I was raised by rabid political-religious animals. I was taught that in politics, everyone was either with us or against us. In religion, some allowance could be made for alliances and common ground but in politics, everything was zero sum.

I spent most of my youth and the entirety of my young adult life recovering from that approach to life and finding how to be me. I am a moral conservative but not generally an ideological one. That one took 20 years to figure out just on its own. What class should I have learned that one in in high school? Anyway, by the time I finally got it to where I could live it, the political character attributes of generosity, moderation, and large spiritedness that I had spent my better years cultivating were now all perceived as weaknesses - just as my parents had seen them.

The crop of politicals that rolled into the administration in January 2025 was astonishing to me. Nearly every one showed signs of the paranoid and Manichaean worldview that I had joined the Marines, and then the civil service to escape from.

Yes, I had served as a junior political in the G.W. Bush administration. His compassionate conservatism never rubbed me the wrong way and served as a . His administration prized ethics, experience, and competence as much as his father’s had, as the Clinton administration had and as much as the Obama and Biden administrations did after him. Among Clinton democrats, I could be as conservative as I wanted as long as I was good at my job. By the time it got to the Biden administration, I had to be shit hot if I was a known conservative. The deck stacked against me over the years, for sure.

Of course a kid soon learns that trying to live by this credo made it kind of hard to find friends. When I graduated from high school, you could still ask someone where he was from and get a good sense of his politics. If you were from coal country, PA, or WVA, you voted democrat. If you were D.C. Irish working class now living out in the suburbs of Maryland or Virginia (there was no amorphous acronym “DMV”), you didn’t. You had had to leave your city and you blamed it on the democrats. You probably also blamed it on the blacks and likely the Jews too, of course, but politically, you blamed the democrats. No one who had a strong D.C. accent (similar to a Baltimore accent if you’ve ever heard that) was ever a staunch republican though. They looked at the whole thing as a dirty game. a D.C. kid, you had your own (or rather your parents’) strong views on what were the right politics, of course. But as long as you didn’t talk politics, you could get along with anyone. Because most democrats were not especially liberal and most Republicans were not especially conservative.