1988 was the first year I could vote in an election, and it was a pretty important one. George Bush (the elder) was running against Mike Dukakis. I was doing temp work for a Department of Defense contractor, and everyone in the office told me that Bush was the right choice. Personally, I disliked both candidates.

My officemate had a transistor radio that was tuned in to talk radio, and I heard a guy named Ron Paul talk. He was the candidate for another party called the Libertarian Party, which espoused ideas that I thought made a lot of sense: Limited government and greater individual freedom were the cornerstones of the Libertarian philosophy. So I voted for him.

My coworkers warned me that I’d be throwing my vote away on a third-party that had no chance of winning, but I explained to them that I felt voting with my conscience was the only logical and appropriate choice.

To be frank, I voted Libertarian for every presidential candidate straight through to 2008, when I voted for Barack Obama – mainly because I wanted to make sure that John McCain wouldn’t win. I knew full well that my own “blue” state had no chance of casting its Electoral College votes for anyone but Obama, but for me, it was a personal referendum against the Republican party.

Anyway, things have changed a lot in the 22 years since I became of voting age, and I’ve changed a lot. I’ve gotten married, had three kids, gone through two major careers, and find myself at the age of 40 in a very different place, and a very different mindset, than when I was 18. And some of the ideas that made sense to me as a young man don’t make as much sense to me as they did then.

Certainly, I still believe that government regulation should be limited in some areas where it is too invasive today, and I still believe that personal freedom is crucial. But in other areas, like universal health care, for example, I’m squarely in the Democratic camp. Yes, if anything, I’ve gotten more liberal as I’ve gotten older (disproving Winston Churchill’s supposition in the process).

One thing I can say for certain: The tone of American political discourse has changed dramatically, even in two decades. Certainly we’ve always had a tendency towards fractious, divisive politics in this country, but it’s gotten mean-spirited and cold-hearted in a way that I find very unpleasant.

There’s a callousness to the way that conservative (and, to an extent libertarian) politics has evolved to a level of greed and selfishness that’s almost unconscionable.

I think it’s ironic. George W. Bush was first elected on a platform of “compassionate conservatism” – the idea that the government could be fiscally conservative while still demonstrating compassionate care for those in need. But in his eight years in office – really, after 9/11 – that philosophy was turned on its head, and what the modern Republican party has turned into has become something else entirely. Something ugly. Something hateful. Something bitter and angry. Something I don’t want anything to do with.

Where’s the Libertarian Party in all this? Well, Ron Paul’s still their poster boy, with his new manifesto, “End the Fed.” But I’m not buying what he’s selling, either.

A world in which we are self-reliant would be very different than the world we live in today, and I don’t necessarily think it would be better. One of the big reasons we changed from hunter-gatherers to farmers, the reasons why we built towns and cities, is because it helped us to pool resources that we would have spent too much time and effort trying to gather by ourselves.

People need help. People can’t do it on their own.