I voted Democrat (sorry!) but also called myself an anarchist. (WTF?)
That's not hard to explain. A Democrat believes that he/she is an upstanding person and should be left alone, but EVERYONE ELSE is a greedy and mean-spirited psychopath just waiting for the chance to commit a crime, and that is why OTHER PEOPLE need to be tightly controlled.
Exactly!!!!! Never heard it put it so succinctly.
Two other influences: my dad is a staunch Republican, and part of young people defining themselves is deciding what they're
not, and it's always easy for young people to pick whatever their parents are as what they're not.
But moreover, my two older sisters, who helped raise me while my parents were both working, are very very liberal. One of them is even Sufi (which is sort of like a Muslim without the RPGs.)
When I read Molon Labe, and got to the (hilarious) part of the FedCop on the airplane (The one who told security "You're not smart enough to search my shoes!"),....you know that woman sitting on the plane next to him? The one who the FedCop can
completely profile just by looking at her....(vegan, drives a Swedish car, reads Mother Jones, etc. etc..)....Well, reading that I thought "Wow! This reads as if Boston has sat next to both of my sisters on a plane!" (I have a theory that all of Boston's male characters, good guys and bad, have some Boston in them, at least in the positive and/or badass parts of their makeup. Boston...have you ever
wanted to say the things to someone on a plane that that guy says to that woman?
)
That female character is
so like a cross between my two sisters.
My sisters, despite their politics, are decent people at the core. They were both a big influence on me, and loved me dearly. And my father disciplined me, but not my sisters. They were just nifty, fun buddies to me. So I grew up thinking "liberals are cool, conservatives are blustery buzzkills."
Took me over 40 years to really figure it all out, to examine it and come more realistic conclusions.
I still love my sisters, they still love me. But one of them recently told me "Please stop e-mailing me pictures of you and DJ with guns. I read my e-mail at work, and it scares my co-workers." (She's on the staff of an East Coast Ivy League university. Her job includes things like writing books to help train social workers.)
Make sense?
MWD