How Did You Become Conservative?
Richard Fulmer ·
July 27, 2012 at 2:01am
When I was a kid, it was common wisdom that conservatives were stupid. But I grew up watching Firing Line with my father, so I knew that there were two intelligent conservatives in the world: William F. Buckley, Jr. and my dad. My one ambition in life was to grow up to become the world's third intelligent conservative. Of course, when I grew up, I found that the position had already been filled (along with the next several million positions).
What's your story?
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Comments:
Sep '10
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
Although I grew up admiring Winston Churchill, I dallied with liberalism in my college years and early twenties under the influence of leftist professors and friends. Like Rob Long, I began to realize that everything the liberals were saying about Ronald Reagan was wrong--dead wrong--and I began thinking for myself again.
Nov '10
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
There are several points I can think of. The first is as a child, when I learned what abortion was and my instinctual reaction was that it was barbaric. I haven't changed at all on that point.
The second was in high school when I became friends with an archetypal teenage-anarcho-socialist. Even at a young age I could tell that anarchism was far too idealistic to operate in the real world, and the more I talked to him the more I realized the same was true of socialism. Basic questions like "How do anarchists prevent people from hurting each other?" and "Doesn't equalizing outcomes regardless of quality of work discourage the productive?" Neither my friend nor his cohort could answer these questions coherently.
And the final ones were during the Gingrich years when I learned what a "welfare queen" was and what affirmative action was. I initially was astounded that making people work for their benefits and treating the races equally were controversial ideas.
Dec '10
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
In high school I read and reviewed Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was an eye-opener for me because it was the first time I had ever seen marijuana talked about in a positive light. Turns out the mohasky wasn't as bad as everyone said it was and I began to be suspicious of everything I'd been taught in school. I started reading Hunter Thompson and adopted his libertarian rowdiness rather than his sometimes lefty politics. I did my undergrad at the University of Babylon at Pyongyang (University of Colorado Boulder) and started out in International Affairs. My paper about how the best way to convert Cuba was to end the embargo and embrace it with capitalism received a C- because it hadn't established that Cuban Communism was actually bad. That soured me. I changed my major to Spanish (still taught by commies) and joined the College Republicans. I spent a semester in Spain and was in Germany in the lead up to the 2nd War in Iraq. The anti-Americanism solidified my foreign policy views. Re-encountered Jesus when I returned to the states and abandoned libertarianism for good old-fashioned Conservatism.
Feb '11
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
From the Southwest side of Chicago, my family and neighbors are Democrats. They weren't ideological - they were devotees of the machine. Dad declared for Reagan in the eighties. Otherwise there were some moments that formed me into an early conservative:
Sep '11
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
Love it!
(And I'm not even a grandparent.)
Dec '10
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
Like Irving Kristol, I was mugged by reality. I started working in 1974. I saw, first hand the ravages of stagflation. Growing up and living in NYC, I witnessed the decline and fall of a great city due to the liberal policies of John Lindsay and his successors of feckless liberal Democrats. Being Jewish from NYC you can guess what my political heritage was. All the dogma I was taught both formally in college and informally from family just did not comport with reality, from the economic disasters of the Nixon/Ford/Carter policies to, especially the social pathologies of the poor. Searching for an alternative I picked up George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty". That was the revelation! I proudly cast my first Republican vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Mar '11
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
Percival: Growing up the child of my parents would make anyone of average intelligence or better a conservative.
It took me a little longer.
The biggest thing was ethics class, and my picking a fight with people whom I agreed with because they wouldn't leave the mousy little girl who was opposed to abortion alone. She wasn't very eloquent and they made great sport of beating her up intellectually.
I didn't like it. They should pick on someone else, I thought. Somebody who can argue back and pull on the edges of their arguments.
So I gave them a more worthwhile target. And I discovered that their arguments weren't very good. I convinced myself they were wrong. · Jul 26 at 2:53pm
Edited on Jul 26 at 2:54pm
As a lonely defender of Life (in a 'Catholic' HS religion class, no less!) in 1971 NY, I thank you. The nun who led the class tried to comfort me afterwards by saying my opponents didn't really believe what they said. I knew their position was indefensible: but feeling like a weirdo geek didn't feel all that great, either.
Mar '11
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
Bumper sticker worthy!
