On economic issues, I consider myself to be an adherent of the neoliberal consensus that arose with the market-oriented “New Democrats” of the 1990s, persisted with George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” in the 2000s, and survives to this day with Barack H. Obama’s Wall Street-coddling Keynesianism. I hate social welfare, but I love government distortion of free markets in the name of progress. On fiscal issues, I consider myself an unflinching budget hawk—except, of course, in times of war, economic hardship, or whenever the wealthy deserve a tax break. On social issues, I am a fervent civil libertarian, with the important exception of privacy rights and the growth of the surveillance state—privacy, in my mind, is overrated. On foreign policy issues, my views are an extremely complicated potpourri of Richard M. Nixon’s hawkish realism, Bush’s hawkish idealism, and Obama’s dovish realism. I can’t say that I care much for James E. Carter’s dovish idealism.

If you are bored by now, I can’t say that I blame you. If someone had just uttered the previous paragraph to me in the course of verbal conversation, I would have tuned out about halfway into the first sentence. Few things are as irksome as having a conversation with someone who is a little too eager to explain to you their political beliefs. Worse still is when they feel compelled to use more than three or four words to describe them (in my experience, this very special caliber of human being is most often found lurking around the Institute of Politics). But really, you can’t throw a copy of Paul Krugman’s “The Conscience of a Liberal” without hitting a Harvard student with a rehearsed political manifesto. Someone ought to tell these people that when somebody asks them about their political orientation, it is intended to be a polite conversational catalyst, not a genuine expression of interest in the frivolous worldview of some overeager Harvard sophomore destined for a desk job at the Department of the Interior.

(Continued)