A liberal for Trump: the process of political change
Quite a few people have recommended this piece by a changer named Keri Smith who now supports Trump. It’s worth reading. Here’s an excerpt:
I still cried the night Trump won. Because I still believed the things I was told to believe about him, without forming my own opinion. Social Justice Warriors do a lot of that. But it became really important for me to figure out why he won, because I wanted to prevent it from happening again in 2020. So I started leaving my carefully cultivated echochamber. I started seeking out other points of view, and actually *listening* to why people voted for him, instead of projecting and telling them what the media had told me were their reasons. I started meeting Trump voters, most of whom did not fit the stereotype I’d been sold.
Regular readers here know that I’m especially interested in the process of political change. I’m also convinced that there are important differences between those who end up changing and those who don’t, and those differences are not merely informational in terms of sources of news, although that has its place. The distinctions are also personality-driven.
There are certain statements in that quote that I see as especially important in Smith’s story. The first step was that she wanted to figure out something on her own, and not just to read what other people had to say about it. Although her motive was initially anti-Trump – she wanted to prevent a repeat – nevertheless she had enough independence of mind even at the outset to seek answers for herself.
The second important step in her story is how she chose to look for those answers: by leaving her echo chamber and seeking out other points of view. That’s somewhat unusual too; I’ve found that few people want to hear opposing views, and those who do are somewhat different from those who don’t.
The third step Smith took was that she decided to listen to the people to whom she spoke, not just with a view to countering and rejecting and fighting what they said, but to hear them with an open mind. I have no idea what propels a person to do this, but I believe it is a personality trait that is fairly rare in the entire population but especially rare among liberals and the left.
Smith adds, later in her essay:
…[L]et me say a word about others like me who are a part of #WalkAway, and those I’ve been blessed to get to know in the past year or so — nobody willingly subjects themselves to social ostracism, to name-calling and insults, to risk of losing their job, to risk of losing their family’s safety — without GOOD reason. And that reason is a pursuit of truth.
That sums it up nicely. The costs are high, but to some people the desire to pursue truth rather than to just accept the group’s word for it drives them in a way that is not shared by all or even by most. I don’t know what causes that difference. But I have certainly observed it.
Her ‘Unsafe Spaces’ channel on YouTube is pretty good also.
I believe she used to be a talent agent for comics in LA but has since moved to Texas.
Keri Smith is to be welcomed aboard. I expect more in her wake, but I suspect that, despite what they may tell you about seeking the truth, their change is less about deliberate enquiry than about growing up and maturing, discovering those around me to be as corrupt as those they oppose, and that civil life is way more complicated than they thought. That’s my story anyway.
I thought that alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote the essay “Live Not By Lies” for the democrats and they refused to read it.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php
I find it interesting that she refers to “what the media had told me were their reasons.” I suspect a lot of the eye-opening involves realizing just how dishonest they are.
And I will add that they always were. They just used to be subtler about it.
“I’ve found that few people want to hear opposing views, and those who do are somewhat different from those who don’t.”
That puzzles me. Of course, I was always on the right, and grew up in the NY suburbs, so opposing views were unavoidable. But I don’t get not wanting to hear opposing views. At least, not from intelligent people*. THAT has always delighted me. My girlfriend in HS was very leftist. Of course, we dated in 69-71, when things were different. And we ENJOYED arguing politics.
And I never noticed a problem in college, either. The self-segregation came later. At least in my experience.
* I confess I find fewer and fewer of those on the left, nowadays. And I am impatient with the dishonest BS we usually get. Eg, when you click a lib link at RCP. It’s getting rarer and rarer to find something worth reading. Those who were intelligent and Left, are increasingly having doubts, even if they don’t come over.
Plus a woman that likes wearing stylish hats is A-OK with me.
That was fantastic. Thank you neo. (I don’t know what the etiquette is here about just posting a thank you. Some sites don’t care for it. In which case, if removed, no problem.)
Eva Marie:
I’m fine with thank-yous. You’re welcome.
Got a more or less close thing going on amongst people I know. One side is progressive and has no compunction about calling others racist and accusing them of various other moral crimes.
Far as I can tell, they picked, so to speak, their personality and the image they wanted to project and then BELIEVED all that was necessary to achieve it. Not that it was deliberate. One guy, several years ago, was very concerned about the number of people in Texas who owned pick trucks and…get this…didn’t need to own a pickup truck.
