When Have You Changed Your Mind?
There is a famous quote, often misattributed to Churchill, that if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 40 you have no brain. Given my political history, I’ve already shown myself to be heartless. Whether I shall prove myself to be brainless as well remains to be seen. To quote an magic eight ball: outlook not good. It did occur to me the other day, however, that despite not following the trajectory set forth above, I have changed my mind on a lot of political issues over the years. To give a very non-exhaustive list, at one time or another I have supported each of the following:
Gun control,
Government Single Payer Healthcare,
Living Wage laws (i.e. like minimum wage laws, only not so minimal),
Hate crimes laws,
the Iraq war,
Affirmative Action,
Campaign Finance Reform,
Restrictive immigration laws,
Trade protectionism,
I could go on, but you get the idea. How about you? How often do you change your mind on a major political issue (and if the answer is ‘never’ doesn’t that give you pause)?
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I started the 1980′s as a conservative – voted for Ronald Reagan twice, and Bush Sr once, mostly on Reagan’s position on abortion, and his pro-business policies.
I came to recognize something in the 30 years since then: you can learn more about a party’s positions by asking not so much, “What do they stand for?” but more “Who do they stand with?”
In other words, who is their constituency?
I use to believe the cant coming from the Republicans about “liberal elites” lording it over Joe Lunchpail and so on – and to be sure, this does describe a certain slice of the left that, as a lefty, I wish would just become Republicans and vote their economic interests and be done with it.
But then I noticed that the people who benefited the most from Republican policies were rich people and large corporations and people in the business of killing and oppressing people; the people hurt by them (among the already-born, at least) were ordinary working guys, the mentally ill, the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable in general.
At a certain point (somewhere around the time Lee Atwater ran the Willie Horton ad) I left in disgust. Actually, I stayed a registered Republican for awhile, but started voting more and more often for Democrats. I think the ’96 election cycle was the first one where I actually registered as a Democrat.
These days, I’m not really happy with the Democrats either. They are not far enough left for me on lots of issues. I wish the US were more of a parliamentary place, where smaller parties could win seats and have more of a voice.
Born in 1961. Strongly pro-life, anti-war (except Dad, who believed the Catholic Vietnamese were going to be rolled, as they were indeed, but America really didn’t care about that), pro-civil rights household – the assassinations of 1968 hit our family like bombs. I remember my parents announcing at the dinner table that summer that if George Wallace was elected president, my father would seek employment in Canada or Australia and we would leave the country.
My father, though, dearly loved Nixon and we lived amid Nixon country (suburban LI gave him his biggest majorities) – the rest of the family detested Nixon (we didn’t like LBJ after 1965 either due to the war). So I spent the 70s as GOP-detesting kid. The came the formative events of 1979-80 (oil embargo II, Hostage Crisis, Afghanistan, revival of draft registration, et cet.) that helped change a good deal of the 1961 cohort from a lagging Boomer group to the leading edge of Gen X in the USA at least. I was at UVa, encountered thinking conservatives and libertarians for the first time and gradually modulated my thinking. Then, in the mid-80s, running a conservative-libertarian law journal at law school (where political correctness – a term invented by liberals to direct at the radicals who derided liberals as impotent – ran very high)0, I witnessed first hand how Reagan’s re-election changed conservatives (less so libertarians, but they eventually got afflicted with the typical ailments of all ideologues) from thoughtful to greedy for the status markers and attributes that came with power. So, by the later 80s, I became disenchanted with both parties and broad ideologies and devoted myself more to focused issues and most of all just to human dignity.
Which was a return to where I started. One of my older sisters was a special needs child. My parents, inspired by the revolution that began in the 1950s as a result of the Kennedys’ sense of responsibility over what happened to Rosemary Kennedy (whose life I maintain has probably been more consequential for the betterment of lives than any other of her siblings), were in the forefront of mainstreaming and related issues. I, the gifted sib, was taught from an early age to appreciate the gifts of the special needs children I encountered, and to notice how the treatment of people often wrongfully depends on whether and to what extent they are valued by other people. This is where I returned: non-cooperation with trends that reduce people to their productive (and even reproductive) value or that reify them into concepts, and trying to build the Kingdom where the inalienable dignity of each human person is championed against such things.
There is no party in this country that really stands for that.
I changed to pro-life when I asked myself whether abortion meant killing a baby, and under what circumstances that might be justified.
I changed to oppose the death penalty when I read the Catechism on the subject.
I followed the Shachtmanite march to the right during the ’80′s. While sympathetic to much of cultural conservativism, become terrified of cultural conservatives in the late 1990s and moved back to the left.
