There's an old saying: We find our ends in our beginnings. Now, I'm a long, dang way from ending right now; I expect to be annoying the left and delighting (I should hope) the right here at RedState and wherever my travels take me for many, many years yet. I've been doing this for a long time, and intend to go right on doing it.
But it's always worth taking a look back at one's formative years. A lot of people I know right now are recovering liberals. We have a few right here at RedState, and it's great that people can see reason and understand facts, and eventually change the way they see the world. The ones that can't do those things remain as liberals.
There are worse things, of course, than being a leftist, but those worse things can be lanced, drained, and disinfected. As for me, looking back at my own beginnings, I was always on the right of center. Here's why, and I'm going to tell you. It all started, you see, with the Watergate hearings.
Mind you, I was 12 - 13 years old while this whole thing was playing out. I didn't give two hoots about Watergate at first; I was more interested in fishing, hunting squirrels and pheasants, and running my trapline in the winter. But the Old Man insisted on my watching and reading about the proceedings, noting that we were seeing history made. As usual, he was right. As time went on, I came to one key realization: If President Richard Nixon, who was coming off a huge, 49-state landslide victory, had walked away from the Watergate conspirators, called them to account, told the press "I won't tolerate this, I don't care which side they were working for," and referred the whole thing to the Justice Department, he would have walked away a hero. A lot of the rest of the Nixon stuff never would have come out. But, well, we all know what happened.
Fast forward to 1979. I had been on my high school newspaper during my sophomore and junior years of high school, and when I showed up for my senior year, I found myself appointed as Opinion Editor. Now, that was fun; it was a little like (metaphorically, of course) giving a maniac a loaded gun. Jimmy Carter was president, the mood of the country was still unsettled after Watergate, and I unleashed a few blasts of the typewriter (remember typewriters? We were still using typewriters) at what seemed to me then to be the feckless and disorganized Carter administration. With the benefit of several decades of hindsight, I still think the Carter administration was feckless and disorganized. Oh, I started a few arguments in the hallways over my weekly columns, even a scuffle or two, but the journalism teacher told me that, as an opinion journalist, "...if you aren't making someone mad, it's because nobody's reading you."
I graduated in May of 1980. At that time, I thought my dabbling in journalism was over. I was working at the Woolco store in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and had been paying attention in a desultory manner to the Republican primaries. As I often did, I asked the Old Man what he thought of one of the candidates, who was clearly the front-runner.
"Reagan?" he replied. "He was the Governor of California. Got re-elected once. Former actor."
I was curious enough that I found the local Reagan campaign office. I was quickly persuaded to be a campaign volunteer, and ended up at a table in front of the library, in front of the grocery store, in the local college student union; I handed out many pamphlets and bumper stickers. That November, I marched in and for the first time, voted for Ronald Reagan, and also for a new guy, a young guy running for the Senate, name of Chuck Grassley.
In the years that followed, I saw the economy start to turn around. The Reagan people dealt with the inflation problem by jacking up interest rates, and while it was painful at first, it worked.
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By 1984, I was married, had a two-year-old daughter, and was balancing college classes with National Guard service while my then-wife worked as a nurse's aide in a local nursing home. I didn't volunteer for the 1984 campaign; I had my hands full, and it looked like President Reagan was going to win handily with or without my help. I did watch the debates, and I remember thinking President Reagan, in no small part, won his landslide re-election in this moment:
We all know how that election turned out.
History turns on moments like this. We saw another, just last summer, a moment when Donald Trump very likely clinched the 2024 election.
So, here we are. We do indeed find our ends in our beginnings. I supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 because I thought he was the man for the moment. I support Donald Trump now for the same reason. Trump is no Reagan; he doesn't exhibit Reagan's sunny optimism, his casual charm. Trump can be prickly, he can be acerbic, but he can also wield a cutting wit and a great sense of humor. He's the right man for this moment, as Ronald Reagan was the right man for his.
After 1984, after some Army service, after Desert Storm, I started a career in the medical device/biotech industry that led me to almost 20 years as a globe-trotting independent consultant. COVID put paid to that, but in 2023, I found myself here, at RedState, having come full circle back to journalism, starting a new career in my 60s - I didn't plan on it, but boy howdy am I glad it happened.
That leads me to look back at Tuesday's elections. Yes, we lost a few races. But we always seem to win in the end. Carter gave us Reagan. Obama and Biden gave us Trump. I find myself looking at the upcoming midterms, determined to do my part to fight that battle, and now I'm doing rather more than hand out bumper stickers. But whatever happens, it will only be a battle. Whatever the outcome, we will look forward to the next one, and the next, and the next after that.
The right appealed to me all those years ago because they were the ones who promised freedom, who promised and delivered prosperity. Those of us on the right are people who build, who make things, who get things done. That was the case then, and it still is now.
We'll always win in the end. It isn't easy, it may turn downright ugly in the next few years, with the left promising violence more and more by the day, but if the left wants a fight, we'll give them one, and we'll win in the end, because we're the people who get things done.
