Well, you know my answer: constantly.
It’s been especially hard socially. Althouse writes:
It’s my hypothesis that people take the positions that are comfortable to them. Living in Madison, Wisconsin, I often wonder about the depth of the political opinions that seem to be everywhere. To express an opposing view would take some effort and maybe even injure your personal life, so it’s easiest to go along and get along, even to adopt the views of the people around you and to avoid exploring the possibility of thinking something else.
These beliefs, then, which seem so entrenched, are actually shallow beliefs. The behavior patterns and commitment to getting along may be deeply rooted, but the ideas themselves are fairly insubstantial. The engagement with politics itself is insubstantial. Why pay so much attention to politics when deviating from your comfortable point of view would only expose you to pain?
Ah, my favorite topic—political opinions, why we hold them, and what could make people change them. I agree that a great many people—perhaps the majority, and (from my observations, anyway) the majority of today’s liberals—take positions that are comfortable for them in the sense that they are surrounded by people who hold the same position. In other words, it’s very easy and pleasant to dance in a ring with the others.
But I would slightly amend Ann’s characterization of their beliefs as “shallow” and say that the amount and quality of the logical reasoning behind those beliefs may be shallow, but the beliefs themselves are extremely and deeply entrenched—and that’s because, as she writes, “The behavior patterns and commitment to getting along may be deeply rooted.” For people who hold beliefs mostly for that reason, it’s a very powerful motivation.
In other words, as in the old saying, it’s hard to reason people out of beliefs that they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. Sometimes these sorts of beliefs can be the most tenacious of all because they rest on emotion rather than reason, and abandoning them causes an extraordinary amount of stress and even a loss of identity for a while. And since I believe Ann is correct that most people are not interested in politics all that much—at least not in digging down deep into the details, rather than just the sound bites or the headlines—it’s really not hard for most people to ignore evidence that might derail their beliefs and therefore their pleasant world of group agreement.
Of course, the opposite is true for those who already are at variance politically with most people in the community in which they live and especially the group with which they socialize. I’d be curious to know what the statistics for political change are for people who move from a community where they espouse the majority view to one where they are going against the general consensus. Do they undergo political change more often than people who don’t make such a move? Perhaps; I don’t know. And then of course we all are aware of what happens to many young people when they go off to college and are exposed to the relentless propaganda there from the left. But young people are in an especially malleable and impressionable state, as well as one in which the opinion of their peers is of the utmost importance, so they are particularly ripe for the leftist picking.
My change of politics in the intellectual sense was somewhat hard to go through, but nowhere near as hard as the social “coming out” later. I underwent my political change mostly in private (read the story if you’re interested). I was living in a new place, had recently been divorced, and was undergoing a very lengthy recuperation from surgery, all of which made for a large degree of social isolation and meant I had a great deal of free time on my hands. Furthermore, I was motivated (starting with 9/11) to do much more reading about world events and politics than ever before, and for the first time I was getting my news from multiple newspapers online rather than one or two delivered at home. I was probably helped along in the journey by the fact that I didn’t even realize I was now reading papers on the left and the right, ant that this was something I’d never done before (previously I had thought my main sources—the Boston Globe and New Yorker—were unbiased).
All of these factors helped get me to the point where, although I’d never really been “reasoned” into my previous positions, I abandoned them when faced with enough evidence to the contrary. My change was helped along by two things in particular: (1) logic and rationality are very important to me; and (2) I had previously moved in such a liberal bubble that I was unaware of the harsh way many liberals treat those who differ from them politically.
The naivete of that last part may really surprise you. It’s not that I’d never noticed liberal attacks on conservatives in the news. But those were public figures; I was me. My friends and relatives knew me and liked me, knew I was intelligent, kind, thoughtful, etc. etc.—one of the them. At least, I thought they did. So why would they be angry at me? I don’t think the possibility even entered my mind, in part because I’d almost never seen anyone in my circle disagree with the prevailing liberalism.
Let’s just say I was in for a big, big, BIG surprise. By the time I realized I was in social hot water, there was no turning back—not that I would have considered it anyway. The only thing that could have made me turn back would have been for me to encounter a preponderance of convincing evidence to support the basic liberal argument, and so far that hasn’t happened at all. Au contraire.
I’m now used to my position. I’m used to not fitting in. I’ve made my accommodation and accepted the situation. I know it has affected a few of my relationships deeply and many slightly. Most have survived the cataclysm, although in somewhat altered form. But make no mistake about it—it was a cataclysm of sorts, although I never sought it out and never anticipated it. But it doesn’t surprise me that very few people would seek it out, and that most will run screaming from evidence that invalidates their previous belief system.
I’ll let John Updike have the last word. I am not Updike, nor are most people—not a literary light hobnobbing with the other literati in the Vineyard, sharing drinks and conversation and sun. But the sentiments and the sense of dislocation are not all that different from those Updike experienced back when he distanced himself from the others by writing a letter to the editor of the Times that was, if not exactly a defense of the Vietnam War, then just as certainly not an attack on it.
In this essay, Updike describes what ensued (and if you haven’t read it before, please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing) [emphasis mine]:
It pained and embarrassed me to be out of step with my magazine and literary colleagues, with the bronzed and almost universally “antiwar” summer denizens of Martha’s Vineyard (including Feiffer and the fiery Lillian Hellman), and with many of my dearest friends back home in Ipswich, including my wife. How had I come to such an awkward pass? In politics, my instinct had always been merely to stay out of harm’s way. My home town of Shillington, Pennsylvania, was peaceably shared by both parties, and by honorable double inheritance I was a Democrat…
I first voted, pulling the Democrat lever, in New York City, in 1956; naively I thought Stevenson might actually beat Ike this second time around. In 1960, transposed to Massachusetts, I was happy to vote with most of my fellow Bay Staters for our young native son, Jack Kennedy. And in 1964 I went to considerable trouble to vote inside the Soviet Union, casting at the American embassy in Moscow my absentee ballot for Lyndon Johnson…
The protest [against Johnson and the Vietnam War], from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property””the USA and its many amenities””intact…
At moments of suburban relaxation, in our circle of semi-bohemian homes…I was, perhaps, the most Vietnam-minded person I knew. Those who deplored the war fit what protesting they could into their suburban schedules and otherwise dismissed it with a gesture of automatic distaste; the technocrats of our acquaintance, the electronic engineers and stockbrokers and economics professors, tended to see the involvement as an administrative blunder, to which they could attach no passion. But I””I whose stock in trade as an American author included an intuition into the mass consciousness and an identification with our national fortunes””felt obliged to defend Johnson and Rusk and Rostow, and then Nixon and Kissinger, as they maneuvered, with many a solemn bluff and thunderous air raid, our quagmirish involvement and long extrication. My face would become hot, my voice high and tense and wildly stuttery; I could feel my heart race in a kind of panic whenever the subject came up, and my excitement threatened to suffocate me…
…it greatly distressed me, for example””it wasn’t fair””that American liberals could so blithely disown what was clearly a typically and historically liberal cause, foreign intervention against a Communist bully…I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of.
Updike’s entire essay is one of the best I’ve ever read on the subject of how a person might feel who is, albeit reluctantly, forced by his/her convictions to step out of line and differ politically. No wonder so few people do it.
