What I used to think of Republicans
Here’s Bookworm, writing a month ago in response to a question about what she used to believe about Republicans:
He was curious as to what I believed.
My answer was a simple one: “When I was a college Democrat, I believed that Republicans are evil people who hate blacks, children and poor people, who want to force everyone to convert to Christianity, and who want to weaponize America to take over the world.” In other words, my understanding of my ideology was simply that I, as a Democrat, existed to thwart evil Republicans. By voting straight down the “D” column on my ballot, I was protecting blacks, children and poor people, and keeping the proselytizers from my state house.
I believed all of this absolutely. I was unconcerned about more sophisticated issues of limited government; the moral rot of welfare; the economic damage wrought by government’s heavy hand in the marketplace; the genuine threat totalitarianism posed to world stability and American security; the danger of allowing government to pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens through taxation, spending, legislation and police action; etc.
All I knew was that Republicans were evil, and I was not evil. They hated people, and I wanted people to do well. Whatever they were for, I was against it.
Bookworm, of course, has since changed her point of view. But the question interested me: what did I used to think about Republicans? I’m older than Bookworm, and so not only do I have to think back further to come up with my childhood and young-adulthood memories, but the memories are of a different era, before liberalism had quite taken over so forcefully in the school system.
I never could have believed that Republicans hated blacks, for example, because I had personal memories of the 50s and very early 60s in the South, and I knew that it was Democrats who had stood in the way of civil rights there. Who could forget Orville Faubus or George Wallace? And who didn’t know they were Democrats? It was almost unavoidable to be aware of that, if you followed politics at all. So revisionist history about noble Democrats and racist Republicans could not touch me.
Likewise, I had been a child during the lengthy (seemingly interminable, at the time) presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. His election campaign slogan was “I Like Ike,” and everybody did. It was nearly impossible to dislike him, or think of him as evil, even if you were a liberal Democrat, as were my “All the Way With Adlai” parents. He was a war hero, for starters. And he seemed a genial, non-extreme sort of president.
What’s more, I grew up in a part of New York that had a fair number of Republicans (for New York, anyway), and I knew some of them. They were just—well, they were just people. So there was really never any chance of demonizing Republicans in general. Maybe the John Birchers, whoever they were.
I also watched the decidedly odd Bill Buckley on TV and had to admit he was an intelligent sort, and humorous, too. It’s true that when Barry Goldwater conservatives started to take charge of the Republican Party it was a new breed of cat, and one with whom I disagreed at the time (I was still pretty young). But I never thought he wasn’t motivated by a sincere belief in what he was advocating, nor did I think he hated anybody.
At worst, I thought he—and other conservatives—just didn’t care all that much about poor people. I thought the worst they were was selfish and perhaps mean, rather than evil. But that was “mean” in the way of tough, hard parents who wanted their children to struggle and learn things on their own. As a child, I had no sympathy with that—I wanted things done for me! I wanted to be coddled! But at least I understood that it could be motivated by what we would now call tough love, rather than hatred.
Maybe I’m whitewashing the past. Maybe I was more intolerant and narrow-minded than I care to remember. But I don’t think so. Half the time I hadn’t a clue what party my friends belonged to, and didn’t care; we simply didn’t talk politics as a rule. In fact, I distinctly recall that when Clinton was running, I was very surprised to be part of a group conversation among about ten of my friends and to learn that all of them were Clinton supporters and Democrats. Until then, I’d had no idea.
Never such innocence again.
Where in NY? I grew up near Rochester.
We conservatives in NY are stuck with a lunatic candidate as our hope for governor. Heck of a choice. A destructive establishment liberal who claims to be a crusader against malfeasance or a loony guy from Buffalo. Sigh.
I had a similar experience.
While never a leftist or a Democrat, I had one parent (my father) who was a solid Republican, and all he ever talked about was taxes, taxes, taxes; spending, spending, spending. And lots of talk of the horrendous experience of Jimmy Carter’s America. Furthermore, he was (and remains) a generous donor to UNCF, so no way I could think of him as a racist.
