Seen one way, Jesse S. Smith is a total nobody. His primary occupation currently revolves around housework and childcare, and he does not presently earn significant revenue from his various business activities.
Seen another way, Jesse S. Smith is a multimedia creative, business owner, and political activist.
Author. As of June 2023, Smith has published 11 books (4 of them under a pen name) through the publishing company he founded in 2003.
Technology. Smith began learning computer programming concepts in the mid-late 1980s, and has been formally building and working on websites, web servers, and mobile web apps for the past twenty years now.
Musician. Smith has written well over a hundred songs in a variety of genres, most of them a sort of funky blues-rock with a “modern vintage” feel, but also including a variety of other influences: from industrial, metal, and “trip-hop,” to jazz, folk, Celtic, and Middle Eastern sounds. Back in the day, Smith used to perform with several musical groups in the Portland area.
Political Philosophy. At the turn of the millennium Smith worked for a year as a teacher at an overseas language school, a pivotal life-altering experience. Returning from that year overseas, Smith began to write works of political philosophy. Smith published Principles for a Self-Directed Society in 2008, and released the Second Edition in 2020. Smith is currently working on the follow-up to that work, based on his experiences as a recent political candidate.
In 2022, Smith ran as the Democratic candidate for his local district’s seat in the Oregon State House of Representatives. In 2023, Smith ran for the local School Board: a race which, though nonpartisan, became far more contentious due to Smith’s personal convictions.
Smith believes in freedom and equality.
For his entire life, Smith has been a supporter of civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. In his early working life, Smith worked in manual labor positions, lived on minimum wage, and struggled to afford housing. This experience solidified Smith’s views on the importance of living wages. Smith has always considered himself a “progressive” in the style of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt: who was a champion of the working class, cracked down on the “robber barons,” backed progressive taxation policies, created the FDA (to protect our essential food and medicine from nasty toxins and quackery), and implemented wilderness conservation measures which have since been used to protect millions of acres of America’s beautiful natural land.
Smith is strongly opposed to both Fascism and Marxism. In the present polarized political climate, with extremism in the ascendant on both sides, this view has caused Smith to self-identify as a political moderate. Smith’s anti-Marxist views have placed him in direct confrontation with a powerful social movement that is currently very influential within the liberal “base” of the Democratic party: a movement which asserts that political moderation feeds “structural oppression.” The animosity engendered by the conflict between Smith’s views and the views of activists within his own party, has caused Smith to announce to a local group of political activists in May of 2023 that if he ever seeks political office again, he will not be running as a Democrat. Breaking up is hard to do; but perhaps it’s for the best. After all, Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican.