Lee Stranahan’s change experience, continued…
It’s interesting to watch it happening in real time.
[Hat tip: commenter “foxfier.”]
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
It’s interesting to watch it happening in real time.
[Hat tip: commenter “foxfier.”]
I myself had more liberal views when I was in my teens (although I realize now that it’s almost impossible to have astute/informed political beliefs at that age because the respective events don’t often impact you directly). I started becoming a conservative during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. I was still very young and fueled mostly by “feelings” (as opposed to logic/facts), and Clinton’s actions, and the support he received from his fans, made me feel…gross. It just didn’t seem right.
As Neo said, conversions like Stranahan’s are always interesting to watch – you can almost see a lightbulb turning on in his head with each column.
I’ve frequented most of the prominient conservative sites for the past three years or so, and maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve yet to see any of the regular writers or posters go through the gradual (and most likely permanent) conversion from conservative to liberal. Yes, there are people like David “Pants Crease” Brooks and Kathleen “I Started the Palin Hate Brigade” Parker, who never really were conservatives, but I haven’t noticed the “I used to hate Nancy Pelosi…but now that I’ve gotten to know her better I’m starting to agree with her” metamorphosis that Neo experienced with GW Bush. Has anyone else?
Of course, my explanation is that if liberals let go of their ingrained beliefs and actually spent time with/talked to conservatives, they’d see that we’re not what they thought we were, and we actually make a lot of sense.
On the other hand, if conservatives spend a lot of time among liberals (as I do), we’ll find that they are JUST AS BAD as we thought. LOL.
ah, but in the end, its too late…
you cant fix and make whole, what was broken, you have to first prevent the break. this is a society and has generations, and breaking it changes it never to return.
see history….
To Stranahan’s point about conservatism lacking the organisational structure to match that of leftist: How do you make conservatives into militant activist on a mission to push their ideology and still remain conservatives? A big part of conservatism to me is leaving people the hell alone because i want to be left the hell alone. And i don’t want to convert people into my beliefs by making them intimidated or fearful of ridicule if they don’t have them. This is all a sort of paradox to me.
Steve.
That means you have to convince them by facts and that you despair of doing so. Good point. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Not with libs.
This is all a sort of paradox to me.
thats because you dont get that to impose your ideology is to remove the chains of others (for real not the stuff now), and let them taste living without them.
to open the cage and teach the bird to be free again is to push your ideology… which isn’t an ideology, its not a simplification of life, its acceptance of life.
its stepping out into the scary world knowing that beliving something else that limits you does not remove the scary part of the world, except in your head. whatever fact i give that is contrary to their falshood, and points out a dark something in the world, makes no change to the world itself, only to the regard of that world.
so one is to sit with your head in a bag, and be afraid of the bad things but feel safe unrealistically… the other is to take the bag off, and see which danger is which and respect the bad things and feel safe realistically as one can in a capricious and random world only governed by physical principals and emergent properties from them.
The interesting sign, to me almost clinical, is his discovery that THEY LIE. Once anyone begins to see it as not just spin, not just putting a good face on what your side is doing, but simply lying about facts that we can easily see, the whole social democrat edifice begins to crumble.
I am convinced that a very big reason that we become more “conservative” as we age is that we have a broader life experience, so that, eventually one of their lies crosses what we have experienced in the real world. The more calcified “liberals” do not just live in a media or political cocoon. They do, but there’s more. It seems, rather, and often, too, that they continue to live in an economic cocoon, a university, a type of job, usually governmental, that never has its ups and downs. They’ve never sued anyone, nor been sued, nor filed for bankruptcy protection, nor lost a house in foreclosure, nor bought one that way, either. If they’ve been in our country’s armed services, they mostly see an outfit that would prosecute them if they committed atrocities, not one that sends them on search and rape missions. This reality reinforcement is also the reason that more modest income people often vote Republican, because folks at that income level know what is involved in receiving government largess. They/we scream, sooner or later, “Don’t help me any more! I can’t afford it!”
That’s what did it for me. You have this sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach that you’re just seeing a small corner of a vast ruin. Or, like the defenders of Helm’s Deep, a lightning flash illuminates the plain before the battlement walls, and you see it’s alive with crawling enemies, armed to the teeth.
Or like going to bed with Dr. Jekyll, and waking up in the morning with . . . MR HYDE!
What got me was their utter ruthlessness in trying to overturn the 2000 election with an ocean of LIES. I fell for it. And when some of the newspapers admitted, months later, in a very tiny voice, that none of the bad things the Dems accused the Republicans of were true, I knew — they put the Triumph of the Left before Everything.
And would stop at nothing, including destroying the faith of our citizenry in our elections, to achieve this Uber-goal.
Then came September 11th. I saw the covers ripped off their hatred for my country; their sick-making support for our enemies; their relentlessly treasonous souls, and I was so enraged that I’ve never gotten over it. That kicked off a process of turning over a lot of Leftist rocks to see how many More worms I’d find.
It’s unbelievable how very much, and for how very long, they’ve lied. Someone linked to George Monbiot’s discovery that Helen Caldicott, the “saint” of the No-Nukes crowd, is an unscientific crank. He’s a leftist himself, but he’s starting to look at facts and evidence, and he’s shocked to the core that her arguments against nuclear power are almost wholly a tissue of lies and gross exaggerations.
He quotes a scientist who was part of the official post-Chernobyl investigation, who said he was anti-nuclear power, until participating in that investigation showed him he’d been fed lies and hysteria about nuclear power. Now he’s for it!
The best metaphor of change is the plot of “Matrix”. It is a shocking and painful experience to understand that everything you get accustomed to take as reality is, instead, a mammoth Big Lie, deliberately fed to you by shameless demagogues. Another classic novel about the change is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
You have to take your shot when you get it.
I got a package of three YA historical novels by Rosemary Sutcliff for some nieces. They are bright kids, always maxing out the science olympiad and so forth. Their parents are relentless greenies.
I bemoaned the historical knowledge available to high school kids these days so I wrote several pages about Roman Britain, the period in which the three novels are set, including some of the history, the military structure, and such like. I made the point that Sutcliff’s protagonists came from some made-up version of the Brits’ 18th-first half of the 20th institution of the “old military family”. Don’t really know about the Romans, but her readers would understand her construction. That kind of thing.
When the Saxons, in one book, decided to leave their North Sea area of worsening winters and diminished harvests and settle in Britain instead of raiding and returning, I referred to that being probably a reference to the end of the Roman Warm Period and the beginnng of the Dark Ages Cold Period.
I was going to write the background anyway, so I figured I’d sneak something in that might cause some questioning about Climate Change.
You do what you can when you can.
Bravo, Richard! Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels are awesome, and if your nieces are as bright as you say, they will love them. Perhaps, along with considering the natural fluctuations of our climate, they might also begin to realize how fragile civilization as we know it, really is … and how miserable life can be for the survivors when a long-established civilization collapses entirely.
I believe climate change will ultimately be revealed as metaphorical of people’s inward fears in an uncertain political climate. A political climate marred with obscene superstitions of humans not even belonging in the natural world and must revert to its animal nature if it wants to fit in.
The reality is we couldn’t harm this planet if it was all of humanity’s goal to do so. The worst we could do is make for very shortlived unsightly surroundings in the blink of an eye that we’re here.
Sgt. Mom
I reviewed Sutcliff’s Sword Song for Amazon. I mentioned that, given current levels of historical knowledge, the stuff may as well be SciFi. Hence my supplement.
What struck me as interesting is that I got twenty-one positive responses. Not that I got positive responses, but that at least twenty-one people were looking at an old YA historical novel.
Her Sword at Sunset is a good adult novel, or was at the time it was written. Given changing norms, it wouldn’t be out of the way–except for length–as a YA.
In my supplement to my nieces, I mentioned that writers tell us about their audience by what they mention but don’t describe. Sutcliff didn’t need to explain various things because she figured her audience already knew them. So we know what the Brits of Sutcliff’s time knew.
Kipling, whose Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Faeries seem to be Sutcliff’s source material, had a couple of his kid characters acting something out of Midsummer Night’s Dream, or one of them shouting verses from Lays of Ancient Rome into the wind. He had to think his audience would be easy with the idea of kids knowing this stuff, including why the Romans told each other the story of Horatius for a thousand years and why the Brit kids were required to learn it.
SteveH:
I’ve long felt that this was a fertile (and largely ignored) field of study — the extent to which policy is driven by a policymaker’s unstated fears and phobias.
I remember thinking about this first after reading Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves”, in which a major policy-maker mounts a one-man political crusade — which is later revealed to be caused by his claustrophobia. (I may be misremembering the details; it’s been a while.)
Similarly, I remember being afraid of guns before my military service. I’ve come around 180 degrees on this issue, but I remember how I used to feel — that holding deadly force in my hands scared me, and that I didn’t trust myself with it, so how could I trust others? I wonder how many anti-gun people feel similarly; I imagine a lot of them do.
(These days, I’d say that if holding deadly force in your hands is scary to you, then maybe you should consider giving up your driver’s license.)
Jerry Pournelle once wrote, in a similar vein, that he’d love to see a history textbook written from the perspective of world leaders and their illnesses. As an example, I believe he cited some decisions made by Elizabeth I, which might have turned out differently had she not been suffering from chronic toothaches at the time.
If you’re fascinated, as I am, by the tiny events that change history — such as the Presidential elections of 1916 and 2000, either of which could have gone the other way were it not for an inconsequential snub at the wrong moment — then these things are very interesting indeed.
And — to the extent that people’s unspoken phobias dictate modern policy — it can be more than a little disturbing. What childhood fears does President Obama have, and to what extent do they influence his policies?
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Daniel,
WRT illnesses. Somebody said a certain French king’s policies were substantively different “apres la fistule”. So would yours, thrones being what they are.
Your last question addresses broad opportunities for speculation. We don’t know his fears and we don’t know which fears have an effect and which don’t.
“What childhood fears does President Obama have, and to what extent do they influence his policies?”
His daddy issues alone were reason enough not to elect him, in my opinion. It’s fine for an author to make that a central part of his life, but it’s unsuitable in someone who is serving as president.