On the other hand, my liberal mother’s side of the family was more bookish (like me), so I got on better with them, and had better intellectual discussions. Yet whenever politics came up, their liberalism always struck me as shallow and reflexive. It boiled down to the standard mantra, which there’s no reason to repeat. But I knew my dad, and all of his circle of friends and co-workers, most of whom were Republicans too (these were businessmen in the Reagan era), and the mantra didn’t fit.
So, I split the difference by saying to hell with it all and becoming non- or anti-political. I tried to frame my views in such a way that I could converse non-abrasively with both sides of my family, both intense about their political views. That resulted, as I mentioned in a previous post, in a kind of libertarian anarchism, with an emphasis on anarchism. This always works when one is trying to thread the needle – with conservatives you can highlight your skepticism of fiscal liberalism; with liberals you can highlight your skepticism of social conservatism.
I didn’t believe any of it – I didn’t believe anything. I guess it’s only noteworthy because I didn’t go from left to right but more from nihilism to conservatism. And I was a consistent nihilist – I hated liberals equally with conservatives, because I just assumed they were all suckers. Both sides like to talk about the other side being suckers – so I could say to my grandmother, “Jerry Fallwell and his followers are suckers!,” and to my father, “Bill Clinton and his followers are suckers!” Politics as family management; go figure.
So much being true, I, like neoneocon, didn’t have any particularly evident beliefs about conservatives being somehow peculiarly venal and evil. And I have to say, even in those nihilist days, the sanctimony of PC and the fact that it was always liberals talking that nonsense really pissed me off. I liked the way Reagan talked to me; I hated the way Clinton talked to me. So maybe the “inner righty” was always there.
In sum, I never thought I would become a conservative, but I knew I would never become a liberal.
Ah, I just remembered a quote from Trey Parker, I think (one of the pair who created South Park), that captures in a typically acerbic way what I felt:
“I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals.”
Of course, when I admitted I had become a conservative I had to revise the first part of that statement. Now I sound like Al Franken’s Pat – “I’m a conservative, and I’m a good person, and gosh darnit, people like me!” 🙂
My mother was a Democrat. My father said he registered as a Republican because the Democrats in town had dominated for years and were doing a poor job. [Corruption was not the issue in our small town.] My father voted Republican on the local level, and mostly Democrat on the national and statewide level. His Presidential votes included both Eisenhower and Norman Thomas [1948], in addition to Democrats. [Is that eclectic or incoherent? Better Thomas than Wallace.] Other family friends were Republicans who voted so on both the local, state, and national level. A town official and also a Republican was so highly regarded that he nearly always ran unopposed in the 30 years for the same poorly paid position his father held down for 40 years previously. A widow of a Republican governor lived in town, so it was difficult to associate EVIL with a kindly grandmother type.
Like Neo, I grew up when Jim Crow had deep roots in the Democratic Party, so I found it difficult to associate Republicans with racism. A further reason I found it difficult to associate Republicans with racism was my family tree. The slave owning and segregationist side was Democrat. There must have been some shame about the slave owning, because I didn’t find out about it until I was 20 years old. On the other side of the family- the Republican side- both my grandmother and my grandfather had family members who had taken steps to advance racial justice. One paid with his life. These steps to advance racial justice were noted in the family history my grandmother compiled before Brown V. Board of Education, at a time when it wasn’t as “hip” to celebrate them as it is today.
Nixon and Watergate is probably where the EVIL REPUBLICANS theme gained traction. I had issues with the religious right. It took me decades to decide that I could more easily live with the religious right than I could live with the Politically Correct.
My last Presidential vote for a Democrat was Carter in 1976, though most of my votes until 2004 were for Independents.
What’s more, I grew up in a part of New York that had a fair number of Republicans (for New York, anyway), and I knew some of them. They were just–well, they were just people.
You’d have needed the special glasses (like in John Carpenter’s “They Live”) to be able to see our horns.