As a young teacher, I was about as far to the left as you can get without engaging in armed revolution, and I adopted every political position that calls itself “progressive,” including contempt for religion and all it represents. What changed my mind was abortion. For most of my life, I taught black students in the inner city, and they repeatedly shared with me how they had been hurt by abortion. Generally it was women who spoke up, but some of my male students seemed to have been hurt even worse, to the point of giving up on all their hopes in life.
In my experience, it was not common for young black men and women to share intimate details of their lives with a white teacher from a very different cultural background, but the abortion issue was so overwhelming to them that they often lost their inhibitions. After a while, it got to me.
I finally concluded that the Catholic Church was right on this issue, and I and my so-called “progressive” associates were just wrong. Abortion not only takes life from the unborn, it also destroys the lives of those who see it as a way out of trouble. That’s why I have so little patience with posters on Catholic blogs who talk about it as if it were just a minor concern of interest only to right-wing zealots with no experience in the real world. Whenever I read stuff like that, I see the pain of so many people I loved, and I lash out at what hurt them.
I defended my MA thesis not agreeing with what I had written. On a somewhat related note, I thought postmodernism was evil until I started reading postmodernists. Okay, not major political issues, but they kinda sorta relate to politics.
In my high school and college years attending Jesuit schools I decided I was the magesterium and as pope made my own rules about sexuality and marriage. I though that since I spent a lot of time and money helping the poor that I was immune from other teachings. I wandered into a confessional at 25 by accident in London and a strong confessor and Christ’s magnificent grace transformed me into a believing practicing Catholic.
I was one day away from being inducted into the inner circle of a moribund Trotskyist party after 5 years of fruitless agitprop and commie organizing when an incident between me and the party’s Dear Leader resulted in my being cut loose. I was adrift on the far left for another year after that.
I had always been secretly pro-life but never dared speak of it because I thought it was just something that could ‘wait’ until a revolution fixed everything in 100 years. One day, for kicks, I mentioned it in the presence of my fellow radicals and it sparked the longest debate our internet forum had ever seen in its existence (nearly 500 posts covering dozens of pages).
Like Ron I realized how right the Church was on life issues and sexual issues, and how empty, shallow, and corrupt the ‘morality’ of the far left really is. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of passion there, a lot of humanism, and there are many good causes that they take up. But they have no moral compass. What they do is pointless given what they believe man is and reality is – nothing but matter in motion.
In other words, the things they get angry about are only worth getting angry about if there is an objective right and wrong, if the truth behind our existence is that it is brought forth by a loving God. And then, accepting that, there are limits to what we can do to our fellow man to redress those wrongs; we can’t have violent revolutions and we can’t abolish private property, and we certainly can’t have abortions and sexual selfishness.
And if there isn’t objective moral truth, then wasting one’s life on a ‘revolution’ is stupid. Somewhere in the New Testament Paul says that if Christ isn’t risen, then ‘eat drink and be merry’ makes sense – not ‘devote your life to changing a world that has no inherent value or meaning’.
A similar one is “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.”
I first heard the Churchill quote from an advisor and assistant dean who was a libertarian, when we were talking politics.
I said, 19 at the time, in the fall of my junior year of college, having had open heart surgery the previous summer, “I guess I have no heart then?”
He said, “No. You’re old. Most people your age haven’t been through what you have”
My parents were “Reagan Democrats.” My Dad was very powerful in the local teacher’s union when we lived in PA. He was on TV any time there was a strike or something. The political arguments in our PA family confused me: I have an uncle who’s a Tom Ridge Republican, and I have aunts and uncles who are pro-life Democrats. It’s all baffling.
But my parents hosted Right to Life meetings at our house when I was a kid. My parents were also activists for me as a kid with a genetic disorder, joining March of Dimes, NORD, and starting their own support group. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I was a target. I grew up hearing how “people with Marfan syndrome shouldn’t have kids.” I grew up hearing stories of people aborting their kids with genetic defects.
My parents could be described as “active” Catholics–both politically and in the parish sense, and they certainly knew the basics, but they’ve never been as conservative/traditionalist as I am, and they’ve never really been big on “continuing ed.,” as it were. They’re Cursillo Catholics, if that makes sense. They come to me for references and information.
So I’m mostly self-educated in the faith. I judge politics through the eyes that I’d rather be a saint.
Because I saw the progressive tendencies in the Church as going away from everything the saints valued, I rejected them. Becaues liberals s upported abortion, I rejected them.
