jacenskylo
27th December 2012, 01:30
Hello everyone, My name is Gareth and I'm from the north east of the United States. There's plenty of liberals where I live but alot conservatives as well. I came into my views over time. I started off as a slightly right leaning libertarian, you know the type of the govt is bad leave it up to the free market. I've been working as an orderly at a hospital while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It was how I was treated there that started to move me to the left. In addition I moved further to the left in response to the Iraq war and how that whole mess was shady. I moved away from the democratic party after I realized they were just as much in the pockets of big business as the republicans and libertarians in regards to the whole wall street fiasco. As far as my views go i'm still working it out. I still have alot to learn before I figure where I stand, and given how big the literature thread on this forum is I could say that might be a while. The four books that have influenced me so far is The S word a historyof Socialism in the United States by John Nichols, Precariat: the new dangerous class by Guy Standing, In praise of Barbarians by Mike Davis, and An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln by Robin Blackburn. If I could guess where I stand I would say Democratic Socialist. Also, one other book that's influenced me is Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. The premise is that modern conservativism movement going back to the Revolutionary war has been to maintain the Status quo and prevent groups that're trying to achieve equality such as slaves, women and unions