How my political views evolved from 2004 to 2024
The 2024 election just happened, marking 20 years since the first election I voted in when I was 19 years old, the 2004 election. I thought it might be interesting to think back to my political views in 2004 and consider what changed.
Does 2024 Jeremy still agree with 2004 Jeremy, or was 2004 Jeremy young and naive?
Have we made any progress, or are we still fighting some of the same challenges today?
And are my political concerns from 2004 even still relevant today?
Foreign policy
In 2004, foreign policy was a big deal. George W. Bush and the neoconservatives were rampaging through the Middle East. I thought the war in Afghanistan was dumb - Afghanistan was so poor there was almost nothing to fight. Should have just dropped some bombs and sent in some special forces to rough up Al Qaeda and called it a day.
The Iraq War was even worse. Neoconservatives had this weird ideology where they thought that Western liberal democracy was universally the best government, and any country exposed to it would prosper and maybe even serve as inspiration for neighboring countries. In retrospect, this proved to be very naive - instead of Western liberal democracy, we got ISIS.
Even back in 2004 I thought neoconservatism didn't make much sense. I was very opposed to our massive military budget (more on that later) and our interventionist foreign policy. In fact this was my main issue for the 2004 presidential election, because I figured the president can unilaterally do a lot in foreign policy, whereas most other issues require cooperation from congress, which makes it much more difficult to actually do anything.
I think I was correct in identifying foreign policy as the primary issue in 2004. But what about in 2024? Neoconservatism seems dead. I don't think anyone really wants to invade another country and engage in nationbuilding again. We don't have any large active wars. So is there really a big difference between parties these days? Not like in 2004.
Some people would argue that the Russia/Ukraine situation is a big difference. I'm less sure about that. It's certainly not on the level of the Iraq War - we were the primary actor there, just like Russia is the primary actor in Ukraine. Could we have averted the war through better diplomacy? Maybe. But it's hard to say, just as it's hard to say if Saddam could have achieved that back when he was in power. And ultimately, nobody in the US is actually on Russia's side, people just debate which of the available bad options is the least bad.
So I don't really see foreign policy as being such a big issue today. There is a lot less disagreement.
Verdict: I was right in 2004, but it's kind of irrelevant now.
Civil liberties
The Patriot Act was very controversial. I didn't like it. I didn't like the TSA. I didn't like encroachments on the First Amendment. I didn't like indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay. I saw those all as Republican policies that Democrats would save us from.
I still don't like any of those things. But despite 20 years of Democrats and Republicans being in control at various times, not much has changed. If anything, it's gotten worse. Most of the bad old stuff still exists. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are seen as heroes by some, but villains by more. And public opinion polls among young people show that the First Amendment is not very popular these days.
This is all very bothersome to me, but it's not on the radar for many people.
Verdict: I was right in 2004, but nobody cares anymore.
Gay rights
I was in favor of gay marriage before it was cool. It's weird to think about it now, but in 2004 gay marriage was very unpopular. Even Obama opposed in when he ran for president in 2008 and 2012. Okay, Obama was probably lying and a lot of people knew that at the time. But he still felt that he couldn't publicly come out in favor of gay marriage because it was too unpopular, even with Democrats.
So thinking back to 2004... I know some people who were opposed to gay marriage back then who would be very embarrassed of that fact today. But I was in favor of gay marriage, and generally in favor of gay rights and equality and all that good stuff.
Today, gay rights is kind of a non issue, in that it has very broad support. The debate has moved on to trans rights, which (like 99.9% of people in 2004) I did not anticipate. "Trans rights" encompasses many different things, and I think at least some of them are not quite the slam dunk case that gay rights was. It often feels like people on the left are kind of losing the plot on this one. I could write a lot more, but this issue has been debated to death, so whatever.
Verdict: I was right in 2004, but the situation has changed.
Taxes and federal spending
In 2004, memories of a balanced budget were not that far in the past. The dot com bubble bursting and the Bush tax cuts quickly turned the surplus into a deficit, but the situation didn't feel hopeless.
At the time, I thought we should reverse the Bush tax cuts and cut military spending. Then, we could balance the budget and also spend more on healthcare (discussed more below) and other services.
What actually happened? Obama partially repealed the Bush tax cuts, but then Trump added more tax cuts. We never cut military spending. And we never balanced the budget.
Now the deficit is a lot larger, the debt is too, and interest on the debt is becoming an issue. This is something that libertarians always talked about in panicked tones, but it was not a huge problem for long time due to low interest rates. But now, interest on the debt is almost as large as military spending!
Spending on entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) has also grown quite a bit. That now absolutely dwarfs military spending.
