until progressive came to mean fucking communism, race based original sin guilt, deplatforming of people even criticizing deplatforming people even if they generally agreed on most other values, everyone’s a Nazi, etc.
None of those things is how I see leftism at all. That all just sounds like stuff Fox News/Breitbart wants you to believe. Sorry to hear you fell down that rabbit hole.
Here are some stories from people who switched to the left sometime in their lifetime:
When I was younger (say, in my 20s), I don’t know if I was really liberal or conservative, so much as naive and unaware. I’d grown up white, male, and solidly middle-class, in a small city which was, at that time, extremely homogenous. I voted for Reagan in ’84 (when I was 19), and Bush in ‘88, but I don’t believe I really thought too much about it.
I went to college at a particularly liberal school, in a stridently liberal city (Madison, Wisconsin). And, I used to make fun of the rabid liberal activists who were always present on campus, protesting against one thing or another (CIA involvement in Central America, ROTC presence on campus, nuclear weapons, etc.) I remember, in that time, having a long conversation with a good friend about affirmative action – I was against it, because I didn’t understand why I, as a white guy, should be penalized for the sins of past generations. I had a hard time comprehending things like homosexuality and non-cis gender orientations, because (I thought) I didn’t know anyone like that, and culture had told me that being gay, or being what we now call transgender, was deviant and/or sinful.
Looking back, I was clueless. My eyes finally began to open when one of my college roommates (a guy who is still a good friend) came out as gay.
Over the years that followed, I finally started to realize just how little I understood about how priviledged my position in life was. I started to get to know people who weren’t white, and people who’d grown up in very different situations from my own. I discovered that, yeah, I did, in fact, know quite a few non-straight people, and non-cis people. (I also came to eventually realize that I was not, in fact, strictly heterosexual, nor strictly cis-gendered.)
So, yeah, not only did I become more liberal, but I became pretty flaming liberal. I now strongly believe that our current system and culture are still fundamentally, inherently biased against anyone who isn’t a straight, white, Christian man, with at least a fair amount of money and education.
I have friends who are conservative, and I respect the views of the ones who are intelligent and reasoned in their views about it. But, when I look at how “conservatism” gets expressed in America these days, I see:
- Blatant attempts to impose a conservative Christian theocracy
- A philosophy that is deepening income inequality
- A willingness to ignore the carnage of gun violence due to holding the Second Amendment as sacrosanct
- A willful distrust of science and ridiculous rationalization about climate change
I’m only 36, so I suppose I’ve got time to go any number of directions still. But I was at my most conservative when I first became politically aware, and I’ve been drifting steadily to the left ever since. Like a couple others here have mentioned, I grew up with certain advantages that I took for granted. I worked hard and saw my hard work produce favorable results, so I naively assumed everyone could just do that.
The more I see of the world, the more I learn just how good I’ve always had it. For example, I was already quite liberal by the time I went to law school, but I still didn’t really understand what drew inner-city kids to join gangs. I hadn’t given it much thought, and in the back of my mind I guess I assumed it had something to do with wanting to be cool. But then, during an internship, I worked on this case that shook me to my core and still haunts me. A young man was arrested for robbing a liquor store. Because he was a known gang member, he got slapped with a gang enhancement on top of that. But in looking back through his file, I learned the story of how he came to join that gang. As a boy of 12, he’d been sitting on his front stoop playing with his baby sister. A rival gang drove by, and seeing him, assumed he was a member of the gang that controlled his street; apparently he was tall for his age. They shot him. He survived, but no arrests were ever made. The gang he was assumed to be a member of invited him to join, without the usual initiation, since he’d already taken a bullet for them. He accepted. Anyone who wants to tell me they wouldn’t have done the same is kindly invited to shove it.
The great author John Varley (who posted at this board exactly one time back in the day) said in Steel Beach (paraphrasing) “a liberal is a conservative who has just been thrown in jail. A conservative is a liberal who just got mugged.” YMMV [your mileage may vary] as to how true you find that but it has always stuck with me.
Me. I grew up in the south, went to Catholic high school and adopted a very libertarian point of view which I held till the presidency of George W Bush. It was during his administration, built on lies and incompetence, that I had a series of revelations that led me to a hard leftward turn. The first is that the incentive of enlightened self interest had very very little actual real world sway with those in power. I had always figured that the wealthy by and large understood they had an obligation to be a good steward of their employees, natural resources they depend on and in general not kill the goose that lays them golden eggs. Then I watched Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with attendant blatant profiteering and the 2008 financial collapse. These people would sell their own mothers for another zero on their account balances.
