Why discredit another of their ideas?

I’ve listened to a handful of memoirs recently; some of them were the memoirs from John Boehner and Joe Biden. I’ve learned so much about these men and what ideas they represent, and I can’t shake off the feeling that they were good men. They wanted what they thought was best for the country. And hearing their arguments, I believe that they all had valid points!

And so I come to a weird point in my life. I don’t know where I stand ideologically. This is weird to me, because I grew up thinking like a Republican. But then I became engrossed in libertairanism when I was a late teenager. I carried for the next few years the idea that the government should be minimally involved in people’s lives. During my young life, I never really gave any thought towards liberal viewpoints, because conservatism runs in my family and I defaulted to think liberal viewpoints were wrong.

But then I started to get curious and I read several memoirs, two of them being from John Boehner and Joe Biden. John Boehner and Joe Biden have expressed valid opinions, and I can see both opinions and ideas working. But they are ideologically different. How can two different ideologies work, and yet be different? But, there is one problem with that question. It assumes that there is only one right ideology. With what I’ve learned, I might argue that there are no right ideologies. If some idea works for a time period, then it works no matter where that idea came from.

Debt spending, Keynesian economics, can work, that is if the central bank is attentive to inflation. Laissez-faire can work, that is people are willing to let the market dramatically crash and endure through temporary hard times. Any great idea can work. Both ideas fall susceptible to hard questions though. Allow a central bank to govern the value of currency and risk inflation? Allow a dramatic market crash with no protection of Keynesian economics?

Why should anyone be so partisan? We are all human, and we all have great ideas. It’s a wonderful world to live in to explore different kinds of ideas. I love to see how much I can learn and grow from people of different backgrounds. I know that a different background doesn’t mean that another person is wrong. That person has as much right to their own opinion as I do. It is a marvelous thing when people of different backgrounds can come together for a solution, and that is what makes democracy special.