He naturally gravitated left, far left.
Anyway, I think the personality comes first, and then the political position that satisfies it. One PJM writer speaks of taking over the world and leaving it ruthlessly alone. That’s kind of my view and probably why i’m conservative.
The writer of the piece could have been overwhelmed by anti-Trump information to the point of it becoming true by repetition without counteraction. Thus, her shift is not a matter of changing personality–she was not self-satisfied with her self-image as a progressive–but of looking for more information. She did no feel a threat to her personhood in case of a change. Others, like my friends mentioned above, can’t afford to abandon the supports of their self-image or….they’d have nothing.
A brave woman.
On the other hand, she does seem to have a point:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/08/15/is-aocs-squad-running-the-rioters-one-just-called-for-more-unrest-in-the-streets-n795546
I was raised a liberal Democrat and my evolution into a conservative took about a decade. My first vote for a Republican was for Bush in 1988. My family and friends were all Democrats (I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and that’s the law) but my beliefs didn’t cause me to lose any friends. I actually enjoyed being the only conservative in the room but things weren’t anywhere near as nasty in those days as they are now.
Two things to say about hearing an opposing view.
First, I’ve commented before on how I appreciate Montage’s contributions to these conversations. I virtually never agree with him/her, except possibly around some edges. But I’m glad s/he’s here to make the liberal/Democrat points, and give as all things over which to chew. I was especially sorry for the sharply hostile reaction s/he got in response to a comment a day or three ago. We can be temperate with our disagreements, even as we hate what the left has in store for us. There are still a few people over there who are willing to talk with us — and vice versa — and I wouldn’t be so quick to toss that away.
The second item has to do with managing technical projects at work. I had a co-worker on whom I could count to have a perspective different from mine, generally in another direction. It was anything but left/right political, as both she and I were are decidedly right-of-center; we were and still are great friends (heard from her just recently). To get to my point: at project staffing time, I was in the habit of asking the people who pull my managerial strings if I could have her just 5 or 10 percent of the time (i.e., 2 or 4 hours a week, on average). She was familiar with what my people were doing, and I very much wanted her opinion to be voiced in meetings or to me personally. I valued her judgment, and even if I went another way, I came away with an expanded perspective on what we were doing and how we were going about it.
End of “two things”.
Back in the 1980s/1990s, I subscribed to The New Republic, because I honestly was willing to hear out what the other side was thinking. (That was very different from today, as back then things were a lot less polarized and emotional, except I suppose for the hard-liners.) I finally canceled my subscription because I saw no reason for me to pay to read people criticizing not just my point of view, not just my intelligence, but my *integrity*. ** Enough’s enough **. And if that’s what was underlying the sharply hostile reaction I wrote about in the first point, I understand, totally.
M J R. Yeah. Those accusing others of vile moral crimes also don’t think the accused have a right to object.
Saw a piece recently which made the point that, whatever progress blacks have made since the Civil war was done the old fashioned way. The new program is to make irredeemable, vile, racist white supremacists be nicer to them. Sort of like Sysiphus gets paid by the mile. No reason to finish.
Foolish me, when I was in high school and college, I thought it was my duty as a liberal to hear opposing points of view. I read “National Review” on that basis. I thought that was one of the ways you knew you were one of the good guys.
It wasn’t my imagination, though that open-mindedness wasn’t entirely perfect. Here’s a wonderful Buckley quote on the matter:
______________________________________________________
Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.
— William F. Buckley, Jr.
______________________________________________________
Of course, that’s ancient history now. Today’s liberals understand their duty is to prevent non-liberals from speaking and others from hearing.
I hope there are millions more like her and that they vote in the upcoming election.
Unfortunately, it’s a sad truth, if you hear others’ views, you might change your own.
Can’t have that.
That’s where I went wrong.
Eeyore: It’s not so much that they were subtler but that there were fewer venues for the truth to get out. When Drudge ran a story that that AP spiked, it was a secular change: time was that if the AP spiked a story, it stayed spiked. Likewise the way the media tried to ignore that Swift Boat vets and were forced to run stories or look like fools, or the way the memos exploded. They had gotten away with such things.
“One PJM writer speaks of taking over the world and leaving it ruthlessly alone.”