The second revelation I had is that while the left was often branded wild eyed idealists with no ‘common sense’ or grounding in how the ‘real world’ works, over and over it was the right wing that put wishful thinking over good public policy. Against abortion? Excellent, provide comprehensive sexual education and free access to birth control. Those are proven methods that work, but are fought against tooth and nail. Why? Religious convictions not based in facts whatsoever. Against youth violence and the drug trade? Pay for after school programs, free childcare and social services.. it’s cheaper than the costs of crime and incarceration Every Single Time. Legalize pot, prohibitions do not work and only pour money into the hands of ruthless and desperate people. The right wants none of those things, just more cops and jails. Don’t think the US should be the cops of the world? I agree, let’s cut military spending and use that money for other more productive purposes as we spend more than the next 20 countries combined and are already very safe thanks to the good fortunes of geography, size and nuclear deterrent. But, no… billions upon billions and never accountability. Right wing policies do not work, it’s that simple.
My parents divorced when I was in the 6th grade. The next year, my mother attempted suicide for the first time (I know of at least two other times, as well). My father was one of those macho guys who didn’t want his wife to work, so she had no skills to fall back on when they split. She didn’t even finish high school because she dropped out to get married.
As a result, I grew up poor. We were on Medicaid and food stamps and lived in government housing. We were in the free lunch and free schoolbook programs.
Because of the lack of skills or education, my mother took a job in a fast food restaurant working third shift. Many times, the only food we had was what she brought home that they were about to throw out. She did all that while trying to get her GED and trying to put three sons through school. None of us ended up dead, drugged out, or in prison, and some of the places we lived very well could have changed that.
She went back to school after getting her GED and became a dental assistant. Within a few years, she’d studied up and became a nurse.
I give her full credit for that. That’s an amazing accomplishment. She was also the toughest woman I’ve ever met. 1999, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Luckily, only a lumpectomy was needed. She had the surgery, then checked herself out of the hospital against medical advice the next day. She had me drive her to another hospital because her granddaughter was about to be born C-section, and she was not going to miss that. She went home, took the rest of the weekend off, and went back to work the following Monday. She refused to take chemo. During work, she’d go to the hospital and get her radiation treatment, then go back to work (whereas if I go to the store and the bank on the same day, I need a nap).When she died in 2015, it was a heart attack. I think the cancer was afraid to return.
I mention all this because I firmly believe that her struggle is exactly why I’m a liberal. I know what it’s like to grow up needing that safety net that welfare can provide. I’ve experienced the exact reasons that we need to fund programs that are aimed at healthcare and making sure that all kids have the chance to grow up not wondering when they’re going to be able to eat again. And making sure that they have their own chances to better their situations to break the cycle of poverty and hunger and illness.
I’ve lived it. And I don’t want any other family to have to go through that. I’m perfectly willing to give a few more bucks to the government so that sick people can get healthcare and a hungry child can know that they’re going to have a meal.
My mother used the system the way it’s supposed to be used. My family benefitted from it. I don’t mind paying it forward so someone else can have a chance, too.
Very conservative in the 1990s, now the complete opposite. It was all the lying that got to me - even in the 1990s, the GOP was a cesspool of lies, justifications, and rationalizations, which really exploded with the 2000 election crisis when they went all in on gaslighting… and, frankly, have never let up on the deceit.
I used to be much more conservative than I am now. I believed in trickle-down economics, tax cuts paid for themselves, social safety net programs were only encouraging laziness, unions were all bad, the environmental movement was a bunch of whackos who were hurting business, the Dems were the party of reverse racism, Bush went into Iraq because they had nuclear weapons….you name it, and I fell for it.
The 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq War’s results that played out between 2003-2008 made me finally wake up. I voted for Romney in 2012, but by then, I was losing hope in the movement. By 2016, I was completely out of Republican politics and suspicious of any “conservative” candidate. Currently, I consider myself a political moderate. I think government has a place in people’s lives where it can help. But I don’t want it so large that it constricts the private sector too much, if that makes any sense.
The conservative movement in the US is a fraud. Their economic and most of their social doctrine is a lie. And they have become a cult-of-personality type movement, and have shown themselves to have no principles. I think there could be a serious conservative movement in the US that could offer another way to govern. But it’s been hijacked. So, lately my votes have been for Democrats. It will remain that way until further notice.
Don’t be surprised when you start purity testing and bullying people out of your fucking group and one day end up with everyone against you because you pushed them the fuck out.
Gee, I thought you were talking about the left…
