My political beliefs and values

Liberal democracy, including free, fair, and competitive elections, freedom of the press, human rights protections, the ability to criticize the government without punishment or retribution, freedom of religion, freedom of association (e.g., the right to join a political party or an activist organization), the right to protest, and at least some degree of multiculturalism (I personally support a more robust multiculturalism, such as what Canadian liberals and progressives aspire to, but a more constrained version of multiculturalism might be sufficient to meet the typical definition of liberal democracy)

A mixed market economy, which is a category that includes a broad space of possible economic models, including, for example, both the U.S. system and more social democratic approaches to economic system-building such as the Nordic model

Conditional pacifism, also sometimes called contingent pacifism (as opposed to absolute pacifism), possibly also transformational pacificism

Social justice, including feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT equality

A strong welfare state and strong social welfare programs, including universal healthcare, access to education, childhood nutrition programs, and programs like Housing First

An empirical, analytical, and, inasmuch as possible, scientific approach to policy, including the wholehearted embrace of economics as a social science that has important things to tell us about how to set policy (this could possibly be called evidence-based policymaking, although I’m not committed to that term)

Green growth or sustainable development, i.e., an approach to environmentalism that believes that economic growth and poverty reduction are compatible with mitigating climate change and other environmental problems (conversely, strong opposition to degrowth, the belief that poverty is the lesser of two evils we must embrace to solve environmental problems)

Abundance liberalism (newer idea and less foundational than the preceding)

Sympathy or openness toward (as opposed to unreserved endorsement of) Thomas Piketty’s proposal for steeply progressive income, wealth, and inheritance taxes, which would cause a substantial redistribution of wealth

Some form of transhumanism, insofar as transhumanism can be considered a political view or politically relevant, e.g., through science funding or by maintaining that adults have the legal and moral right to biologically self-modify within the same sort of constraints that already exist for cosmetic or gender-affirming medical procedures

Openness to (without necessarily endorsing) new ideas for structural reform in economics and governance, including electoral reform (e.g., proportional representation, ranked choice voting), limited experiments in direct democracy (e.g., referendums or ballot initiatives where people vote directly on an issue) with potential further steps toward direct democracy if those experiments go well, examination of laws around political financing and lobbying, stakeholder governance or codetermination, and increased workplace democracy and reduced hierarchy in workplaces

Some form of optimism or hope, which, for me, in the way I mean it, is not a belief that things will automatically get better on their own, or that success is guaranteed, but a recognition that a lot of progress has been made in the past and a belief that future progress is possible if we make the right efforts (over the years, people have tried to come up with a term to signify this sort of perspective, including “agentic optimism”, “meliorism”, “active hope”, “definite optimism”, and “prescriptive optimism”); conversely, I am skeptical of nostalgia because I think that people typically overlook how troubled the past really was and how much improvement has really happened