Why do some liberals become conservatives?
The intellectual transformation from left to right.
There are actually a lot of people who've made this transformation. The big question isn't why some become conservatives, but why don't the rest? Can't they grow up? Can't they take a serious look at liberalism and it's fruits?
My take: It's ego and self-image. Liberals have a lot of emotion tied up in a worldview in which they're the enlightened elite on a higher plane than the common swine they think most of their fellow citizens are. When you think you're on a higher plane how do you climb down from there?
by
Jean Kaufman
March 1, 2013 - 12:13 am
These days it may seem as though the entire nation is moving ever leftward. But on the personal level it’s actually much more usual for political change to go in the opposite direction: from left to right.
It’s not that uncommon an event, either — in fact, there’s a whole literature of political memoir written by left-to-right changers (such as David Horowitz and Norman Podhoretz, to name just two).
One changer closer to home is founder and former CEO of PJ Media Roger L. Simon, who talked about his own story in a recent speech in which he admitted that, despite his having written a book about his change experience, the how and why of political change is still a mystery to him.
Political change is something I’ve thought about long and hard because it happened to me, too, about ten years ago. In fact, struggling to understand and explain that change was one of the things that first drew me to blogs and blogging. I agree with Roger Simon that the vast majority of people are exceedingly reluctant to change their political beliefs and identification, and that was my experience, too; in fact, I’ve titled my own change story “A mind is a difficult thing to change.”
It’s not easy to come up with universals, because change stories differ in their personal details: fast or slow; solitary or interactive; sparked by things heard, seen, read, or personally experienced. But over the years that I’ve been contemplating my own story and listening to or reading those of others, I’ve come to see some patterns.
Rarely, if ever, are prospective changers actually seeking change. In fact their previous political positions on the left may be quite firmly and strongly held, and they would probably consider anyone quite mad who had the audacity to inform them of the transformation about to take place.
But although they may not be interested in change, change is interested in them. It usually begins with something external, some new information encountered seemingly by accident, something that starts to bug the person because it contradicts or doesn’t fit easily into his or her pre-existing framework. It’s like a buzzing fly that won’t quit and can’t be ignored. It causes discomfort, a sense of unease, and the disequilibrium that comes from the dilemma known as cognitive dissonance.
It’s such an unpleasant experience that people are usually eager to resolve it. How they do that is one point at which changers split off from non-changers. The latter group, if faced with that very same information, might just swat that fly — that is, in their discomfort at the knowledge that seems incongruous with their previous beliefs, they would either discredit the new information, minimize it, rationalize it, or shut it out entirely, thus ending the discomfort and the dilemma.
But those who ultimately end up as changers can’t seem to put it away that easily. For them, something once seen cannot be unseen. Perhaps they have a different habit of mind to begin with, one more accustomed to challenging its own beliefs and assumptions, one more uncomfortable with contradictions.
The process can become even more intense if the experience is a personal one in the first place. Roger Simon’s slow decades-long change, for example, began with trips to China and the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s, where he witnessed some disturbing things he found he couldn’t forget or explain away. David Horowitz discovered that a friend of his whom he’d sent to work as a bookkeeper for the Black Panthers had been murdered by them and the crime was covered up by the left. These are personal experiences of a dramatic sort, especially Horowitz’s. They act as catalysts to send the person on a path to a series of discoveries, although the initial experience doesn’t need to be so extreme to spark the same process.
The whole thing rarely happens overnight, although it can. It resembles tearing down a structure and building a new one brick by brick. The final collapse of the first building tends to be the quickest part, with the changer now perceiving that structure as having been a house of cards, essentially fragile, although previously the person had been unaware of that fact.
Another less dramatic way a change experience can begin is with the perception that the mainstream media has lied about something. It can even be something that seems quite small and unimportant by itself, but then it happens again, and again, and a pattern begins to emerge. This learning usually also comes about by accident. For example, a person might happen across the original of a speech from which a truncated quote had been taken, and suddenly realize that the quote was probably edited that way in order to purposely mislead. The advent of the internet has increased the opportunities for this sort of discovery, because it’s much easier to compare the two texts.
Again, the watershed moment is not usually the event itself, but the person’s reaction to it. Some people resolve the discrepancy by ignoring it with a shrug, and perhaps the thought, “Oh, everybody in the media lies all the time, the right even more than the left.” Or it’s dismissed with the rationalization that it’s not really a lie because a much more important truth is being told in the process. Or it can be justified with an ends/means calculation: lying in a good cause is okay. In the future, such a person might even try to avoid going to the source of quotes, in order to avoid encountering similar discrepancies that might lead to more cognitive dissonance that could lead to greater unease.