Back in 2004 it felt like we were spending completely absurd amounts of money on the military, and that any other policy goal could be easily funded by cutting military spending. That is no longer the case. We still spend a lot on the military, but we spend even more on other stuff, and we're also running a huge deficit that can no longer be ignored. That easy old answer of "just cut military spending" is a relic of the past.
Verdict: I was right in 2004, but the situation has changed.
Capitalism vs. socialism
In 2004, I thought that Euoropean countries were doing a lot of good things economically. They called themselves "socialist" but it wasn't old school socialism, it was capitalism with bigger social safety nets. In contrast, the American system seemed kind of barbaric - with smaller social safety nets, people down on their luck could really suffer a lot. So in general, I was in favor of a more European economic system. Universal healthcare and various forms of welfare, supported by higher taxes.
I don't think my past opinions have aged very well. In the past 20 years, the US economy has accelerated way beyond Europe. It used to feel like we were comparably wealthy but Europe was a little nicer to the poor. But if that niceness cost massive economic growth compounded over 20 years, was it worth it? Even for the poor? Probably not.
Verdict: I was wrong in 2004, I should have advocated for the opposite.
Universal healthcare
As you can probably guess based on what I wrote in some of the sections above, I was in favor of universal healthcare back in 2004. If all the other rich Western countries can do it, why can't we?
Today I am less sure. I think I still support universal healthcare, but the devil is in the details, and I don't have a lot of confidence that it would go well if we tried implementing it right now. I guess probably a lot of people agree with me on that, since it has basically disappeared as a political issue.
I also suspect that universal healthcare would be, at best, more of a minor improvement, rather than a cure to all the problems of our healthcare system. Yes we spend a lot of money, but there is a decent argument that we spend that money because we're rich, not becuase we're particularly inefficient at healthcare spending. Additionally, at least some of the money we spend is not really "waste", it's going to the development of better drugs and medical devices. Without the US spending so much money, would medical progress slow down? Would that be worth saving some money? I don't know, it's all very messy.
Verdict: I was overconfident in my opinion in 2004, or maybe just flat out wrong.
China
China was not significantly on my radar in 2004 as a political issue, but in general I supported liberalizing relations with all countries. While I didn't agree with neoconservatives that liberal values could be spread militarily, it did seem that countries exposed to Western media/commerce/etc would take some positive influence from all that. China was seen as a case in point, going from horrific attempts at "real" communism to at least some amount of liberalization and growth. I expected that would continue, in China and elsewhere.
Instead what has happened is that China has continued to grow, but without taking much political or cultural influence from the West. They're doing their own thing. And they may surpass us while still doing their own thing, which is troubling.
Verdict: I may have been wrong in 2004, but probably nothing else could have been done.
Religion
Atheism was very controversial back in 2004. Richard Dawkins (and a few other similar activists) led a movement for acceptance of atheism and criticism of religion's negative effects. I was fully on board with this. Religious conservatives wanted to ban teaching evolution in favor of creationism, make people pray in public schools, and do all kinds of crazy backwards stuff.
But then religion just kind of faded away. There's still a lot of Christians in America, but few of them are true believers. Nobody goes to church. Nobody cares what the Pope thinks. And while being an atheist was controversial and edgy back in 2004, these days nobody cares. And I'm not sure how much of that came from the atheist movement, a lot of the change seemed to be internal to religious people. They just don't care about religion anymore.
Verdict: I was kind of right in 2004, but the problem basically solved itself and became a non-issue.
Race relations
In 2004, I thought that I would live to see racism become a thing of the past, and that it might even happen fairly soon. I thought that all racial disparities were caused by racism and that as we eliminated racism and counteracted any remnants through things like affirmative action, we'd be able to eliminate said racial disparities.
That is not at all what actually happened. Overt racism has continued to decline, but racial disparities have been stubborn. This has led to people on the left advocating theories like "systemic racism", which basically says racial disparities alone are evidence of racism. Which sounds kind of like the creationism that religious nuts were advocating back in 2004 - if you can't explain something, that means it was done by God/racism!
Here in 2024, many racial divisions seem worse than in 2004, they don't seem to be getting better, and I don't really see a path for them getting better. And in contrast to what I thought in 2004, a lot of the problems are coming from people on the left.
Verdict: I was wrong in 2004, and the problem is worse now.
Drug policy
Marijuana was very common in 2004, but at least in my circles, other drugs weren't. So in terms of "drug legalization" I was mostly thinking about "marijuana legalization". And I was very in favor of it. It seemed ridiculous that such a common and harmless (or at least less harmful than alcohol) drug could put you in prison.