🙂
Jeb…
if they wanted they could make cuomo look even LOONIER… its the fact that the newspapers here and news try to pick winners…
think of the craziest thing that he has done…
then think to the craziest things any of the Cuomo family holding the same seats cross family generations… (along with the Vallones)
it was interesting to see the advert this morning against paladino…
Mario Matthew Cuomo was a biggie in ny who rose up from an immigrant itallian family and cut his chops basically fighting socialist causes disguised as other social issue solutions
Andrew Cuomo is interesting… like peter Vallone, he is under the shadow of a established father.
most dont remember that he is or rather WAS a Kennedy Family member… 🙂
he married Mary Kerry Kennedy, seventh of the eleven children of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy.
interesting how the Kennedy clan married to make power the way old kings and aristocrats did…
his son Chris Cuomo, is a journalist
his Daughter, Maria Cuomo Cole, is married to Kenneth Cole the designer
[if you dig, you will find that there is a hidden and denied American aristocracy behind all this change to oligarchy]
now remember, it was ted Kennedy who approached the soviet KGB for advice on how to beat Ronald Reagan!!!!!!!
just all these ties to aristocracy and all that connection to certain lines of money is enough to write him off in a sane electorate.
if that isnt enough, then go through the records of the legal firm that cuomo works for…
remember Wilkie? lend lease? FDR? THAT legal firm
and what does that have to do with tea in China?
well, this is the firm that represents and was big with a company called Shearson Lehman (Lehman brothers)
and if you know HOW lehman brothers was founded, you can tell why they wanted them out.
For its first eight decades, the firm operated independently and merged with a number of Wall Street’s most venerable securities firms including Hayden Stone & Co. and Loeb Rhoades & Co.. In 1981, Shearson was acquired by American Express and operated as a subsidiary of the financial services company before being merged with Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in 1984 and E.F. Hutton & Co. in 1988.
shearson was married to Flora Josephine Shea… Shea stadium ring a bell? its now citi field, no?
and shearsons company which became leahman brothers, who then was spun off when lehman collapsed and was picked up by CITI bank…
so the family assets are back in the family 🙂
oh…
i forgot to mention… that one of Cuomo’s law firms largest customer is BLOOMBERG LP (limited partnership)….
Now, why dont the news point out this stuff about Cuomo?
care to connect them to Barney, and others?
You will find a common thread in this is that its the Children of the self made making revolution
Compare
Cuomo Sr to Cuomo the son
Bush Sr to Bush the son
Thomas G. Ayers was a self made man at commonwealth edison… his son bill Ayers…
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” FDR
its interesting to take a look and see these relationships…
but my posts are way too long…
and there is way too much we have forgotten to our peril.
i also forgot to mention that Cuomo is part of the Liberal Party of New York…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_%28New_York_State%29
so again… big finance, connections around the globe, and big time communist origins..
which is why i brought up wilkie, the wobblies, and all this missing history.
now George Sylvester Counts is very interesting, as it was him and the communist spy DEWEY the father of modern education, with Bella Dodd that reformed our school system into a progressive hell.
An early proponent of the progressive education movement of John Dewey, Counts became its leading critic affiliated with the school of Social Reconstructionism in education. Counts is credited for influencing several subsequent theories, particularly critical pedagogy. Counts wrote dozens of important papers and 29 books about education. He was also highly active in politics as a leading advocate of teachers’ unions, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the founder of the New York State Liberal Party, and as a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
oh no.. and that leads up back to the AFT..
who then implemented the soviet/franfurt school stuff on critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is an “educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action.”[1] Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements for social justice. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:
“Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.” (Empowering Education, 129)
so it was Cuomo and the related people before him who were big time progressives posing as anti commnists, and reforming our society…
if you dont know this history, you can easily vote for someone who is connected to all the stuff you dont like!!!
Critical pedagogy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy
Realizing one’s consciousness (“conscientization”) is a needed first step of “praxis,” which is defined as the power and know-how to take action against oppression while stressing the importance of liberating education. “Praxis involves engaging in a cycle of theory, application, evaluation, reflection, and then back to theory. Social transformation is the product of praxis at the collective level.”[3]
they basically took the feminista and soviet consciousness raising games to our schools, so they would “socialize”… look into Charles Hubbard Judd, John Dewey and Francis W. Parker
I should point out that Counts had tenure at Columbia at the new teachers college, which inculcated soviet educational methods and frankfurt school ideas (as thats where they ended up)
however, most argue with me…
and never look up my references, and such.
