To get an obvious question out of the way, I vote with the Democratic Party nearly all the time. The US runs on single-member plurality districts, meaning that it's exceedingly rare that a third-party candidate has a legitimate chance in a general election. It's happening more lately as power fragments, and it's a good thing, but the winner-take-all aspect of the voting process means things generally come down to a two-way race. For instane, Bernie Sanders (Senator from Vermont) is a socialist (you go, Bernie), but when he faces reelection it's him vs a Republican, a two-way battle. Changing up the voting rules might be a good idea, but that's pretty tangential to the question of Values.

However, what's not tangential, and which does explain my propensity to vote D, is my basic political philosophy: Pragmatism. For the most part I favor practice over theory, results over ideology. Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing informs success like paying attention to results, seeing what works and what doesn't, and improving by iteration. I believe in the application of the scientific method to the problems of politics and governance.

The Pragmatic philosophy should not be confused with contemporary "realism," that nattering voice of conventional wisdom constantly advising a scaled-back course of action or retardedly incremental change. Pragmatism is not a timid stance, it's simply a curious and adaptable one, one that focuses on outcomes and results over theoretical, moral or ideological purity.

I inform this with the Utilitarian view to try and figure out what "results" actually means. Pursing the greatest good for the greatest number helps keep you from becoming too cynical, and targeted on course. Add on a little common-sense moral seasoning — truth, justice, liberty, etc — and it's a pretty tasty pie.

I believe that a Public Interest exists and forms a rational and moral basis for government (the State) to manage both common goods (infrastructure like clean air, paved roads, and a national health system) as well as managing the negative externalities of everyday life. Private actors are necessarily limited in their scope of understanding, but everyone benefits from a more fertile environment, and the problems of large-scale collective action — as well as large-scale insurance against unexpected calamity — necessitate organization in larger numbers than individuals alone can manage. Institutions are inevitable; our challenge is to make them work as well as possible.

Keying off those points, ultimately I believe that most of our existential questions as a species — energy, global warming, carrying capacity, nuclear proliferation, pandemic illness, etc — are global in nature, and require the inevitable development of more sophisticated and powerful global systems. The rich are already getting richer off globalization; maybe it's time we the people saw some upside too?

But That's All Philosophical; What About The Politics?

Good question. The practice of politics is not a philosophical affair. It's about the exercise of power, the work of organization, the realities of economics. When it comes to these brass tacks, I favor a blend of good old Liberalism with some Populism thrown in to address contemporary times. Basically, I think we're best off when more people are more educated, more secure, and have more options to figure things out. The pie needs to get bigger, and more evenly distributed.

And that's just not happening. The incredible prosperity and awesomeness of the past 30 years has been overwhelmingly captured by a proportionally very small number of people, who increasingly constitute their own small world no matter where they are actually from. We're one world now, and it's honestly a pretty open question as to whether we re-play the dark-ages style feudalism trip.

So as a matter of economics I favor higher taxes on high high earnings, coupled with better policies to foster the growth of small to medium-sized businesses, stronger economic infrastructure, and some (inter)national leadership on 21st century industrial policy, particularly when it comes to energy. Individual personally pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't help the economy innovate, but creating better shelters for people trying to grow a diverse and distributed set of smaller businesses will. Giving people security when it comes to health care, and ample education without crippling debt will increase capacity and entrepreneurial risk taking. Renewing the ultimate wellsprings of the economy — energy, food and resources — will open up new opportunities as well as mitigating very real risks the coming century.

Socially I think people need to get over moral crusades about homosexuality, drugs, or entertainment technology. In particular, the massive explosion in incarceration that came with the "war on drugs" and "three strikes" rules is a tragic, wasteful and deeply immoral failure. It's now an intractable problem as we've created an enormous and well-organized population of criminals, but we've got to start unwinding this calamity sooner rather than later. Every life sucked into the prison industrial complex is a family left fatherless, a creative human spirit forever dampened, a net-loss for everyone.

Thinking Big and Far

Long term we will have to address the problem that the consumption/servitude model for organizing labor isn't working out and seems incapable of scaling to the global level. That's another existential problem, but it can be solved through more equitable ways of organizing (more nice things and more free time for almost everyone), as well as the development of better culture and interesting ways for people to spend their time. As we emerge from the era of a world divided (roughly) into a developed one — in which TV-watching and pointless consumption are primary pastimes — and a developing one — where free time is scarce and relatively barren — the question of "just what do we do with ourselves" becomes more and more pressing.

I think it's an exciting question though. We certainly have plenty of problems to occupy our attention, and the human capacity for creating beautiful, interesting and engaging culture should have no problem scaling to billions of active participants. With any luck we can slide into a 21st Century that is as much of an improvement on the 20th as last century was on the 1800s. History suggests horrible things will also happen, but I'm cautiously optimistic that we might hit a tipping point of interconnection and self-awareness that makes it impossible for war on a mass scale to really take hold. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Right now times are dark, no doubt. Our governing elites are manifestly unqualified and our culture often seems vapid, venial and morbidly obese. Crypto-consumerism as a strategy for maintaining elite control seems like it might just be effective, Roman decline with lazer lights and a Hemmi magnum. But I'm still optimistic. People will surprise you. People want things to be better. People respond to better things, and tend to get smarter, more enlightened, more forgiving and dare I say wiser as they grow. We've got a lot of growing up to do, but I think we might just have the time and space to do it, to grow up in our own way; and wouldn't that be something?