My Political Development

On becoming a Globalist Classical Liberal

People sometimes tell me I change my mind a lot, but my view is that most don’t change their minds nearly enough. And I think those who’ve known me over the years or followed my work understand there’s always been a consistent core to what I believe. Compare my development to, say Sohrab Ahmari, who as one profile describes it, has been “a rebel, Iranian expat, an atheist, a bohemian dissident, an anti-Mormon provocateur, a communist, a lawyer, a teacher, a libertine, and finally, a Christian.”

In contrast, since discovering the basic arguments for capitalism and evolutionary psychology in my teens, I’ve always been something of a free market fundamentalist with a worldview heavily influenced by hereditarianism. There have been a few major changes in terms of policy opinions: on the value of democracy, foreign policy and immigration. But there’s a consistency here in the fact that in each case I’ve moved in the direction of favoring globalism and open societies, while continuing to give Darwin and Smith the respect they deserve.

More often, I don’t actually change my mind, but I’ll identify more or less with one side of the spectrum or the other based on a shift in priorities or real-world events. I’ve always been pro-abortion rights, and that has obviously become much more relevant over the last couple of years. Few imagined that there would soon be an assault on IVF, yet here we are, and someone might notice me taking more shots at the right recently and think that this means I’ve somehow changed positions, when it only shows that we are in a new political reality.

I’ve rarely seen anyone discuss the topic of what is ideal from the perspective of how often and to what degree one should change their mind. As mentioned, a person constantly jumping from one extremist ideology to another is usually a sign of some kind of mental instability. At the same time, if an individual never shows any development, it indicates that their mind is closed. Many people incline towards mostly exposing themselves to the work of others who agree with them, and simply become more convinced in their worldview. An individual who thinks the US must use its military power to defend the free world gets into the political science literature on the benefits of democracy and devours the memoirs of dissidents living under authoritarian regimes. Sohrab Ahmaris, people who change their minds all the time and in all kinds of weird directions, are rare, with most tilting too far in the other direction. Those that do change are often just moving with the ideological currents. A lot of conservatives became more anti-trade and anti-immigration around 2016 for self-interested or tribalist reasons, and leftists similarly adopted new weird ideas about gender over the same timeframe. Such cases aren’t very interesting. Ideally, I think you want to change your mind much more than the average person who cares about politics, but not too often on too many fundamental things and not for careerist or tribalist reasons.

As you might have guessed, this is all a long-winded way of saying that I am the best thinker, not only because I have the correct opinions on everything but because the development of my thought over time reflects a commitment to logic, intellectual integrity, and epistemological humility. Through the entire process, there’s been a kind of teleology to my development. I’ve always been anti-equality and in favor of processes of creative destruction that move humanity forward. This meant starting out as unthinkingly liberal, because leftists were supposedly on the side of progress, before realizing that they were actually the radical egalitarians and becoming something close to a conventional conservative, and then shifting back towards the middle as theocratic, conspiratorial, and populist ideas came to occupy center stage on the right.

The Journey to Globalism

For the sake of good story telling, we can break my political life into four eras: Unreflective Liberal (circa 2002-2004), Standard Libertarian (2005-2007), Identity Libertarian (2008-2018), and Globalist Classical Liberal (2019-present). The consistencies throughout the years have been secularism, a commitment to markets (after the first very brief era), genetic determinism, and a dislike of obfuscation and anything that seems weak, stupid, or unmanly. My biggest shifts have been towards more universalism and epistemological humility, which has made me pro-democracy and turned me further against economic central planning, and also social conservative policy, which I increasingly see as a kind of cultural central planning.

1. Unreflective Liberal (2002-2004)

I never showed any interest in political affairs until I was around 17. Before that I liked things like sports, pro wrestling, rap music, and video games. Very prole. If you took a hundred kids of similar intelligence and asked someone which one of us was most likely to become a political writer, before my late teens I probably would’ve been among the last you would have chosen. Nothing in my family or personal background before that point would have predicted my future. Earlier in my teens I was interested in the question of whether God exists. I had a cousin who had a group of friends that were what I now recognize to be Evangelical Christians. One day they explained to me how their worldview made complete sense.

