Just remember that Republicans used to be the moderates, and there are many ‘Republicans’ who are pissed at the ‘Republican party’. You might not have changed as much as the party has.
I was a very vocal proud Republican, pro-life, feminism-eschewing, Santorum-Bush supporter, and a warblogger for a long spell even after the invasion of Iraq. The only place I broke substantially with the party was on the issue of gay rights.
I’m now a very vocally pro-choice feminist, Kerry then Obama voter, anti-war, proud Progressive, registered Democrat, and even more radically pro-LGBT equality than ever before. Save that issue, I’ve done a full 180 from where I once was.
One of these things is not like the other?
I grew up in a Republican conservative religious family, and most of my family is/was racist.
I am nothing like any of this, but my biggest change of opinion concerns religion. I was a Creationist, for cryin’ out loud! I was obsessed for years with studying the Bible and religion and history. Studying them all at once is what changed my opinion. How could it not? I’m atheist now, and try really really hard not to be one of the bitter angry ones.
I used to think that Star Trek: The Next Generation was the best series in the franchise. Now, I realize that it’s so obviously Deep Space Nine.
THIS
That is a reasonable evolution of thought. It’t not like you were praising Voyager.
The biggest change I’ve experienced in the last 5 years or so is an awareness of how transitory and fragile things can be. Friends coping with life-threatening medical emergencies. People who aren’t close friends but are in my social circle dying. Watching my kids grow and seeing how helpless they are. Friends who have disabled children. Friends getting divorced and the sadness and hurt of their children. Friends in the grip of addictions or other out of control irrational behavior that they can’t seem to stop. And realizing that I’m not so different than anybody else.
Everything seems much more contingent and arbitrary nowadays. I’m doing OK now, and I’m supporting my wife and kids, but who can say how long that will last? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. And it happens all the time. I used to feel a bit superior, and much more confident in my abilities, and anyway if I screwed up what did it matter? Now I see how fallible I am, and how fallible all human beings are. Not that I was ever really egotistical, since I could see my own foibles and shortcomings pretty clearly. But all this is weighing much more heavily now.
Now I’ve gone and made myself a bit depressed.
This.
Lemur, you said what I wanted to, much better than I ever could. But don’t let it depress you. I’ve learned to be so very grateful for how lucky I’ve been so far. You hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Once you’ve done that, just enjoy the ride! Life’s a scary carnival ride. Sometimes short, sometimes long. But always with it’s ups and downs. Enjoy every minute of it while it lasts. Whether you get 5 years or 105, it’s always over much too soon.
One of the big reasons for my leftward slide was watching more and more Republicans embracing Santorum’s hatefulness toward non-hetero people, if not his strident way of talking about us. All of a sudden, with Santorum’s lead, bigotry toward me and people like me became a wedge issue, and try as I might to take a Log Cabin Republican sort of stance, I just really couldn’t do it over the long term.
I’ve been through quite a lot of changes in the past ten years. Undoubtedly the biggest is that I switched from being a militant atheist to being a firm believer in the saving power of Jesus Christ. As to why it happened, it would be a long story and I’ve have to report nearly everything that’s happened to me in those ten years, but certainly it began when I stopped taking everything that I’d learned in school or gotten from the media at face value, and instead started investigating the world around me.
Another big change would switching from a left-wing political perspective where I believed that government could fix (I voted for Nader in 2000) anything to more ambiguous politics; I now generally believe that the founding fathers were onto something when they limited the power of the federal government. This change arose mainly from learning about past failures of government, both in the USA and other countries.
And then there’s a chance similar to what Sattua described. While I was in college, I felt that academics were vastly better than everyone else and that most problems were caused by the rabble not listening to us. Now I have much more trust in the everyday wisdom of ordinary people, and much less in academic snobs, many of whom, I now know, devote their entire life to nonsensical research in meaningless fields.
When I was young I was pretty liberal, but only in a child-of-the-sixties didn’t-really-understand sort of way. As I came into my young adulthood my views moved right. As I grow older, my views shift left. Mind you, I never really far from center.
I have been through several phases of religious belief from devout Christian to atheist and back and forth between to a more agnostic approach now.
Hell.
While I still see the possibility of an eternal conscious Hell in the light of the perfect fairness & kindness of God, I lean more to the eventual extiquishing or rehabilitation of those sent there. I never believed Heaven was exclusively for Christians, though.
Politically, using a Buckley(1)-to-Bircher(10) conservatism scale, I’ve gone from 8 to a 5.5. Only a big shift from a Bircher perspective.
Make that a 7 to a 4. I tend to gloss over how wacky we were.
This is a really interesting post, because to me it sort of encapsulates one of the semantic issues the OP raises: What’s the difference between an actual transformative change of opinion, and just growing up?
The switch from “more important to be right than kind” to “more important to be kind than right” is so commonplace that I’m inclined to think you just matured, rather than changed an opinion. Most people become less strident and more diplomatic as they age. I’ll grant that’s not true of everyone, but then, some people just don’t become emotionally mature.
I mean, I’m very different in attitude from where I was 20 years ago (as I am 38, 20 years conveniently covers my legal adulthood in a nice, round number) but none of that was a big personal switch, it’s mostly just growing up and allowing experience to inform my judgment.
I used to believe unions were full of lazy, overpaid, self-entitled twits, then I joined a union and become one of those lazy, overpaid, self-entitled twits. Now I feel like there’s two sides of the coin, but in our age of economic uncertainty, I’m definitely glad I’m in one. My Union was the reason I still have a job when other companies were shedding jobs by the boatload. My job, due to the union membership, allowed me to be able to afford to treat some persistent medical problems, get out of credit card debt, and buy a new car. In a few years down the road, it will let me be able to afford to actually try and buy a new house, and support a family 
It’s hard to say just one because there have been so many. I guess it would be a tie between converting to atheism (formerly having been “spiritual but not religious”), unlearning the racism so rampant in much of my family (of which I’m very ashamed), and finding out that mental illness really exists and isn’t just people “acting up” for the sake of attention.
Yikes, I used to be a real dickhead.
I had stopped agreeing with my parents’ indiscriminate dislike of all politicians but now I’m starting to become disillusioned just like they are.
That the following statement is true:
“If you aren’t a Liberal when you are young, you have no heart.
And if you aren’t a Conservative when you mature, you have no brain.”
And this (to take some of the sting out of the above: )
“Moderation in all things is the measure of a life well-lived.”
Let’s see … here are a few …
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I don’t have to like my family or agree with them, or even pretend I do.
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Everyone makes mistakes, because everyone is human. Even my sister.
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Transsexual women are really women and are not just drag queens. Trans women were just born with the wrong parts, essentially constituting a birth defect.
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People like “us” can enjoy hip-hop music, boxing, reality shows, and other “lowbrow” pursuits without spontaneously combusting.