Cuomo is still listed as a member of this Party but runs under the Democrat ticket
While the Liberal Party generally endorsed Democratic candidates, this was not always the case. The Liberal Party supported Republicans such as John Lindsay and Rudy Giuliani for mayor of New York and Jacob Javits and Charles Goodell for U.S. Senator, and independents such as John B. Anderson for president. In 1969, Lindsay, the incumbent Republican Mayor of New York City, lost his own party’s primary but was reelected on the Liberal Party line alone. In 1977, after Mario Cuomo lost the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York to Ed Koch, the Liberal Party endorsed Cuomo, who proceeded to again lose narrowly in the general election. Liberal Party candidates played the role of spoiler by being the possible cause of the defeat of Democrat Frank D. O’Connor in the race for governor in 1966 by naming Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. as its candidate in the race against incumbent Nelson Rockefeller; and again in 1980 when it endorsed Javits (who had lost in the Republican primary for United States senator to Al D’Amato). In the general election for Senator in 1980, it was assumed that Javits took Jewish votes away from Elizabeth Holtzman, the Democratic candidate, as they both lost to D’Amato.
still think that he is telling the truth that he will clean up the dirt he has been making with his dad, the socialist, the unions, and all that for nearly a century?
by the way, all that and $2.25 gets me on the bus…
people who know so much and are self educated are not permitted to participate any more… so i am warehoused and moribund…
the only pdf for Counts work is not trusted to download. but you can read related stuff…
A new Social Order…
http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_196912_ether.pdf
Social Reconstruction Curriculum and Technology Education
scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/v3n2/pdf/zuga.pdf
What Price Uniformity? [Human Events]
cumulus.hillsdale.edu/buckley/Standard/downloads/originals/whatpriceuniformitydotpdf_9500_buckleypublicationsbyyear1952articles/WhatPriceUniformity.pdf
Preparing educational leaders to “build a new social order” for social justice and democratic community
http://www.uc.edu/urbanleadership/journal_pdf/allen,_louise_-_final.pdf
and if you have a lot of money to spend..
you can read things like Havelocks change agent manual.
from iserbyt.. (she served during reagan, then was removed)
doesnt sound so crazy does it?
and if you look at the work from Counts, you find out that the feminists and other popular fronts were key in remolding not only the school but our social arrangements..
[with wealth redistribution, feminism, abortion, end of life, and all that increasing the removal of the smarter race groups in the general population. when you read these obscure policy papers its pretty clear and laid out, only those who are on the outside believe differenly because they use feelings to decide. and their horror prevents them]
it would take years of non stop reading to just read a part of what i have read over the past 40 years (as i dont sleep much and remember almost everything i read)
I am happily far removed from NYS, fleeing it southward at age 25, where I’ve remained, while Upstate sank ever lower. The depth of the decline is terrible. WNY used to be lovely, but then the Dems took over….
I’d vote for Paladino in a heartbeat
Born in ’67, I was at the impressionable age of 9-10 years old during the year-long celebration of the bicentenniel. It left an impression and inspired an interest in history, especially the colonial and early-republic eras. Forwarned and forarmed with the glorious truth about the American Revolution, surviving four years in Ann Arbor, with its cadre of fellow travelers and useful idiots, was not difficult psycologically but did have a social price.
I went to a parochial HS, and my most impressive teachers were Boston Irish nuns. The Kennedy election was a hot topic my freshman year. Then the Jackie glamour and the White House tour, plus the Dem’s interest in the civil rights movement, put me in the D column. At college, the only people not following the civil rights and later Vietnam issues were a group of girls in my dorm who made the stereotype of country club Republican look nuanced. I think they spent half their college life worrying about Lenox vs Wedgewood for their bridal registration. I did not want to be like them. So I took off, party affiliation intact, to discover the world on my own. I never wanted a roomate because I liked being able to have all different sorts of people over for dinner without getting an up or down rating from someone sharing rent.
I guess through all this I had basically conservative values but saw the social problems that only Dems seemed to be addressing. And, to a small town girl like me, the likes of Cronkite were not to be questioned. I started to drift right when I observed the radical blacks and Welfare Rights Organization, the man-hating lesbians I encountered at a NOW convention, and the anti-Americanism of many Vietnam protesters. There followed a period when real life dominated politics. When I checked back in I decided the lefties were nuts. 9/11 sealed the deal.
