Find me a candidate

Still in the race, dropped out, whatever. Republican, Democrat, third party, tenth party, I don't care. I just want someone I can support in good conscience. At this point, I have three priorities:

1. Pro-family. At a minimum, this means being pro-life, but it's high time to discourage abortion and encourage healthy families through other methods. We can start with more robust parental leave.

2. Against structural inequality. The clearest place to start here is with criminal justice reform, but just understanding that things like housing discrimination and de facto school segregation are problems and actually trying to address them (even if it's not the solution that I prefer) is important.

3. Foreign intervention as a last resort. We don't need to go to war with Iran. Bombing the crap out of ISIS isn't going to fix Syria.

I honestly haven't studied enough on guns, healthcare, and general economics to have confident opinions on those issues--there are some ideas that make me more skeptical than others (typically the extremes of "make everything free" and "let the private sector do everything") but I'm willing to listen to both sides of the ideological fence. I also have preferences for someone not in the pocket of special interests (hello, campaign finance reform?), someone who doesn't want to turn public universities into trade schools, someone who isn't going to trample on religious freedom, and someone who isn't pandering to xenophobia. But let's start with the first three and work from there.

Seriously, I don't even know what party to start in. Y'all sit here talking politics all the time. Any help?

 

i don't have exactly the same top three priorities, but i feel like i'm in the same boat in terms of having no friggin clue who i can support..

 

Sounds like it's pretty much a coin flip between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders for you.

 

Feels like every time someone says something I like, they go on to say three things I hate

 

Gary Johnson.

 

You would like Jim Webb.

 

I like a lot of what he says on foreign policy and the War on Drugs, but he's not pro-life, and I'm not sure if he's anything better than Rand Paul on structural inequality (note: this is a legit "I don't know," not a coy way of saying I don't like him).

 

I hadn't looked into him before, but you're right, I like a lot of what he says. But he's pro-choice, and being pro-life is probably a sine qua non for me right now. There are a lot of pro-life people I won't vote for, but I can't see myself voting for someone pro-choice.

 

Basically all structural inequality is due to government monopolies of power

 

There's no party for you right now, Tar. You are sincerely between the two main camps.

 

What a load of bull.

 

They're politicians and likely what they said you like is a lie or equivocation. Semantics is their magic.

 

Definitely a significant amount, but culturally ingrained tendencies can cause significant problems even without government support. There's a lot of reforming/scaling back government power that will do a lot of good, but sometimes the government needs to step in when the people are out of control (housing discrimination is a great example of this)

 

The biggest inequality is within education and the justice system.

 

There are a couple guys that I really believe are genuine (Sanders, Johnson, maybe Paul to some degree), but this is mostly right

 

But government is generally the cause of the lack of housing and insanely high housing cost through zoning and code laws.

 

That's kinda what I thought. I identify more with the Republicans because I'm pro-life and my family are Republicans, but they've been pissing me off as much as the Democrats for quite a while now.

Right now I can't even seem to find a third party. Libertarians don't recognize the cases (perhaps limited in number, but still there) where we need the government to step in, and the left-leaning third parties are always pro-choice.

 

Big government may well contribute to lots of housing problems. But big government wasn't responsible for the housing covenants of Jim Crow, and it isn't responsible for realtors who refuse to show certain houses/apartments to minority buyers/renters.

 

Seems like if that is a definite dealbreaker you would have to compromise somewhere else. Don't think there is a major candidate that fits the bill.

 

That you don't get it? That you can't fix that people flack to similar people?