Commenter “Phil D” has a question for me:
…[T]his is something I wondered about for a long time.
Take another example of a neocon, Roger Simon of Pajamas Media.
I remember reading a comment of him from a few years back were he states (I have to paraphrase since I don’t have the original comment);
– in the seventies I was a big admirer of Mao
– even though he killed more people than the nazis
– it was no big deal at the time
Now to me that means that Mr. Simon was worse than a nazi in the seventies (the “killed more ”¦” part), and then there is the “no big deal” part too.
The same can be said of most of those people who were hit on the head by 11 September 2001. They seem to have forgotten [their] own responsibilities before they were “hit on the head”.Compare this to a Bernard Nathanson. He didn’t just “change his mind”, he repented of what he had done. In fact, that’s one of the reasons he stated for converting to Catholicism, because he felt a great need for forgiveness.
The inescapable responsibility of the Germans for the nazis is fairly regularly stated, but has it never come to your mind that that same question of responsibility can be asked of you?
The first thing I want to say in response is that I have no idea whether Roger Simon ever wrote such a thing. I Googled it just now, and nothing came up. So perhaps Phil D’s memory is tricking him regarding the quote, or perhaps not—but let’s not get mired in that issue, because undoubtedly there are other changers who might have said something similar, even if Roger didn’t. So let’s assume that such a phenomenon is not so very unusual.
It seems to me that left-to-right changers fall into two general categories: the ones who were originally very political, and quite far to the left (David Horowitz comes to mind as an excellent example), and those who had been politically affiliated with liberalism and/or the Democrats but who had not been especially politically interested or involved. I was more the latter type. Although I was a Democrat, I was never ever a leftist, and although I read the papers and kept up with the news I was neither a political junkie nor especially given to political discussions. Admirer of Mao? Not even close. I was more of a Scoop Jackson type of Democrat, a fervent anti-Communist and believer in America as primarily a force for good in the world.
When someone politically involved such as David Horowitz goes through a political change, it’s a major upheaval. One of the reasons is that his/her political views are a public matter, and usually part of that person’s work life or volunteer work. But, paradoxically, from another perspective it’s actually not so much of a stretch, because that person is going from activism and intense political interest to activism and intense political interest. It’s just the political orientation that’s different, not the fervor of the political involvement.
For someone like me, it’s a very different process. That person can keep it private until he/she chooses to “come out”—and maybe never come out, although I did tell friends and family quite early because I was so naive I didn’t realize that people I knew would have problems with my change or anger about it. And someone like me will experience a change not only in his/her political affiliation, but in that person’s intensity of interest in politics and breadth of knowledge, especially about history—even the history through which that person has already lived, and thought he/she already knew about.
I’ve described the process of my change in exhaustive detail in my series of posts on the subject, but I haven’t written new posts in the series in years. It used to be, when I started out blogging, that just about every reader had read and was therefore familiar with my story. But it occurs to me that perhaps that’s no longer true. Maybe Phil D and many others haven’t read those change posts, and so the whole process is a mystery and they can fill in the blanks with speculation.
So, another response I have to Phil is to say that you should read my “change” posts if you haven’t already, because they could answer your questions in greater depth. I can’t really summarize the posts very well (they are long for a reason!), but the gist of the story is that I didn’t suddenly change my politics after 9/11. It was a process that took several years of reading and thinking. And I didn’t so much change my mind as that I became better informed.
One of the most important factors in the whole experience was that 2000-2001 was also around the time that I started getting my news online rather than from hard copies of newspapers and periodicals, and that gave me access to a far greater variety of sources than ever before. It’s not that those sources hadn’t existed previously, it’s just that earlier I hadn’t even realized that the news sources I was customarily reading (NY Times, Boston Globe, New Yorker) were biased towards the left. But once I started reading from sources on the right as well (at first, without even knowing they were on the right), for the most part they made more sense to me. When I realized I was more simpatico with thinking on the right—and probably always had been—I was absolutely stunned.
The emotional adjustment after I realized that fact was profound. Me? A conservative? I had trouble wrapping my mind around it. And then once I had come to accept that fact, there was the difficult emotional adjustment when I tentatively started mentioning to people that I disagreed with this or that premise of liberalism, and experienced a series of angry and even insulting responses from quite a few. It took some getting used to.
Phil D asks me, “has it never come to your mind that that same question of responsibility can be asked of you?” Of course. Part of my answer relates to what I’ve just written; I felt that my main problem had been misinformation and lack of intense involvement with politics, as well as—as commenter “DNW” writes—being a “‘let’s all be nice’ liberal living in a circle” of people about the same.” I bore and accepted some responsibility for that, but I think the press bore a much greater responsibility.
To make that point more clear, I offer the following excerpt from one of my posts in the change series. This passage (written in 2008) describes my feelings a few years earlier when I finally realized how the press was distorting things, and had been doing so even back during the Vietnam War days. Read the whole post if you want to get more of the background, but the subject matter was some Vietnam War era photos that the MSM had originally presented in a misleading and propagandistic manner, and about which I had just learned the fuller story, thirty or so years later:
I spent the next few hours searching the subject online and found quite a bit more information, but no serious or credible refutation of the stories I’d just learned. The facts therein did not appear to be in much dispute. I read the original article again, and then again, in a tensely concentrated state.
Then the strangest feeling came over me. I don’t even have a word for it, although I usually can come up with words for emotions.
This was a new feeling. The best description I can come up with is that it was a regret so intense it morphed seamlessly into guilt, as though I were responsible for something terrible, though I didn’t know exactly what. Regret and guilt, and also a rage that I’d been so stupid, that I’d let myself be duped or misled or kept ignorant about something so important, and that I’d remained ignorant all these years.
I sat in front of my computer and put my face down on the keyboard. I stayed in that position for a few minutes, energyless and drained. When I lifted my head I was surprised to find a few tears on my cheeks.
There’s your answer.