Eugene Robinson believes something !
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/02/race_and_the_tea_partys_ire_107805.html
Let’s take back this country !!!! That’s the line that makes Eugene think we are racists…
From the Robinson article:
Mr. Robinson has apparently not seen other visible differences between Obama and other Presidents. I refer to graphs of deficits and federal spending.
Apparently irresponsible fiscal policy is genetic.
I read this several times, trying to remember myself what I believed. I gained wisdom and sanity long before I could vote, thankfully. I had been under the influence of socialism, to the point of insanity, until reading real history and understanding the cost of communal uniformity. But I finally remember what I thought.
I saw Republicans and conservatives as hypocritical Christian witch hunters, rich fat cats who were above the law, and any one with power. The rest of us, as I saw it, needed to take what they had and make things fair… distributing ill-gotten spoils. The workers needed fair wages, the poor needed to be tended, and those of no use needed to be ended.
All I can say is thank God for access to history books that had not been revised and an innate ability to look at people and see that they are evil. Look at Schumer, the Clintons, the Kennedys, and how they lived, closely, sometime. Between the reading and the examination of leftist politician and activists… I realized what I had been supporting was simply evil. It hurt, a lot. I also, then, realized that monsters are real, and I was becoming one of them. I even saw what I could gain. Teachers loved me, before I realized and changed, hated me after. I could have done almost anything, and they still would have loved me, if I was smart enough to get away with it. It is tempting. It is evil. It took years to rid myself of most of that poison, and yet the temptation is still there.
My mother was a thoroughly wonderful, intelligent, cultured person. By the time I was in jr. high I’d been to performances or movies of performances of numerous plays, operas, ballets.
By the time she was out of high school she spoke French, Latin, Greek.
She tried to raise me as a responsible American and stressed the importance of political involvement and voting.
She was candid about her earlier days. Once when we were out she ordered a shot of vodka and poured it in my beer because she wanted me to know the joys of spike beer.
I loved and respected her more than I have anyone since.
Yet, and yet, she thought Alger Hiss was a delightful, fey sort of intellectual who was besmirched by that awful Whittaker Chambers (that fat loudmouth sat on the stand and beat his breast) attributed the presence of evil in the world to Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon.
She was no political naif. I have a photo of her standing on the tarmac in front of a B-17 talking to Andrei Gromyko. She worked for Army Intelligence.
She was well off. While my father railed about the depression she told me anecdotes about her height-challenged mother sliding off her chair while searching with her to for the button that summoned the maid.
But she was a passionate Democrat. Because of that beautiful boy Hiss and that dark, sweaty Chambers and the man who was mean: Joe McCarthy.
My father may have had something to do with her longing for anything that wasn’t mean. But he, too, was a committed Democrat.
That’s a lot of programming to shed. It took me a near-fatal head injury. You were lucky to have achieved a little clarity by dint of intellect.
It’s tough to pshrink somebody else at a distance, and not much easier to pshrink ourselves. Too scary.
So my feeing about repubs was that they were slightly better-off than the dems in the aggregate and were more likely to belong to country clubs. When I got a bit older, I noticed they were about a bazillion percent better than the dems on national security. Dems seeming to either put party ahead of national security, or seek directly to damage national security, secure themselves in their party’s zeitgest and organization.
Then I noticed the infantilizing, dependency-making nature of welfare, and what seemed like deliberate attempts to make it more so when it wasn’t necessary. Sure, we’ll back you up with $30k of resources…as long as you don’t get caught committing honest employment.
With each discovery, the dems looked worse to me and the repubs who didn’t oppose them vigorously followed.
Republican meant country club, business, anti-taxers to me. Boring stuffy people in general, but they existed along a range from regular decent white-collar folks to lunatics. My hometown paper was the Manchester Union Leader, for those who know that history. Democrats I saw as more mixed. There were those hidebound slaveowners who got reelected for a million years in the South, or city politicians in corrupt places. But locally, they were just a little…ethnic, dear…wonderful people in their own way, but…well, Catholic. And often French (Canadian)…still working in the mills, poor things…but the Irish seemed to be turning out all right… Which was a relief to me, as I loved how Irish girls looked, and figured I could talk them out of being Catholic with my immense charm, if need be.