I read Thomas Aquinas. I studied Marian appartions. I read the Catechism and the Code of Canon Law (I’m talking like when I was 13-15 here). I came to the opinion that I’d rather live in a Catholic constitutional monarchy, but I was stuck in the US. I liked the inherent subsidiarism of the US constitution, but I had deep qualms about the Founders being Freemasons.
I have a mistrust of politicians in general and of anyone who serves worldly power or money.
I was a very idealistic Young Republican until two things happened ca. 1992 (only 15 at the time)
No one I knew wanted to vote for Pat Buchanan. I believed that a Catholic should vote for the most pro-life candidate, and I heard all these people saying, “I like what he has to say, but I’m not going to vote for him, because he can’t win.”
The other thing was _Planned Parenthood v. Casey_, and the reactions thereto. Those began my questioniing whether the Republicans really cared about ending abortion.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve dropped my teenaged capitalism. But I’ve dropped it in favor of an anti-economic attitude, rather than a necessarily “liberal” one. I think Catholic Social Teaching needs a dose of Lord Acton, a rememberance of our own doctrine of Original Sin and concupiscience. I don’t think we should assuem goodwill of practical politicians.
What Chesterton says in the first paragraph of Ch. 4 of _Orthodoxy_ matched my view by the time I was 19.
I gave Bush’s election some hope. At the very least ,I did not want to see Kerry Or Gore elected.
But I voted for Buchanan in the 2000 election. I voted for Bush because there were no alternatives in 2004. In 2008, I voted for Huckabee in the primary, then McCain because of Palin (and because I didn’t like any of the third party candidates).
But I’m just praying for the Republican party to implode.
So, I’m a subsidiarist, strict constructionist, Kirkean conservative who believes natural law trumps everything else, but that government should be primarily a local affair, emphasizing the defense of the family (morally, socially and economically).
I no longer consider myself a Republican. Mike Huckabee is the one politician I’ve seen who best represents what I believe. Sarah Palin embodies the kind of person I think *should* be in politics, even if I don’t agree with all her positions.
I was once a “leftist” on strictly economic and racial issues–never on issues relating to loyalty to the crown or to cultural and aesthetic ones–but my belief in “socialism” as a viable economic system changed after I spent four and a half years in the corrupt, bureaucratised “Democratic, Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka,” for whose murderous and racist government I actually worked for almost two of those years as a “curriculum consultant.”
Nowadays I believe that both the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism and the “communist state” are bogus RELIGIONS–equally as bad as the perverted Protestant Evangelism that, in its watered-down form, the civic religion of the United States of America.
What is preferable? For me, it would be a semi-feudalistic, constitutionally-limited monarchy whose aristocracy or princely caste is kept continuously broken, financially and militarily, by their obligations to serve the poor and promote education and the arts–particularly the liturgical arts. There would be an extremely well-regulated “free market” and there would be severe, edifying and retributive punishments (short of the “capital” one) for all who prey upon the poor or the disadvantaged.
Also, a great deal more of the society’s resources would be spent on education, and “natural rights” would be predicated upon a demonstrable willingness to perform the one essentially “humanizing” task, to LEARN–and not necessarily “to learn” only academic things. It would be a Judaeo-Christian “meritocracy” and, of course, it would be a “utopia,” because it would take a philosopher-prince to run it! (And, no, I’m NOT that “philosopher prince,” myself–not “Christ-like” enough.)
I was once for:
The Republican Party (until 2002)
Operation Desert Storm
A Constitutional Amendment on Marriage
No progressive tax code.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton
Hmmmm. I’d never heard the quote attributed to Churchill, but then I’d heard a supposedly French variant: If you’re not a revolutionary when you’re 20 you have no heart, and if you’re not a bourgeois when you’re 40 you have no brains.
My conclusion was always that I had no heart.
Things I’ve changed my mind on:
Term limits (used to be for, now don’t really care)
Abolishing public funding for education (I’d support going to an all-voucher system, but not abolishing tax funding for education.)
Oil independence (used to be for it, now don’t think it exists)
Trade deficits (used to think they were a problem, now don’t)
Outsourcing (used to be against, now not)
Three strikes laws (used to think they were a good idea, now don’t)
Paying politicians less (used to be for, now against)
Campaign finance reform (used to be for, now against)
As a sometime Ayn Rand fanatic and evangelical Christian (not at the same time), I have come to the conclusion that the truth usually lies between the well-formed polar opposites on the hot poltical issues, and it seems to me that those at or near each end of the spectrum are not so much thinking for themselves as jerking that old knee in the ways that feel good to them, for deep-seated psychological reasons or simply based on how they were brought up or who their friends are.