But people who end up becoming changers are much more likely to vow to get to the bottom of it and learn more, plunging ahead with research. People who do so often discover as time goes on that a great deal of what they thought they knew is actually false.
I know that place; I’ve been there. It is a profoundly disorienting time, and many and even perhaps most people would do almost anything to avoid it. But those who are constructed a certain way cannot help themselves, because the discrepancy gnaws away at them. Next time they see something – another quote, for example — that reflects badly on someone on the right, they are driven to check out its veracity by looking at the original text and its context. And of course they also check out similar stories in the press on the right, hoping to find similar distortions about the left, so it can all seem evenhanded. But if they are persistent, over time they discover the troubling fact that it’s not quite equal: generally there are more distortions (and more egregious ones) made by the left.
At some point changers usually become hungry for knowledge. Reading more and more writers on the right (sometimes for the first time), and/or talking to more people on the right, they discover a number of simpatico souls where they had thought there would be none. Ultimately, they find a coherent philosophy and their place in it. It takes a while, often quite a while, to accept that one is now a Republican or a conservative or a libertarian or a classical liberal or whatever one ends up calling oneself. Some never do; Zell Miller, who changed his mind but never could bring himself to switch his party affiliation, likened party identification to a birthmark.
And finally, of course, there are the reactions of others. Most people who’ve lived their lives in a liberal bubble have little awareness of the invective hurled at those who change– — until they become one of those people themselves. And even if they were previously aware of it, they probably remain sanguine in the notion that it won’t happen to them, because, after all, they’re talking to liberals who’ve been their friends for years.
So it is usually a tremendous shock when they have their first coming-out discussion. Even if voiced only tentatively, their departure from the liberal line is often met with tremendous hostility. Not from everyone, of course. But a large percentage of the people they now encounter, including friends and family, will express anger and contempt.
Being on the receiving end of this experience can’t help but be profoundly disturbing. Perhaps it even drives some people under cover, and or back into the liberal fold. But for most, it seems there is no turning back, because — as a fortune cookie I got a few years ago succinctly put it — “one’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
pjmedia.com
Mojave Mark
Every conservative I know who used to be a lib (I was a teenage democrat) shares the common trait of honesty. The more honest you are, the harder it is to swallow leftism.
Curt A
It's easy to understand why. They have to start paying their own bills.
Allston
I actually did exactly that. When I was first able to, I registered as Democrat and voted for Carter in '76. My parents were die-hard "D," as were my older brothers and sister. It seemed natural, all of the kumbayaa and good times from Uncle Sugar. Sounded great.
Shortly thereafter, events led me to understand, "what the *hell* did I just do?!" I had just assisted in voting a lame, barely competent ideologue to the White House, one who was clearly out of his depth.
In particular, it was my decision to join the military that led me to a big "C." Many of my relatives served quite honorably, and of course as kids we were all led to understand this was a viable option for a directionless young man.
And that's when my "peers" (loosely speaking) from High School (in a *very* Liberal Suburb just... (show more)
I actually did exactly that. When I was first able to, I registered as Democrat and voted for Carter in '76. My parents were die-hard "D," as were my older brothers and sister. It seemed natural, all of the kumbayaa and good times from Uncle Sugar. Sounded great.
Shortly thereafter, events led me to understand, "what the *hell* did I just do?!" I had just assisted in voting a lame, barely competent ideologue to the White House, one who was clearly out of his depth.
In particular, it was my decision to join the military that led me to a big "C." Many of my relatives served quite honorably, and of course as kids we were all led to understand this was a viable option for a directionless young man.
And that's when my "peers" (loosely speaking) from High School (in a *very* Liberal Suburb just outside of Boston) began to speak to me as if I had announced I would be a toothless hillbilly as my life's choice and had just gnawed the head off of a live infant right in front of them. The sheer nasty attitude was oppressive.
In fact, it was the same stuff you hear Radical Liberals say today. Exactly the same.
So I engaged in some self-analysis and, as you say, began to read. And I discovered that as a class of people, Democrats really stood for nothing. They were, and are, nothing more than cynical opportunists who cared not one whit about me or mine. End of story, I re-registered and never looked back.