And then I discovered there were socialists who thought the others were all hopeless capitalists, and the moral superiority of getting to look down at everyone was delicious to me. McGovern was unfortunately too conservative, but it least it gave us a chance to strike down that horrible Nixon, who had secret plans to declare himself king, just you wait and see.
I think I’ve always been a conservative. I was a news junkie from the time I was a young teenager, I really became aware of things under Jimmy Carter.
My parents owned a Funeral Home which we also lived in. Because of Carters policies, we were required to keep our thermostat at 68 degrees. My dad applied for a waver since it was also a family dwelling, which was turned down. Sounds more like the soviet union than the United states, doesn’t it? We froze that hard winter of 78/79, heating a 4 story home can be difficult at 68 degrees. My parents had to rent generators to run the street lights during calling hours because the town turned them off at night. We weren’t comforted by that fact that Carter wore sweaters and kept the white house thermostat at 68 as well.
I read Newsweek, watched those Sunday morning shows and wondered why they hardly had any conservatives on. My first vote was Reagan. My thoughts about what I was didn’t really solidify until being stationed in Germany with my husband, I became friends with a German neighbor who liked to talk politics. She’s the first person that ever really challenged my thinking and I loved arguing with her, especially while drinking heavily as was the custom there! We still argue politics and she and her family are coming for thanksgiving, so we’ll have lots to talk about.
Ah, AVI, I come from one of those ethnic-Catholic factory worker families, a child of UAW Democrat parents, who always voted D. But they weren’t particularly liberal (at all, even), and while they didn’t care for what they believed the GOP stood for, they didn’t appear to think that Republicans were evil. Plutocratic, sure, and likely to favor the company rather than the worker, but not evil. They may have voted for Stevenson instead of Eisenhower, but they prayed for Ike when he suffered his heart attacks. He was “our” president. Even Nixon they didn’t hate. They just thought he was a crook. Turned out they were right about that.
As for myself, the Dems started to leave me sometime in college. After McGovern had become the Democratic nominee in ’72, the party seemed to lean more and more to the left. I didn’t. Congress’ refusal of aid to South Vietnam in its hour of need followed quickly by the Carter presidency made it impossible for me in good conscience to remain a Democratic voter. Reagan came along, and that was that. The last time I voted for a Democrat was 1976. I’m ashamed that I helped to elect Carter, but I haven’t made that mistake again. Never will.
I’m a lifelong Republican so I have no memories to share except Democrats always seemed to be the party of not wanting to do things for yourself and I have always always always resented being told what to do. Actually I take that back, I will accept advice if it’s proven to me that you know more than I do about whatever the question is. We all know government rarely knows anything. So no conundrum there.
I’m very late to this discussion, but I thought I would briefly summarize my story. I grew up in family that was very Republican. My parents were both Republicans, as were their parents. My maternal grandfather was retired military, and my mother was very pro-military. My father had served briefly in the military as a result of the draft, and eventually had a career as a civilian working for the military.
Up until my sophomore year in high school, I was also very conservative, but then I started getting involved with more academic things in school and reading more widely, and questioning more, and I noticed that the most intellectual folks in high school (and all of the “cool” teachers) seemed to be pretty liberal, so I decided I wanted to be more liberal. It was more aspirational than absolute, though, as I didn’t think much of the liberal politicians I was aware of. I convinced myself that most conservatives were not well-informed, and that they didn’t understand liberal arguments, and that they were too self-serving and just didn’t care enough about the less fortunate–all the typical stereotypes that I knew at some level weren’t true.
So then I went to college, where I hoped to gain the right sort of knowledge and perspective to convert to being an actual liberal and not just an aspirational one. This conversion never really occurred, so I settled on being a “moderate” who looked favorably on liberals. This lasted from college through graduate school, though the more time went by, and the more I observed, the harder it was for me to look favorably on them. After graduate school, during the Clinton administration, my ability to believe in either the good will or the good faith of liberals began to fall seriously by the wayside. As the years have gone by, I’ve pretty much returned to my conservative roots, though my dalliance with liberalism has left me with far too many friends and acquaintances with whom I have increasingly little in common.