....interestingly, for myself, I am drifting into a form of life and professional cowardice.

I have always been a bit of a worrier...used this to motivate myself...and since I'm not the smartest person around, somewhere above lichens but below the lower amphibians, I've always had to work harder, be more alert to my own failings, to get myself and my people to where we need to be.

And since my life involves fixing broken lives, (and I don't mean this badly, at one time or another, almost everyone is broken in some serious sense), all I have is my bravery, stepping up to the plate, for this person or that, in this situation or that cussed error....

So to lose this is....pretty much losing myself.

For a long time I've seen myself drifting towards seeing people, all people....as problems, sometimes I dread opening the door, or an email or answering the phone...I've rejected really nice women, as well as bad, as simply too much trouble to deal with.

None of this is good.

I'm working on myself...with some success.

But, maybe this is just a function of age, (67), or, worse case scenario, I am just becoming who I always was but was able to hide from.

None of life is easy...and drift is a negative word me thinks, the connotation being that one is not controlling the direction of one's life...which, however I think at a societal level is and can be true, (see your Iowa), but is different on a personal level.

Drift is the premise of your diary, but personally, it is a state of being that...I must reject as a form of simple self-survival.

n'est-ce pas?

Best Wishes, Traveller

Edit:(FWIW) the only thing that matters is how I perform in battle.

compared to when I was a kid reading National Review.¹ A big part of that has come from experience: I've found that America circa 1999 and Toronto are both pretty much places I'd really like to live, and so these days I'm inclined to vote for a party that's liable to get more of that.

But what's been really amazing has been that, thanks to the magid of Facebook, I've rediscovered a lot of my old friends from the Marine Corps.  Back in the 1990s they were all pretty much apolitical.  Now, to a man, they seem to have become not just Movement Conservatives, but full-on libertarians, convinced that gold is the only real money, that the Tenth Amendment forbids the welfare state, and that Obama is a communist.  And I have no idea what caused it, although I suspect it has something to do with the fact that they're mostly evangelical protestants.

Which means that I have a very bizarre Facebook feed: old friends from high school, former Marines, medievalists, and people I know from an alternate history newsgroup.  A few have permanently blocked each other after heated exchanges about torture, Libertarian Jesus, and the evils of the welfare state.

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1. Why yes, the amount of sex I was having in high school was exactly zero.  What was your first clue?

....on social issues I see as personal in nature.  F'rex, I simply cannot bring myself to care if you are into screwing males, females, toys, sheep, etc.  De gustibus....

Went a bit "right" economically.  There was a time when I would have said MITI was a reasonable model (and the fact that my example would have been MITI indicates both the vintage and my reasoning at the time.)  Since then, not so much.  Also, I determined that I know better than everybody else, so why cede yet more power to some bureacracy? :^)

Maybe it's my age, but I can't help but think that Reagan would be a RINO in today's GOP. That said, some of my positions have moderated.

pragmatist since I was around six or seven years old. I know that sounds hard to believe, but seriously: I stopped believing in God, Santa Claus, and political ideology pretty much at the same time & at an early age. I think and have kind of always thought that there are some things only government can do well, some things it has no business doing, and some things it can do only with public collaboration; and that telling the difference is the whole trick and why we have a political class in the first place. Democracy is always a work in progress, and works best where a prosperous middle class is as large as possible.

In foreign policy I've evolved a bit more, and found myself drifting towards a kind of pro-reform realpolitik; I've come to accept, for example, the notion that military power can be necessary to secure supply lines for energy, industrial materials & the like. Yes: war for oil, as well as war for human rights. Although more like: overwhelming military superiority making actual war unnecessary. That's more a center-right position, and not one I held in college. Back then I was against a lot of our "small wars": central America, SDS, the Persian Gulf War. Nowadays I see those as somewhat Republican aberrations of a general postwar US policy as a kind of global cop. Haven't really changed my position on most of Reagan Era Republican militarism and adventures derived from it...but I cast a friendlier eye on the Persian Gulf War, for example, than I once did. Preventing basically malign, warlike regimes from getting access to large supplies of cheap energy seems like a pretty good idea.

I've always been socially liberal and fiscally responsible, but as time goes by I'm getting tired of waiting.

A teacher got mad at me for quoting Karl in some school project.

My biggest drift in recent years has been on gay marriage. Some years back, I engaged the audience at Daily Kos, and that led me to change my position to in favor.

I think hanging out here has led me to appreciate the right's position a little more, although the movement has probably been microscopic.

