I don’t know where I fit. I started as a Libertarian and have moved left on economic issues and right on civil issues.
Core beliefs haven’t changed much. But the parties and policies I support have changed greatly. Mostly, I’ve become more pragmatic in my old age.
Started pretty conservative - I blame my evangelical Christian upbringing. Now I’m pretty liberal. I blame Jesus, that damned hippy.
I feel precisely the opposite way.
Edit: about myself, that is.
+1, with the caveat that I actually started out as a conservative, if you want to be technical, in that I supported William F. Buckley for NYC Mayor in 1965, because I liked the lively way he wrote.
I was 12 in 1965. By 1969 I was a full-fledged Yippie. (Full-fledged=my first beard.)
Started out pretty conservative and Republican. My views have become much more moderate in the last 40 years or so, especially on social issues. I’m still Republican but I’m getting pretty tired of the right wing of my party and my party’s right-ward shift, but I’m not quite comfortable enough to vote Democrat yet.
Depends. On some issues I have moved to the more liberal side. On others, I have become conservative.
My dad still listens to Rush Limbaugh. That gives you an idea of how conservative an example I had. When I was younger, I didn’t have all that many political arguments with my dad. Now…?
Depending on the issue, I’m a total loony lefty. On some issues, I’m a frothing at the mouth righty. While it seems like the two are diametrically opposed, I have very consistent ideals. It’s the political “sides” that have attitudes that are all over the damn place. My ideals: always bias toward maximum possible freedom for individuals; always go with the facts when making policy, not some bullshit ideological, dogmatic, or any pre-determined bias.
I was a pinko at age 12, but mostly just to enrage my father. I then spent most of my life as a disinterested centrist. Although I never actually voted for a Republican, I accepted Nixon’s Liddy and Reagan’s Poindexter with minimal irritation. It was when I became aware of hypocrites like Gingrich, Cheney and Rove that I became enraged, but I remained centrist, just extremely anti-Republican.
I’ve always been an avid reader, but only in retirement did I get a chance to read much on current affairs – a low-priority subject when I was just a computer nerd. This reading definitely pushes me leftward.
My dad also listens to Rush, and watches Fox News as well. Growing up, I had fun political discussions with my dad, though we saw eye to eye on a lot of things. Now that he’s almost 80, half deaf and easily agitated, and I’m a pinko liberal commie in his eyes (though I’m not), those political discussions aren’t fun anymore. He tends to yell a lot.
I started out as a conservative because my father was a conservative. During Nixon’s campaign my father met the man and told me that Nixon was the smartest man in the USA. That caused me to take a hard look at everything my father stood for and that was what caused me to become liberal.
My moderation is much more extreme than it used to be.
I used to be conservative. My religious beliefs collapsed in my early 20’s, and I had some life experiences that made me much more sympathetic to people of other races and social classes. After accounting for those changes, there’s not much of the conservative belief system that can withstand serious scrutiny. Fiscal conservatism? Sure, yeah, whatever that means if you want to raise taxes on the poor to pay for bombers that cost more than Iceland’s GDP.
When I got to law school, I thought I was a liberal. Prior to that, I’d been in the Air Force, and I was pretty clearly the most liberal person among my peers and co-workers. Once I got to law school, I encountered actual liberals. My views did not change, but my positioning on the spectrum relative to my peers changed considerably. I went from the left of the military to the right of my law school class.
Hmmm… I’d say that I started out as a moderate liberal (at least by Massachusetts standards), moved rightward around the end of high school, more libertarian through college, then steadily moved left for a bit, and have shifted around various points in the left, from progressive Democrat to a bit shy of anarcho-syndicalist. Probably somewhere in the political vicinity of Eugene Debs these days. I’d like to think I have maintained both a heart and a mind.
For a very long time out of high school I could be accurately described as a ‘South Park Republican’. I held socially libertarian views and was a strong fiscal conservative. In general I believed that government had more potential to abridge individual liberties than other social forces and should be held strongly in check… primarily via the the purse. One can look back at my first posts here and see. Then 9-11 happened and I began to see a slide towards an increasingly authoritarian and intrusive government led by the party in power, the Republicans, supposedly conservative champions of small government. Then I watched as two wars were mismanaged, wasteful and pissed all over the Powell doctrine. The increasingly close alliance with the religious right, the advent of Fox news’ brand of partisan propaganda and the excesses of the corporate elite exposed by the economic collapse just sealed the deal. You see, I had always thought, naively, that successful people could be relied upon in general to make decisions based on what I thought of as ‘enlightened self-interest’. Surely, I thought, an intelligent and ambitious person understands you can’t kill the goose that lays golden eggs and eat its liver with thousand dollar a bottle wine. It was shown to me over and over how wrong I was. It was about the time of the healthcare debate and Citizen’s United decision that I firmed in my belief that our country faces an existential danger in the greed of the wealthy elite. It’s not the government’s purses that must be carefully managed, it’s the concentration of resources into the hands of too few.
I started out with the simple philosophy when Reagan ran for President of "rat fuck the moral majority (aka tea party).
I have since matured to add “vote for anyone fiscally responsible”. And as a Keynesian economist by both education and experience, that does not mean things like running wars off balance sheet, unfunded Medicare bennies for votes or slashing government spending in the face of the biggest slowdown since the depression. YMMV
I find myself interested less and less every election cycle. It seems no matter who says what or promises anything, after the election it is Business As Usual. Neither major party really represents my beliefs, yet each have positiions that I care about and both have totally failed in regard to them. :mad: Left is too far left, Right is too far right.
I’m not even sure if I will bother to vote anymore. Maybe if its on the way to the store. :rolleyes:
I have some issues that I have been conservative on and some that I have been liberal on. They have not changed much over the years. Can’t really say I’m a moderate, though.
I started out liberal, went through a libertarian phase in college, then gradually moved to democratic socialism.