Sarah Hoyt, a science fiction writer, born and raised in Portugal but American at heart.
She got here as quick as she could, and ended up in Colorado Springs.
Her personal blog is a mix of political and, well, personal; her pieces at PJM are mostly political.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/
Her latest is a doozy.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/08/14/colorados-paste-eating-governor-polis/
Read through to the punchline, for the snark as well as the substance.
It’s getting harder to believe that the Babylon Bee is a parody site.
Food for thought in this one.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/08/12/change-change-change/
Neo: “I don’t know what causes that difference.” That is, the will to bear the social costs of going alone.
Courage is that rarest, yet most valuable of virtues because without it, none of the others are put into action.
So, why do people become heroes? Exercising courage despite high risks and daunting penalties?
Neo might have an opinion, and perhaps an expert one, on my next connection. I recall an old title in the psychiatry of PTSD. Here’s my memories’ caricatured recollection.
In the book “Achilles in Vietnam,” the author theorised that trauma victims of combat likely enjoyed deficits of motherly attunement. His thesis turned on the intuitive notion that great heroes, like the ancient Homeric warrior Achilles, benefited from early care-giving emotional attachment. But those with an ‘Achilles heel’ of a crushing inner vulnerability to action in the face of life or death combat were more likely to have lacked that developmentally strengthening early in life emotional support.
Now, as an aside to those who read this but don’t know, infants and toddlers do experience most every human emotion, but lack the words to convey them. The mother’s great early in life role is to function as an auxiliary consciousness, to intuit their needs (or even to fake understanding them). The very young find their bodies vulnerable and strange and painful, often.
They need a buddy to help them through it all, an early in life parallel to the experience of combat itself and the martial training ethic we see in war films today that emphasise primacy of “The Team.”
Thus, the summa query: what is the status of research on this significant question?
Put crudely, the Big Question is this: could adults with better, more empathic early in life experiences generate the foundations needed for greater capacity to exercise courage?
(Yeah. And put that Big way, suggests longitudinal and comparative intergenerational studies….Big research hurdles, and not years of data but decades. But it has been decades since “Achilles in Vietnam” came out.)
One last thought about the discussion of KeriSmith, here. She mentions Truth Seeking herself.
The weaponisation of SWJ perspectives emerged after PoMo perhonian(?) skepticism was overcome by educational group think and the assertion of absolutism. Does the move from epistemic miasma to political action imply recognition of a Truth Claim, and therefore the revaluation of Truth seeking?
One hopes so. As Jonathan Haidt, I think, properly understands political differences, the Left rejects any sacred common values and sees the Right as the toxic prisoner of too many. But the Right sees danger and madness in their totalising and empty and unmoored existence without any!
Perhaps a post revisiting Haidt’s insights for the present struggle would be valuable?
Ought to have posted as “T J”
“Every time you think things in Minneapolis couldn’t get worse, they do.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/08/minneapolis-requiring-businesses-destroyed-by-riots-to-pay-property-taxes-before-they-can-rebuild/
It may be too much to hope that some of the owners, as they leave, might consider the reasons why they are faced with this insanity, and change their voting habits when they get to their new locations.
Maybe.
“While Biden, seemingly overnight, now bills himself as tough on China, his administration is directly responsible for allowing the CCP to gain a foothold in American classrooms and subjecting American students to Chinese propaganda abroad.”
https://thenationalpulse.com/politics/uschinastrong-biden/
But will this news change anyone’s mind?
Or this?
https://thenationalpulse.com/politics/cuomo-adviser-ccp-foreign-agent/
Fantastic article! I’ve long thought personality traits have a lot to do with political position.
“A desire to fit in is the root of almost all wrongdoing”
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/desire-fit-root-almost-all-wrongdoing/
And—as expected—keeping it classy….
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hashtag-wrongtrump-trends-on-twitter-after-death-of-presidents-brother
(One can, sigh, imagine the deep disappointment….)
I am a changer. What is it about me that makes this possible? When all is said and done, it seems to come from an essential part of me that is perfectly expressed by an e.e. cummings poem:
“There is some shit I will not eat.” Even more, there is some shit I CANNOT eat.
AesopFan, the voters in Minneapolis won’t change. They’ll keep voting for the insanity. I see it every day.
