I'm an old school Southern Democrat. I'm Progressive and extremely to the left of modern Democrats. I believe that everyone is entitled to a standard of living and that includes a home and a mode of transportation and a mode of communication and a way to provide for themselves. I hate how the New Southern vision was sabotaged by Reagan and the Republican Party. We could've had a more inclusive and diverse South. I'm from the Gulf Coast. When I was growing up the Gulf Coast was the last bastion of Southern Democratic dominance. Republicans have taken over our area and corrupted the minds of our people. Southern Democrats are often seen as a monolith but just like the overall Democratic Party it was a big tent. I believe we can revive the Progressive tradition in the South but it's going to take effort.
The funny thing is that the people I mentioned actually are coherent. Each of them was concerned with human liberation, social transformation and breaking people out of systems they believed were holding humanity back.
That makes perfect sense to me as a Creole Gulf Coast Southerner with an old-school intellectual outlook. My influences don't have to belong to the same modern political faction to be connected. I’m interested in the underlying ideas, not in forcing every thinker into a contemporary ideological box. I’m Creole from the Gulf Coast, where the old social and cultural world was a lot more mixed and culturally distinct than the modern American South. In some ways, parts of the Gulf Coast historically had more in common with the kind of multicultural, fluid society you’d associate with Brazil than with the rigid categories people project onto the South today.
So yes, my worldview is eclectic. It’s Southern, Creole, historically minded, populist, anti-capitalist and full of influences that don't fit neatly into modern left/right boxes. That isn't a contradiction. That's the point.