Jun '12
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
I grew up in a kind of christian ghetto: large family, relatively poor, but very happy nonetheless, and mostly insulated from the outside world. I truly believed that, at birth, most people were like my family: honest, kind, loving, just plain good people. Then I grew up, and got married.
And had kids.
Don't get me wrong; I love my kids, really, I do, but I saw every evil impulse I have ever entertained (and a few I'd never even thought of) acted out on the carpet right in front of me. Anyone who questions the doctrine of the depravity of man has never spent much time with a two-year-old.
More than anything else, raising five kids has made me conservative.
Nov '11
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
As John Maynard Keynes once quipped, “In the long run we are all dead.” But having children leads to the understanding that in the long run others are alive. Kicking the can down the road no longer seems like such a good idea when it’s your kids who will be left to deal with it.
Edited on July 28, 2012 at 6:16amJul '12
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
"On January 20th, [1973] there will be approximately 30 seconds when Nixon isn't President. Enjoy it while it lasts!!" said my father when I was 13 years old. I enjoyed those 30 seconds.
And Watergate was a blast! I spent the summer of 1974 glued to the TV watching the hearings and hoping Nixon would be caught. When Nixon resigned, it seemed too good to be true.
In 1976, I wondered "Who is this crazy old coot who thinks he can be President!? He's an ACTOR!!" I briefly rooted for Jerry Brown and then became a big Jimmy Carter fan. We needed change and Carter was the man to do it!
I defended President Carter long after others had given up on him, but his weakness in the hostage crisis made me throw in the towel. We needed someone else! As a registered independant, I briefly rooted for Ted Kennedy, George H. W. Bush and John Anderson. I was disappointed when it came down to a choice between Reagan and Carter. I held my nose and voted for Reagan.
Reagan started to amaze me from his first day in office and I never looked back!
Apr '11
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
I'm a third-generation Washingtonian. My mother occasionally referred to FDR as "that man", and said that the country started to go to Hell when they air-conditioned the Capitol building and began income tax withholding. We subscribed to the Post, the Times-Herald, and the Star. I read the op-ed pages and found people like George Sokolski and James Kilpatrick made more sense.
I started high school the Fall JFK was elected. I felt some ethnic-based thrill at the "Kennedy Clan" hype, but my aesthetic sense kept me from buying into the myth and the hysteria: I realized how insulting the propagandists were to expect me to be transported by joy because of some demographic affiliation. At the beginning of high school I thought of myself as a liberal, because "liberal" was good. Then my father gave me a copy of Conscience of a Conservative.
The process didn't end, but the first phase did, when I discovered National Review in the PX in Vietnam, along with the Nation and New Republic for comparison. By the time I got back home, I was a stone conservative.
Edited on July 28, 2012 at 7:04amMay '10
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
My parents were raving 60's hippie liberals. But my dad's family came from Poland after the Nazi invasion and had family still there, so the evils of Communism were pretty clear to me.
Three things happened.
1. Ronald Reagan #1. Jimmy Carter was a wuss and should have turned Tehran into a parking lot. We all knew it, even liberal high school students. When Reagan was elected and the hostages came home, the gears started turning.
2. Ronald Reagan #2. The Berlin Wall coming down. Liberal or not, I hated communism. I traveled to Poland and the Soviet Union in 1987, and it was a soul-wrenching experience. I cheered and cheered and cheered when the wall fell. The gears started turning a bid faster.
3. Forced enrollment in the The Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies by the fellow in the next cubicle at work. Sure, El Rushbo was bombastic and over the top. But he actually made sense. He used reason and was rational. And underneath everything, I believe in rational. I am an engineer by schooling. What matters is what works. Effectiveness matters. Liberalism doesn't work.
Jun '12
Re: How Did You Become Conservative?
My dad was a Democrat, WWII vet, who was actually very politically astute and while I didn't realize it until adulthood, was very conservative. He always voted Democrat, but talked like Ronald Reagan. It was the way I was raised. He was always writing his congressmen, and spoke up whenever he thought something was wrong. At the time, when we were kids, he was embarrassing. Now that I am an adult, I find myself doing some of the same things. I have noticed that sometimes all it takes is for one person in a group to speak up and all of a sudden the dialog changes. It can go from PC to a real conversation quick.
He worked as a civil servant on an airbase and was continually written up for not wearing his seat belt. When he retired, at his party, he was given a seatbelt by his boss. He died in 95. He hated to be told what to do by government.
My mom was also conservative witnessed by the way she lived, but was quiter about it.