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What’s Your Conservative Issue?
We sometimes talk here about “conservative converts”: people who were once liberal and were in some way or other “mugged by reality” such that they ended up conservative. For others of us who were mostly raised in a conservative mold, I find that there is usually at least one important issue that we feel on a particularly deep and visceral level, which has been defining of us as conservatives since before we even really understood what the implications were.
For some people it’s taxes. Or the right to bear arms. For some, respect for the military is a core defining principle. Some are raised with a deep and abiding respect for rugged individualism, and a core belief in our right to decide for ourselves what we believe and how we wish to live. Some were shaped from a very early age by a horror for the injustice of abortion and a yearning for a culture of life.
These are in no way mutually exclusive, but I suspect many or most of us, on reflection, can name some issue or other that shaped us as conservatives from a particularly young age. Many of these points end up feeding into each other as we mature, so it’s mostly one of those no-wrong-answer questions that’s just interesting to consider psychologically. And yet, sometimes when disagreements divide us or when political coalitions start to break down, we do discover where our deepest “principled” allegiances lie.
I have an answer that I’m willing to explain, but I’d first love to hear other people’s. What’s your “original” conservative issue?
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By the way, Rachel – you have a talent for the provocative question. That type of insight is rare.
My absolute disgust with identity politics.
Excellent comment. I think that I was born a conservative myself. I can’t pull out one thing out of the matrix. If I had to choose, the life issues are currently most on my agenda, and the foreign policy issues have been forced on us by this incompetent administration and Islamic terrorism.
Thanks, Brian! Interesting that Bork would have been such a turning point for you. I don’t think that many people really appreciated what was happening there, but you’re quite right that it was a good illustration of how unified our progressive power elite were becoming. Would that more people had recognized that at an earlier stage in the day!
The election of FDR whom even his friend Churchill described as “a third rate” intellect and who left a lot of 21st century victims and deficits from his poorly thought- out policies.