...pretty much blindly following the dictates of my parents until I was two or three.  Potty training began to build a pretty hairy independent streak in me that is with me to this day.  I learned to regard all efforts at redistribution with extreme predjudice and suspicion by eight.  I was much more efficient than my brother at landing Halloween spoils.  When my parents dumped out both bags on the floor, mixed the candy up and then split it down the middle I had considered armed resistance.

In truth I am a small 'r' republican.  I want the localest government possible.  I have always wanted that but my drift has been on how much that local/state govt could or should provide.   

Than earlier in my life, when I was supposed to be outraged more. 

Here's the drift I've been having. I grew up with a fair number of rednecks. I like them, albeit with some large reservations.  I think they do a lot of the working in this world, and a lot of the dying in the armed forces. And I think they're right in suspecting that liberals look down on them. And if folks on the left really believe in stuff like alleviating poverty and promoting equality, it's the rednecks they should be talking to, not each other. 

With time, I have gotten a progressively greater appreciation of the nature of unintended consequences. In high school I read, "Of Mice and Men", the title of which Steinbeck took from To a Mouse. The relevant quote:

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

So this realization has some pretty direct consequences in terms of my ideology. First you need to understand that my family was left wing, yet anti-communist. In this universe, utopia was political freedom without capitalism. I suppose that the lack of any country with such a system made the dream all the more appealing, but I was always a nerd, from birth, so the absence of a single country like this led me to distrust the concept almost as soon as I understood it.

It was only later, by my early teens, that I understood why. Actually, there were several. First it became clear to me that you cannot have political freedom without significant economic freedom, because money is power, so if only the state has money, only the state has power. A little later, watching the computer industry develop, I came to understand that conditions change constantly in unexpected ways. Great plans by smart men will fail, early and often.

A state run economy puts its eggs in only one basket. Even without an appreciation at the time for the power of corruption, it became obvious to me that the many more chances to make mistakes that the free market offered also meant there are more chances to make successes. I came to fully grasp the free market as a key economic engine. Spending a day in East Berlin in my late teens sealed the deal.

Yet the same engineering mindset that prevented me from believing in socialist utopias also told me that the market needed regulation. A car engine, a steam boiler, or a nuclear reactor must be bounded within safe limits. We can argue about how to calibrate the limits but not about the need for their existence. I've become convinced that free market fundamentalists are just the flip side of my old left-wing relatives, focused on belief in an ideal while ignoring reality.

But economics and power isn't everything. I have grown ever more concerned about the environment, for example, and I think of it as being orthogonal to the left-right spectrum. I do know the right hates environmentalists today, but this only illustrates how brainwashed it has been by the oil companies. Conservatives by temperament should be conservationists also, but I'll let these guys make that case better than I could.

I also know that some leftists have used environmental issues to attack capitalism, but they are being intellectually dishonest. Without exception, every communist country has had a dismal environmental record, despite being entirely free from the pressures of capitalists.

It is precisely because its not really on the left-right spectrum that I am concerned about the environment. It's a minor issue to most people around the world. It's a big blind spot for the species, and a solution is not obvious to me so far. There might not be one.

It seems that a lot of us have moderated our views as we've grown and I suspect that is a function of the fact that we are well informed and politically aware. Studying the political sausage making process in detail makes one realize that practical politics are required to get anything accomplished and that extremism merely leads to gridlock and inaction. It is obvious that a lot of regular folks have done just the opposite and have hardened their positions and become more extreme.

As for me, I have evolved from a "big L" Libertarian in my college days through a "small l" libertarian as a adult and have ended up somewhere in the vicinity of a civil liberties liberal. I spent most of the 90's railing against inside the beltway culture in general and DLC type centrism in particular which prevented me from voting for Clinton either time he was elected. In hindsight he was a pretty good president all in all and was successful in so far as he managed to spur the economy and balance the federal budget, something which hasn't been otherwise done in my lifetime. To be fair, best president of my lifetime is a pretty low bar though.

I don't get too wrapped up in culture war skirmishes because most of that happens at the state level and I live in a progressive blue state. One of my justifications for living in a high tax state like NJ is it keeps out the riff raff who want to enshrine Christianity in law and aren't interested in supporting the trappings of civilization via taxes. Over the years I've had friends and colleagues that have moved to places like Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas who are appalled at the culture and legislation that gets passed. I'm not terribly sympathetic, it serves them right. That's the price of living in a low tax state.