Politics is a genuine passion of mine, not a hobby I picked up to sound interesting. On the questions that shape daily life I’m firmly libertarian — civil liberties, free speech, privacy, gun rights, local autonomy, and the freedom to start and run a small business — with a standing distrust of bureaucratic overreach. My default is simple: the burden falls on government to justify intruding on a person’s liberty, not on the person to justify keeping it.
And yet I hold an older, FDR-era belief with equal force. When the country faces a severe national crisis — economic collapse, mass unemployment, the kind of emergency that grinds ordinary families down — I believe the federal government can and should act aggressively: stabilize the economy, protect workers, rebuild infrastructure, and keep people out of poverty. Liberty is the everyday rule; decisive collective action is what genuine, nation-scale emergencies demand. The two instincts argue constantly, and I think that argument is the point.
I love this country plainly, and I see the work ahead as restoration rather than blame — lifting it back to its full stature and helping every American, whatever they believe, feel there is a place for them in it.