By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Perhaps because I write a column, I am regularly asked—or told—what my political orientation is. It happens more frequently during election season.

I’m always at a loss for an answer. Taking on a term like “conservative,” “liberal,” or “progressive” feels like putting on a rigid and grossly ill-fitting suit that is painful to wear, disfigures appearance, and distorts movement.

Many of my core values were considered conservative when I was growing up. I believe in defending the integrity of families and communities. I believe in the virtues of hard work and self-reliance. I believe that government should not spend money that it doesn’t have or isn’t committed to raising in the foreseeable future.

For seven years I led an economic development organization in a small city that was the largest producer of frozen fruits and vegetables in the U.S. Its politics were imbued with a conservatism derived from the surrounding farm families’ way of life. If those families had a year of crop loss, they would not be able to survive many more. That reality produced a sober prudence about financial management and policy change that I respected and recognized as what being “conservative” meant to many Americans of that era.

But this is a different era. Self-described conservatives, liberals, and sometimes progressives have collaborated to create policies that do damage to the values I hold dear, while repudiating their stated political philosophies.

The real-world policies that each group advocates have often been inconsistent and contradictory, based more on that group’s particularistic interests than on ideological consistency. But those contradictions have proliferated.

Conservatives opposed single-payer healthcare, even though it would be the least costly system that keeps healthcare enterprises privately owned—far less expensive than “Obamacare,” a Frankenstein system invented by the Republicans who now demonize it.

They insist that government should tax and spend as little as possible, but Ronald Reagan, their poster president, doubled the debt that the nation had previously taken 200 years to accumulate. The elder Bush’s administration tripled it, and Bush Jr. outspent both.

Conservatives argue that there is a “right-to-life” for the unborn, but favor the death penalty. They oppose killing fetuses, but resist programs to reduce our nation’s shameful infant mortality rate.

They rage against government infringement on individual freedoms. Yet they prosecute individuals for victimless crimes and supported the Patriot Act, which authorized extra-judicial searches into Americans’ communications and private affairs.

Conservatives condemn foreign entanglements, but can’t seem to resist wars that wreck our nation’s reputation, multiply our enemies, savage our fiscal health, and do lasting harm to our military, our combatants, and their families.

Meanwhile liberals deplored poverty while supporting welfare programs that encouraged dependence and discouraged entrepreneurship. They were all for minority advancement, but instituted busing regimes that damaged the communities that nurture minority children.

Purporting to be champions of labor and friends to the world’s poor, liberals gave us the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. Together, they destroyed living-wage jobs in the U.S., increased misery among the world’s poor, and brought a new wave of illegal immigration.

Then liberals helped lock in domestic poverty. They presided over the destruction of a deeply dysfunctional welfare system without replacing it with meaningful incentives and supports for self-reliance and self-development, thereby trapping people in a lifetime of working poverty.

Liberals decry concentrated economic power. But it was liberals who led the repeal of Glass Steagall and the other financial industry regulations that had protected Americans from the reckless greed that melted down the world economy in 2007-2008.

We don’t have to indulge conspiracy theories to see whose interests are most consistently served by politicians’ departures from their stated philosophies. Whether deregulating the financial sector, feeding the war machine, genuflecting to pharmaceutical and insurance cartels, building a prison gulag, or undermining fair trade, the richest get richer when liberals and conservatives betray their stated principles.

And concentrated wealth has changed our world so much that the historical assumptions embedded in conservatism, liberalism, and progressivism can no longer accommodate reality.

We are blessed with the democracy and protections provided by our Constitution. But those who wrote it knew no concentrated power, other than the state and a faded aristocracy.

They did not know that the very economic system that spawned democracy, individual freedom, and increased prosperity contained internal dynamics that would, over the centuries, threaten each of those values.

I’ve written about those dynamics in other columns. Their net effect is ever increasing concentrations of corporate power.

Most of conservatives’ and liberals’ betrayals of principles may be traced to moneyed interests’ agendas, or the need to from coalitions with hateful constituencies to implement those agendas.

So I’ve come to believe that that defending the values that I hold dear and that were once considered conservative requires transforming our institutions in ways that many—including a recent presidential candidate—would call “socialist.”

This was the dilemma faced by those who led the peasant wars of the 20^th Century. Western powers never understood that the revolutions in China, Mexico, Algeria, Cuba, and Viet Nam were essentially conservative movements.

The changes brought when western economic interests penetrated those countries disintegrated the bonds holding together family, community, and society. Their leaders had to make a choice. Those who chose to defend the traditional rights and obligations eventually lost power to those who chose to become agents of capital. For the patriots, socialism became a way to restore the integrity of their family and community structures.

What goes around, comes around. More and more Americans are now enduring economic hardship and the disintegration of their own families and communities. And few politicians who describe themselves as “conservative,” “liberal,” or “progressive” are offering solutions that they, or I, find compelling.

So ultimately, I really don’t have a name for myself when I’m asked my political orientation. “Bill” will suffice. And if you want to know what I believe, let’s have a conversation.