In the final analysis, I made the proper choice. I know who I am and what I stand for. God, duty, honor, country. Respect. Decency. Hard work with the rewards it brings you.
Had I remained a Democrat and fully bought into it all, I would have likely have rejected God; that Duty is a fool's errand; that our Country is racist and misogynist and damned near the "new" Nazis; Respect and Decency are provisional if it serves your base purposes. And hard work? Why bother, when we clearly all "owe" everyone else something?
I ask Democrats on occasion, "what do you stand for, exactly?" The responses are always fascinating, because they never include actual core values, it's virtually always a list of Liberal talking points. Cheap, hollow, devoid of meaning; the cause du jour.
I don't hate Democrats, I rather pity them. What kind of a life is it, to believe in nothing save what your handlers tell you to?
Anyways, 'nuff said. Apologies for the extended ramble. (show less)
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Harald
I suspect that many liberals convert after they get real jobs and figure out that other people are mooching off their honest labor.
jmarie
My dad used to say that liberals were just conservatives who hadn't been mugged yet.
artghost
I suspect that some people convert after observing that liberals, when debating any topic under any circumstance with conservatives, very often assail their opponent with personal insults rather than deal with particulars. This happens all the time here on PJM in the comments section. A conservative will make a thoughtful comment only to be attacked on a very personal level by a lefty whose only arguement is invective. That's not a very fruitful debate style.
elarga
This kind of political shift is comparable to a religious conversion; both are conversion experiences with I think similar stages. I have passed through both, and of course the passage from agnostic to religious is fully compatible with the passage from left to right. A key public event in my political conversion: the image of the NY firefighters climbing those stairs on 9/11. It was a like a punch in the jaw to me.
Fail Burton
When it comes to the stereotypical politically correct progressive liberal, this is an easy call: the difference between them and a generic pragmatic conservative is one of particulars, or identity, vs. principle.
This is the source of the cognitive dissonance you mention. Something seems out of sorts, and it is. It's a common human failing, to over-identify with an identity, especially if it's a "side," and throw principle to the wayside.
The reason we got into Viet Nam and failed to see the horror of what we were doing was because the men who put us there were from the generation of WW II. We were on the side of right. We were America, we could do no wrong. Well, yes we could.
Once people started taking a hard look at what we were doing in Viet Nam rather than who was doing it, we saw ourselves in an ugly mirror, and we didn't like it.
So, liberals are addicted to identity. Rather than using principles to distribute morality, spirituality, sophistication, etc., they use identity. To a certain extent, this is a normal thing to do. We are raised on films and books loaded with such things.
Where liberals go off the rails is they hideously exaggerate these stereotypes and root them in the real world. They build narratives based on pathology and persecution. So, Latina's become "wise," blacks are incapable of racism, gays of injustice and on and on. Turbans, skin, gender, etc. rule. How many times have you seen an artist's website and there's some big mandala with audio chants? Ever see baseball caps? No. They convey dumbness. In fact, they don't.
This is how an inveterate racist with at once overblown and narrow and provincial world views and feelings of persecution and self-righteousness can associate himself with hate speech, indulge in it himself, and get millions of liberals to elect him into the Presidency of the United States.
Principles and particulars. Obama's 2007 speech at Hampton U shares no particulars with a Nuremberg Rally speech. For the Nazis the particulars are Jews, for Obama whites.
But the intellectual and philosophical space, the principle, are identical. Hate. Hate by identity, hate by ethnicity. With Obama, MLK becomes twisted and tortured into the very racism they fought. The absurd paraoia of the black academic and political Left with their New Jim Crow and white privilege is their Viet Nam.
There's the rub, the whole ball of wax, and your little dog too.
It's how GLAAD can be bigots, the NAACP racists, feminists discriminate, artists do Goebbel's work and generally how madness, failure and mayhem can spread throughout a society and even destroy it. Politically correct identity politics is the single greatest danger this country has faced since WW II. (show less)
cfbleachers
It's funny. I didn't change on some issues. I am still "live and let live" socially.
But...
1)The information stream is completely corrupted and a farce;
2) Stanley Kurtz' work sealed it for me as to how severe it was;
3) Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi and George Soros are not trifling matters;
4) Forcing us to buy government goods and services, attacking the Catholic Church's tenets, proposing the "Fairness Doctrine", refusing to submit a budget, threatening anyone who questions them, taking away gun rights, drone attacks on citizens...is it ok to think we've passed the danger zone yet?
I didn't change.
My country did. |
