchism: broadly taking from a lot of different influences, despite my social anarchist starting place and comfort place, I am becoming increasingly more sympathetic to individualist and insurrectionary anarchist perspectives but its rather tepid given the amount of misinterpretations that are out there. But am also rather uncomfortable when social anarchists talk about organizing methods nowadays so who knows, though I think the writers in that tradition tend to have a more in depth sociological and anthropological account relative to individualists. I think I mostly see anarchism now as extremely influential ethos-building, background starting point, and powerful force of dispelling ideological mystifications, but frequently lacking in philosophical depth. Good fundamentals and great critiques of existing modes of everything, particularly with social things (tho the new wave of relationship anarchists kinda bug me a bit [don't think its a problem with the theory, just micro-differences get blown up when you care a lot about a subject I suppose]). Marxism: with an interpretation largely influenced by Wertkritik approach, not to mention a lot of Marx's general insightful approach to history, human powers, ideology, morality, and immanent critique. Animal Liberation: which is now completely different from where I started from: Peter Singer utilitarianism to post-humanist anti-moralist prefiguration clusterfuck. Queer Nihilism: deep suspicion about the concept of identity at all (reading Stirner was great for this even tho this was another example of the circle thing, tho by the time I got around to Stirner Queer Nihilism was deeply engrained in me), the coherence of self, and the ontologization of historically contingent social relations. Youth Liberation: recognizing children as an oppressed group and all the associated structural coercion that is seen as ideologically justified as a result; greatly influenced by Anarkismus, RiotLinguist, and the whole Judith's Dagger gang and particularly appreciate the connections they make as understanding youth oppression within patriarchy. Radical Realism: honestly just a really lovely synthesis of many of the affinities I already had/have, but giving them a more coherent presentation; extremely important for helping me come around to the ideological nature of morality; upon re-reads I find myself having more disagreements with Geuss (very VERY different misgivings from the first read through though!) so it's not as if I'm dogmatically worshipping this one guy; additionally, I like the work of contemporary radical realist political philosophers as well including Janosch Prinz, Enzo Rossi, Paul Raekstad, etc.

I think I'll continue to be an eclectic mix of a lot of different sources, which is fine by me. As they say, the ideological supermarket is only fit for looting :) .

Despite the unreasonable length of this blog post, I still feel like I’ve pruned so much out that is of vital importance. I barely touched on the significance of mental illness, feminism, personal relationships and how they influence personal orientation in all domains including political and philosophical, important online people for my learning, gaming, my relationship to my parents, relationships since breakup, aro/asexuality, etc etc etc. Also my treatment of my gender and sexuality was woefully inadequate and borderline misleading lol, maybe I’ll talk about it another time. Though to be fair, given the wide interpretation I have of politics, there basically isn’t an irrelevant part of my life, so the scope was a bit flawed, huh? I enjoyed writing it at least. hehe.

In the future I might consider implementing footnotes or something so I don't break up the text so much with self indulgent paranthases lol. I also have ideas about microblogging or categorizing things in separate boards, but figure I should actually just write something first before worrying about that. Because this experiement went so well, I now have lots of ideas for what I'd like to write about so hopefully I make more soon ^-^.