Guy: So do you believe in God?

Me: Not sure, maybe

Guy: Look you either believe or you don’t.

Me: Ok, I do.

Guy: And if you wanted to live forever with God, you would have to be perfect, right? God can’t have imperfection in his presence.

Me: Uhh, yeah…

Guy: Well, but you can’t be perfect! So the only way to be worthy of being in God’s presence and achieving eternal life is through a sacrifice of one who is perfect. Hence, Jesus Christ!

He made it sound as if any reasonable person would derive the necessity of the crucifixion of Christ from first principles. I wasn’t entirely convinced by this logic, but they told me that the penalty for not believing them was eternal hellfire, so I became “saved” because I was pretty impressionable. As soon as I had two seconds on my own to think about this I realized how ridiculous it all was. This was in the early days of the internet, when every forum and chatroom centered around nerds debating the existence of God, and somehow I discovered a book called Atheist Universe. It was filled with arguments that are today sometimes dismissed as “Reddit atheism,” but they were revelatory to me at the time, and I still believe they are correct. Young people today might not understand, but to not believe in God was still a pretty weird thing in the late 1990s and early 2000s in non-elite circles, and in my lower middle-class suburb I had never met an atheist or even been exposed to the most basic arguments of unbelievers.

In the time immediately before 9/11, stem cell research was a major political issue. The way the media portrayed the topic was that this was an important technology that had the potential to lead to major breakthroughs and religious people were standing in the way. Some conservatives on X recently told me that the output of stem cell research hasn’t been all that impressive, but whether that’s true or not, I still don’t think there’s any value in protecting the “lives” of unwanted embryos, so in this area the expected value of medical research should be based on the kind of cost/benefit analysis we normally use, or at least should use. If we’re putting any more than zero weight on religious considerations, it’s too much. As will be discussed below, distaste for the sanctity of life philosophy has always been with me, but there was a period in my life where I downplayed just how evil it was due to tribalism. Leftists at some point after this became the enemy, so although religious conservatives were annoying and wrong I could convince myself that they weren’t that big of a threat, or even that their views on things like abortion were somewhat admirable.

The first political show I regularly watched was Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher on ABC. This was the first time I saw that politics could be entertaining. I found Maher hilarious, and loved his common sense takes, mocking religion and the idea that boys could be traumatized by having sex with their teachers. He ran circles around the church lady types associated with the religious right that he regularly brought on the show. As silly as it may sound now, leftism represented freedom and masculinity. These were the people who were not afraid of speech, or sex, or art, or crime, or naughty words.

It’s interesting to look back at my teenage self, because I think the way I saw politics back then was similar to the way many people do as adults, and so it gives me insights into normies. Since the early 2010s, the dominant paradigm has been racism versus anti-racism, and we may be moving into an era of establishmentarians versus weirdos, but in the 2000s a casual observer would understand politics as centering around conflict between religious Christians and secularists. I developed a very simple and comforting model of the world. Some people were stupid and weak, which is why they became religious and indulged their bigotry. This made them anti-gay, supportive of pointless and destructive wars in the Middle East, and easy marks for greedy capitalists who stopped them from doing the rational thing and supporting a social welfare state. I remember being excited about Barack Obama, and voting for him for Senate in 2004, along with Kerry for president.

I think my story up to this point was pretty common. People often have one belief or one interest, and that makes them identify with one tribe over the other, which shapes their views on everything else. To me, finding out Christianity was false colored my views on all other topics, because if a group of people can believe that a bunch of ancient fables are divinely inspired and an invisible man is watching over them, why would I trust them on anything? The world made perfect sense. Smart, enlightened, kind people on one side, who controlled the most cognitively demanding institutions because they were correct, and irrational bigots and religious weirdos standing in the way of progress on the other. Many stop there, but thankfully I was curious and open minded enough to continue learning.