Hey, I didn’t vote to let you in yet 
It is strange that all their fantasies involve liberals having sex-hmm…
Who’s bangin’ who now?
Elephants having sex is a popular youtube viewing experience.
Just saying.
Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept him, one of us, one of us, sorta kinda one of us.
Whom. Who’s bangin’ *whom *now.
Oh, NOW the fucking grammar police show up.
You know who is almost worse than them ? 
Well by that sense I myself might also be something of a radical leftist, in the sense that I also think many of their goals are laudible and one of the main reasons to oppose them is that human nature makes many of them utopian and unattainable. But I don’t think that’s the same thing that the OP is talking about.
So in theory, if you could come up with a system in which everyone worked according to his ability and received according to his need, I’m probably all for it (subject to what else might be sacrificed to achieve that). I think the inevitable results are what you see under communist regimes - people are not working according to their abilities or receiving according to their needs. But it’s not that I object to being on the same side of the issue as Stalin and Mao - it’s just that I think this is the inevitable result of trying to impose that type of system.
So in your case, if you came to realize that any radical leftist movement would inevitably contain “too many people who were lethal to any sort of success that [you’d] want to be part of”, then that’s rational. If you were just turned off by the particular radical leftists you encountered at the time and disgusted at being on the same side of the issues as them, then it’s not. It sounds like you’re saying the first, but that’s not what I’m getting from the OP here.
Today’s preferred word is schlonging. Not bangin’.
If your disbelief that conservatives can be genuine leads you to liberalism, you’re in for a rude awakening on the other side of the fence.
Yours is a better example, although now, for me, it’s hypothetical. But I can see it working out that way.
When the people “on my side” act badly, it does make me question my beliefs. I had trouble with this in the sixties, with the violent wing of the left, such as the Chicago riots in '68.
Today, I believe strongly in the moral cause behind “Black Lives Matter,” but the rioting and looting alienates me greatly, and, while it doesn’t make me actually change my views, it pretty much silences me. It leaves me without a sense of moral leadership. The rioting has cut me adrift from the central moral core of the movement, even as I still believe in it as an abstract value.
I hate it when people I want to agree with act badly! It leaves me feeling lost and rudderless.
I’ve had a similar political journey to the OP.
When I became politically aware, it was the 70s, and a lot of objectively very intelligent young people was very enthusiastic about the economic system of places like Albania, and about armed revolution as a means of getting through ideas that did not have democratic support.
And talking to them, and asking them “Thats very consistent and works well in theory, but what happens in practice?” didn’t really penetrate. The whole notion that real-world experience should be a factor in their vast mental edifices of theory about how things should work… it just wasn’t relevant.
To me, being a conservative back then meant taking a good look at the real world, and basing your beliefs on what you saw. What worked, what didn’t.
Today…I see the same kind of foaming-at-the-mouth delusion among a lot of people who call themselves conservatives. Evolution, climate change and most of all health care, they got their own internally consistent belief systems and real world experience just isn’t relevant if it contradicts it.
Asking “What happens in practice?” is met with exactly the same blank look.
The only thing Phelps supports these days is six feet of dance trodden urine saturated dirt.
Perhaps the problem is that you’re looking to other people to validate the things you want or choose to believe in. If you feel that A is a preferable political belief to B, it shouldn’t matter how badly some on the A side behave or how well some on the B side behave. There are hot-headed agitators and rational, level-headed people on both sides of the political spectrum. You need to have the strength of your convictions (albeit with the ability to modify or abandon them should facts and reason suggest you should) and believe what you think is right, no matter how anyone on either side behaves. They’re really two separate issues.
It’s true, I do that. I don’t really see it as a problem, though. I don’t exist in a vacuum. Many of my views were formed in the first place by exposure to both good reasoning (for) and bad reasoning (against.) I heed the good, and react against the bad.
Obviously, the more difficult challenge is when people I admire and respect and whom I know are intelligent and educated…hold views opposite to my own. That’s really dismaying.
Having idiots on my own side is much less dismaying, but it still forces me to re-evaluate my views.
Magiver! He’s the one I was thinking of that I get mixed up with these guys. But he’s not the good one. He’s pretty reliably in the “stupid and also hostile” category. Definitely Martin Hyde who’s conservative but intelligent and respectful about it. Glad Magiver just posted in a thread I’m in to remind me who I was getting confused about!
It’s brobably a combination. I don’t want to hold myself up as some paragon of rational thought I’m still a monkey at heart who wants to fit into my monkey tribe, and when my fellow monkeys fling too much poo (I realize the metaphor is stretching thin, bear with me, I’m almost done), it kinda makes me want to go off and be a Lone Monkey.
When I heard about a billion monkeys bangin’ away at a billion typewriters I really never thought I’d get to read the result …
Why should educated people come to the same conclusion about certain political issues? Even if each were perfectly rational and highly educated different people have different sets of axioms. Or may weigh subjective values slightly differently.
That’s a point. So many ambitious people, hoping to curry the favor of the rich and powerful, purport lefty/liberal views as a career move. Sort of thing that looks real good on your permanent record.