Now, marijuana is legal in many places. But it's also not very relevant when people talk about drugs today. Becuase today they're talking about meth and opiods and other drugs that are much more harmful than marijuana. This is a much bigger issue than marijuana legalization. And a much more difficult one. Because while people do advicate for decriminalization and harm reduction, that only gets you so far. Taking those actions alone seems to lead to the horrific scenes you see in many cities, where some streets are filled with homeless drug addicts whose lives are slipping away. When you look at those places, it's hard to see what harm is being reduced. 2004-style "just legalize it" policy won't cut it.
Verdict: I was right in 2004, but the situation has changed.
Immigration
Immigration was not really a hot button issue in 2004 like it is now. But overall my opinion was that we should:
Increase high skill immigration, because it's good for the economy, and they want to come here, so why not?
Decrease low skill immigration, because automation and outsourcing will decrease the need for unskilled labor.
I still have the same opinion on high skill immigration.
But for low skill immigration, I have the same answer but for a different reason. I think I was wrong to focus on the economic impact. Libertarians argue that unlimited immigration would be a net economic benefit. In some sense they are probably right, but maybe only if they got their way on some other issues. Like if we're going to have unskilled laborers come here, but they're going to get a $15/hr minimum wage and send their kids to schools that cost $20k/year and get Medicaid that costs God knows what... that probably is not economically beneficial. Maybe it would be if we get rid of the minimum wage and universal education and healthcare for the poor?
But... I don't want to live in a society like that! That's the reason I'd give today about immigration - it's not all about maximizing GDP, it's also about the society you want to live in. I know that might sound hypocritical in comparison to what I wrote above in the "capitalism vs. socialism" section where I basically said economic growth trumps all. But one is like the difference between the US and UK today (I'll take the US) and the other is about making the US culturally more like Brazil or India (I'll also take the US, even over the wealthiest parts of those countries).
I admit I could be wrong here, this is just my gut feeling about how things balance out.
Verdict: I was kind of right in 2004, but maybe for the wrong reasons.
Abortion
I've always been very pro-choice. You probably can't find anyone more pro-choice than me. But back in 2004, this was not as much of an issue as it is today, because it felt like Roe v. Wade provided a pretty secure foundation for American abortion policy. Don't get me wrong, it was still an issue back then, and there were still fights to maintain and expand access. But it was nothing like it is today, where some states have crazy restrictive laws, and abortion is a huge issue.
Verdict: I was right in 2004, but the situation has changed.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
I'm kind of sneaking this one on the list, because AI was not a political issue back in 2004. I was a big scifi nerd, so I was aware of how AI could be both extremely valuable and extremely dangerous. But it seemed like a distant possibility, one that would remain in the realm of scifi for my lifetime.
Neural networks were seen as an old-fashioned obsolete technology. I thought we'd get to AI through neuroscience - learning about the human brain, and eventually simulating it. Instead, there has been incredible progress in neural networks, to the point where it's kind of scary to think about what will happen if there are just one or two more breakthroughs in AI. That makes AI one of my biggest political concerns today, in stark contrast to 2004.
Verdict: I was wrong in 2004, and the problem is much worse now.
Summary
Overall, there is a pretty good mix of things that in retrospect I think I was right about in 2004, and others I was wrong about. But even the ones I was right about, they are mostly irrelevant today for a variety of reasons.
My fundamental take-home message from this is that the political world does not always evolve the way you think it will, either in good or bad ways. When you're young, everything seems important. You often feel like you're on the right side of history, and maybe everyone will agree with you and see the light if only they can have things explained to them correctly.
In reality, politics often evolves in weird, unexpected ways. For a lot of issues it's not that the good guys won or the bad guys won, it's something else. Maybe the world changed and it just doesn't matter anymore. Maybe there was some third option that nobody was thinking about. Or maybe the issue is still unresolved, but nobody cares anymore and we're all arguing about different stuff.
In 2004 I would have said I'm part of the left wing of the Democratic party, and soon the whole party would come to agree with us, and soon after that the whole country. It's like the last chapter of The Jungle where it talks about how the socialists keep winning more votes in every election and soon socialism will sweep over the whole nation! That's not quite how it played out. Predicting things is hard, especially about the future.
It's a lot more difficult to say where I stand politically these days. I feel pretty alienated from both parties. The Democrats have gotten kind of crazy on everything related to race/gender, which is a lot of things! And the Republicans have become pretty radical in their anti-intellectualism, to the point where many are lost in dumb conspiracy theories. That's just a quick summary - don't worry, I have plenty more grievences with both parties!
So what am I now? I guess I'm a centrist, because I could imagine either party tilting in my direction, but who knows if they will. If the past 20 years is any indication, probably not!