“Hello!”

Hello! I’ve written a couple of guest posts with some preliminary thoughts on one of the early frontrunners for the GOP nomination, but this will serve as a more formal introduction.

I grew up in the Northeast and retain irrational pride for my dysfunctional former home-state, New Jersey. I currently reside in Oregon. I studied history as an undergraduate and continue to do (part time) in graduate school, so oftentimes, I find myself making strained historical analogies in my writing.

I’m a conservative and have been that way for a while, both dispositionally and policy-wise. I’m under the impression that Will Truman and the fine folks at this site were looking to add a conservative perspective or two, and they found me on Twitter (@therotund1b, which is a baseball-related thing from a long time ago). I’ve been writing at a personal blog for the last year or so mainly as a way to force myself to clarify my own thinking. I tend to try to write about politics and policy, mostly, but I also find myself sometimes writing about culture and religion.

To me, when conservativism is practiced right, it is a philosophy of humility. I try to retain that element when I write, though I often fail. I really find sources of disagreement interesting, though, so a lot of the time, the types of things I find myself exploring and writing about are ways to think about why we disagree and what we really disagree about. I like to think that understanding the people we disagree with will at least make those disagreements less hostile, if not less intense.

One of the real perks of this site is that it has a vibrant, thoughtful commenting community (words that are rarely spoken on the Internet!). So I plan to mine those for ideas, and I’ll probably drop in on various threads periodically.

Thanks for reading!