Help! For liberals/progressives/leftists who once held conservative/right-wing beliefs— [View all]

What caused you to change your worldview? Can you write a bit about it?

My purpose in asking you to do this is to get some idea of how change in political beliefs happens. I hope to get a variety of personal narratives for the purpose of identifying any common threads in the change process, etc.

I’ll start.

When I was an undergraduate, between the years 1962-66, I was a self-identified conservative (although my actual positions were closer to libertarianism). I wasn’t religious, I was an environmentalist, I wholeheartedly endorsed the values of ACLU and I participated and believed in the civil rights movement, but I thought that government posed the greatest threat to freedom. I was, in other words, a naïve, idealistic kid who somehow thought that conservative policies best advanced my values. I pretty much supported the war in Vietnam because I thought we were defending the rights and freedoms of the people against the advancing tide of Communism.

What changed me? I went to Vietnam. I saw what we were doing there. I saw the brutality of war. I saw that we were destroying that land and its people, not saving them. By happenstance, while on my way to Australia for R&R, I ran into a party of oil company geologists who told me about how much oil there was in the South China Sea.

I came back opposing the war. And once this first chink was opened in my conservative armor, the rest of my conservatism began to fall rapidly away. I entered grad school after Vietnam and started reading about the history of Indochina. I took a course in East Asian cultural anthropology. I was surrounded by the quasi-hippie culture of UW-Madison (pot-smoking, long-haired people in serious pursuit of intellectual and academic goals). Within 3 months I was a liberal, and within 6, a democratic socialist.

Now please be so kind as to tell us your story.