What is killing the large towns and cities is chain stores. Once up on a time Minneapolis was run by people named Dayton and Pillsbury. They were part time council members, because they had businesses to run. They minded the budget and made sure the potholes got filled. But store managers don’t care about budgets or potholes.
Nowadays even the hardware stores are a chain, managed out of a building in the suburbs. We’re down to two independent full-service grocery stores; the third was bought out for the site by a chain. Chain gas stations can undercut an independent by underpricing on gas. They can afford to lose money on gas sales for a while. Independents cannot.
A restaurant build out costs at least $500,000 now. A chain can finance that. A new guy starting out? No way.
And if you look at the ruins in Minneapolis, it’s very clear. Walgreens stores were cleared to the pad very early, and they set up portable pharmacies. At least 3 of the five looted stores will never reopen as full service stores. The theft is just too high. They’ll set up drive thru pharmacies.
But stores like Uncle Hugo’s, the oldest independent SF bookstore in the country, can’t get a permit to clean up. Might be asbestos there, that means triple the cost. The next door dental office’s contractor knocked down salvagable walls and dumped their debris into Uncle Hugo’s. There’s a big dump fee savings if you do that!
No one on the Minneapolis city council ever met a payroll or worked in a productive job. They’re all activists and political pros. Why would a business owner want to do that? Yeah, the pay is decent since they made it full-time, but serious people have serious jobs and no patience for meeting with the bike lane mafia.
Chain stores are a cancer on the civic body. I didn’t used to think so. I was wrong.
Gordon Scott:
What do chain stores have to do with the far leftists on the city council who are voting for the things that are making the city unliveable? Plenty of GOP-run cities have lots of chain stores, but those cities don’t have far leftists in charge of the council and the mayorship, and they are doing okay.
Must read article by Yoram Hazony: https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/
Gordon Scott…”What is killing the large towns and cities is chain stores. Once up on a time Minneapolis was run by people named Dayton and Pillsbury. They were part time council members, because they had businesses to run. They minded the budget and made sure the potholes got filled. But store managers don’t care about budgets or potholes.”
I think that’s a worthwhile point. True, there are GOP-run cities that have the same mix of chain stores (and factories which are controlled from somewhere else), but over time, a de-skilling of local management….which will be accelerated by the current vogue for ‘big data’ and further emphasis on ‘push’ inventory systems where all restocking decisions are made centrally…will lead to a reduction in the number of well-connected and well-paid people who can actually get something done locally.
Except for the lawyers, and, in some places, the senior academics.
I think Gordon, Neo, and David are all right, coming at the problem from different angles. And there are good and bad elements on all sides.
The upside to having local business owners on the city council (or with their minions, who could be “assigned” to run for office) is that they have a vested personal interest in good city government — they are also the basis for the “machine” that we are familiar with (Tammany Hall, anyone?) — benevolent dictators to some extent, but there was a certain floor to the level of services provided to keep people voting for them.
Chain stores present an opening for the disconnect between city government and absentee owners; they don’t bother with local councils because there are just too many of them, and — as Gordon said — managers don’t really care. Even if they live locally, they most likely were recruited from elsewhere, and will go somewhere else when their stores are closed. (Yes, there are exceptions; I know some of them.)
Neo is correct that the ideology of the “pool” of candidates for city councils, and the inclination of the voters, is the most important factor in electing local governments.
However, as I’ve seen many other people remark over the years — for some reason (!), leftists have more time (and interest) in staffing positions where they can meddle in other people’s lives and exert control and power (anyone here live in an HOA? Case closed.)
As Gordon said, “serious people have serious jobs and no patience for meeting with the bike lane mafia” – which is what happens as cities grow and the leftist tilt of all large urban populations takes hold.
David sums that up nicely.
Note the relationship of commercial central planning to social & government central planning (and I would add non-profits, such as BSA & colleges, especially large state-wide systems): the people making the decisions have no “skin in the game” local to the effects of their decisions; all of their “consequences” are located in the nexus of other central planners (“Am I still in the club?”) — hence, the DC & corporate “bubbles” and the lack of accountability at upper levels for decisions that — as we have seen recently — end up killing businesses, cities, and individual people.
You can also see this in the spate of virtue-signalling corporate sign-ons to the mafias of today, with no regard to the actual sentiments of their customers — and thus we see different responses to said boilerplate in different areas of the country.