How did you change your political views?

[Richelieu]

I used to be much more to the left but life changed that. In the US i'd be a right wing Democrat i guess.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Er... I believed in doing things quickly.

I'm sure the women really liked that .

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Richelieu
In the US i'd be a right wing Democrat i guess.

We call them Republicans.

[Richelieu]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
We call them Republicans.

Can't call myself that. That would be grounds for deportation over here.

[St Leo]

I've always been a social liberal, but right now I am drifiting to left-wing economics as well.

[C0ckney]

used to be fairly left wing, then i saw the light

[Cruddy]

Travel helped. Living by my own wits helped. Meeting people from different social backgroundgrounds helped.

Politicial views are like cheese, they take time to mature.

[Odin]

I started out as a John McCain/Libertarian-style Republican, Then came 9-11 and Enron and I saw the light.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
Moderates. HA!

I was like you both.
Then I joined the service.
Saw the world.
Saw how things are.
Realized that I, just like you 2 are, was full of ****.

Thanks for your arrogant opinion.

[Berzerker]

I took what my folks taught me about not stealing to it's logical conclusion and became a libertarian.

[KrazyHorse]

Funny. That's why I'm a socialist.

[MichaeltheGreat]

I started out as a kid in the 60's as a Bobby Kennedy - MLK liberal who couldn't stand that dmaned Texas rancher. In my teens I moved sharply left through the third year of college (when I was 18), then I got sick of the vacuousness of most leftists. After that, I gradually moved right on economic issues, although I never could stand Reagan.

On most social and environmental issues, I pretty much stayed in the center of the Democratic party, so very little movement there. On privacy and personal moral matters, I'm fairly close to libertarian in my view that there's a lot of things that are just none of the government's business.

The biggest driver for me away from the left is that no matter how laudable the end goal is, the left usually manages enough ineptness and whininess to make me sick if I stayed in a room with them for too long.

[Maniac]

I started out very left-liberal, but as time progresses I'm becoming somewhat more authoritarian/right-wing (Currently 0.00 auth<->lib and -5 left on www.politicalcompass.org ). When I die of old age I'll probably be some conservative right-winger.

[Zkribbler]

I started out as a right-wing Republican but then saw a series of lights.

I was anti-abortion until a girl I knew in college died from having an illegal abortion. That death drove home two realizations: First, the mere fact that abortions were (then) illegal wasn't going to stop them from happening. Second, laws have unintended consequences...even sometimes ending people's lives.

I was also pro-Vietnam. Then someone asked me if I was for the war, why wasn't I over there fighting. I gave him some half-@ssed answer which sent him away, but it didn't satisfy me. I thought about it somemore and came to the conclusion that I supported the war enough to send others to fight but not enough to subject myself to that stupidity. And the closer I looked at that war, the more stupid it looked. There was no democracy, just a series of corrupt military dictators. Certainly nothing worth dying for.

Ecology was just beginning to emerge, with pollution's endangerment of the human race. Big business was ignoring the problem, willing to kill people for profits.

Ralph Nadar published "Unsafe at Any Speed" and was subjected to mudslinging attacks from the auto industry and big business in general.

I had some run-ins with my landlord's lawyers and with managers at my workplace, and found them to be lying, incompetent, bullying sons-of-beeswax. That pretty much destroyed any remaining illusions I had that people who were rich and powerful achieved that because they were morally and intellectually superior.

Conservatives were battling the civil rights movement. J. Edgar Hoover was calling Dr. Martin Luther King a communist.

National Guard troops opened fire on anti-war protesters at Kent State, wounding many. Four non-protesting students headed for class were killed. The Grand Jury blamed students for provoking the guardsmen.

Reagan won the governorship in California on an anti-student platform (among othe positions). When he took office, California was No. 1 in the nation in education. When Grey Davis took office (following a string of Republican governors), California was No. 49.


In short, I was driven from the Right by a realization that it was filled with a bunch of unprincipled, greedy bastards who would jettison fairness and compassion, who would let any number of people die, who would sell out the future of humanity, just to make a few lousy bucks.

So if we "little folks" wanted to be left alone without some overload trying to run our lives, wanted to have equal opportunity, want to have hard work rewarded with sucess, then our salvation was with the liberals.

[Rex Little]

In high school I was a Lyndon Johnson liberal, mostly because of the influence of my American History teacher. In my graduation speech I came out for big government and the Vietnam War (this was 1966). Can't point to any one thing that changed me; age, experience and time away from that teacher probably all contributed. At age 23 I read Ayn Rand's books; by that time I was already a libertarian, and Rand just helped me clarify and organize my thinking.