Determine my political affiliations

This task is one of the easier ones to accomplish you would think. You simply look at how life is and decide on who to vote for and then over time you vote the same way as your beliefs align with that particular organization.

Oh, I wish it was that way.

There is a saying in English that the devil is in the details, and this is super applicable here. See, your party of choice has some broad views that they will vote on, and your candidate will mostly align with those views but there will be variance. The candidate will only meet maybe 70% of the views and when push comes to shove, they may vote one way or the other. The other thing to note is that you will also not agree with 100% of any party unless you form your own.

Parties are a coalition, meaning a broad umbrella and each one tends to have a few specific highlights or things that are important to said party. Think of like hot button issues, the stuff that they will highlight and promise to work on that cycle. This doesn't mean that other things aren't important to them, it's just that the party may not prioritize those particular issues may not get attention.

Growing up, I didn't understand the benefits that you get from taxes; to me they were always pain. I would get my paychecks and see the government taking out a substantial portion and would be annoyed. This defined my voting strategy then and caused substantial leanings in one direction. I was of the opinion that the government had too much overreach and was infringing on my rights. This impacted my views on firearms, alcohol, land rights and many other things. I went fairly deep to one end of the spectrum and for the longest time was highly annoyed at anyone that was on the other side.

I had a teacher my senior year of college, someone that was leading my international studies department and he was the lone staff member that was president of the group representing the other political party on campus. He was very much the minority across the state of Idaho at that time. His style of teaching was that such that he would give us a topic and ask us to do research on it and then respond in a paper. He wanted citations so he could make sure that we had actually done the research. He looked at me and assigned me to write on the topic of foreign aid. Oh boy, I set out to prove that it shouldn't exist and what I found was quite the opposite. There were numerous cases where a minor investment from the US resulted in a net positive event back in the US. I persisted, assuming I was looking into the wrong data sets and continued to not find what I was looking for.

Some 20 single spaced pages later, I concluded that foreign aid was indeed the correct approach and a valuable thing to provide to others. Then came the next assignment, understand the value of NATO. This led to a similar change in my understanding, and so on. In the short period of one semester my world view changed drastically. Fast forward 20 years and I find myself on the other end of the spectrum.

I am forever grateful to my professor of international studies for making me a project in 2003.