Threads has been running a trend where someone posts “my thread is a safe space for…” and fills the blank with a political identity. Pro-gun progressives. Fiscally conservative vegans. Catholic socialists. The replies pile up with people finding their people, like strangers at a potluck spotting the casserole their grandmother used to make.
I sat down to fill in my own blank and ran out of room.
Start with the census data. I’m a straight white man, raised Baptist. On paper that’s a demographic the pollsters think they can call before the doors open. They’d call it wrong.
I’ve voted for both parties. Which lever I pulled depended on the politics of the moment, what was happening in the country, and who seemed to understand it. That makes me a bad fit for a team jersey. Each side reads a split ticket as a betrayal, when for me it’s a vote cast on the question in front of me.
The Baptist upbringing was where I started. From there I went looking, and the search took me through the world’s faiths, with long stays in the atheist and agnostic rooms along the way. Buddhism held me longest: more than a decade of reading and sitting meditation. Where it finally took root was in the forest. Sitting still among the trees gave me the connection the cushion had been pointing toward, and that’s where I landed, closer to a deist, in the sense that nature is the living god. My faith sits where scientific understanding, Zen ideals, and a hippie’s habit of putting a hand on a tree trunk overlap. I find the divine in how a watershed works and how a forest feeds itself, and I don’t need anyone else to find it in the same place.
Socially, I’m about as liberal as a person gets. Who you love, how you worship or don’t, what you wear, what you put in your own body, how you build your family: yours. I’m antiracist, and I’ve got no patience for separatists of any stripe, whichever direction they’re pulling apart from. Underneath that sits an instinct that looks libertarian. Independence tops my list of values. The government I want stays off your front porch unless you invite it up the steps.
The place I part ways with modern libertarians is the question of why we have a government in the first place. The Preamble names the purposes, and two of them sit side by side: provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare. I read those as one thought. The general welfare of the people is the cause, and the common defense exists to protect it. Defense is the fence, and welfare is the garden the fence is there for.
Turn that same logic inward and you get my view of policing. Internal policing exists to provide for the general welfare of the public and keep people safe enough to go about their lives. That’s the yardstick. Enforcement that serves the welfare of the people passes. Enforcement that serves itself, or serves revenue, or serves somebody’s idea of order at the expense of the people living under it, fails the test the Preamble set.
That’s why I call myself an Enlightenment-age republican, small r, before I’d call myself a libertarian. Modern libertarianism tends to treat government like a tumor to be shrunk. The eighteenth-century republicans treated it like a barn the neighbors raise together. You build it for a purpose, you own it in common, and you keep it in repair because your livelihood depends on it.
Now the combination that makes me the odd duck at any party.
I want to govern like a Virginian. Jefferson and Madison gave us local control, suspicion of concentrated power, the citizen who stands on his own ground, and liberty of conscience written into law.
I also think John Adams was right more often than not. Adams didn’t trust human nature to behave itself when handed power, and he built for that, with checks set against each other like opposing springs in a clock. The Virginians supplied the spirit. Adams supplied the engineering.
My fiscal ideas, and the bureaucracy that grows out of them, are pure Hamilton. National credit. A professional administrative state that does its job competently. Bureaucracy is plumbing: you only think about it when it backs up, and a country with good plumbing can build whatever it wants on top.
And the part that gets me the strangest looks: I believe in a central bank, and I want it to be a direct piece of our own government. Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States was a public-private hybrid, with the government holding a fifth of the stock. By the time its charter came up for renewal, foreign investors held a large share of it, and that was one of the arguments that sank it in 1811. Today’s Federal Reserve is its own hybrid, with a federal Board of Governors on top and regional reserve banks owned on paper by the commercial banks in their districts. I’d bring the whole thing inside the house. The institution that sets the price of money shapes the price of groceries, rent, and a paycheck. If it belongs to the government, it answers to the people, and outsiders lose their hand on the dial of how we live.
So here’s the ballot-box twist. With that whole tangle of Virginia, Adams, and Hamilton in my head, I’m voting a straight Democratic ticket this election. Same rule as any other year: the politics of the moment decide the lever, and this moment decided it.
I grew up around a kind of man I figured the whole country recognized. The neighbor who shows up with a chainsaw the morning after an ice storm and clears your driveway before his own. The volunteer fireman who leaves supper on the table when the siren goes. The old-timer who’d tell you to mind your own business and then spend his Saturday fixing your fence because your kid was going to get hurt on it. Those men guarded their freedom like a good pocketknife, kept sharp and kept close, and the reason they kept it sharp was so they’d have something to cut someone else loose with. I thought that picture of strength was common ground. It turns out a lot of people only kept the chainsaw and the stubbornness, and forgot who the driveway was for.
Which brings me back to the trend. The posts are looking for a safe space, a place where a person can show up as they are and not have to brace for a hit. I’d like to be that place. People of any gender, sexuality, race, religion, or creed: life is safe with me. I’ll use whatever privilege I carry to stand between you and harm, and that includes the folks throwing rocks at me. Protection is my nature as much as systems are. Somebody builds the barn, and somebody stands at the door.
My thread is a safe space. I checked, and it’s me. Pull up a chair.
