Don’t just take my word for it

I’ve come to the conclusion that the beliefs and hence the policies of liberals are an article of faith based primarily on feelings, whereas conservatives tend to base their thinking more on their assessment of human nature. “One of the older political sayings is that a ‘conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.’” (Arnold Ahlert)

I have no credibility with most liberals because, after all, I’m firmly in the conservative camp, a captive of the right. So, if I and other conservatives are not to be believed about the rationale for conservatism, how about those prominent liberals who have changed sides? Are their reasons for becoming conservatives also not to be believed?

 

A number of highly regarded liberals have changed sides, and their conversion to conservatism tells us a great deal about the difference between the two philosophies.

Thomas Sowell: An American economist, political writer, and commentator, and currently a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In an interview with The American Enterprise online, he was asked about having started out as a Marxist. Sowell’s response was: “Yes. The first time I read anything really serious about him was when I was about 19. I remember buying an old, secondhand set of encyclopedias for a dollar and 19 cents…In it was a long piece about Marx with all these quotations from him, and it all seemed to ring so true. Fortunately, even during my period of Marxism I had respect for evidence and logic, so it was only a matter of time before my Marxism began to unravel as I compared what actually happened in history to what was supposed to happen.”

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) started his political career as a New Deal liberal, was president of a union, the Screen Actors Guild, and an active Democrat. “As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan became embroiled in disputes over the issue of Communism in the film industry; his political views shifted from liberal to conservative.” (The White House official website). On the difference between a communist and an anti-communist he said, “How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.” (Ronald Reagan: Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987)

David Horowitz, publisher of Front Page Magazine: His “parents were long-standing members of the Communist Party. While still identifying as a Marxist…in 1968 Horowitz wrote several books that were influential in New Left critiques of American society and particularly its foreign policy. He was an editor at the influential New Left magazine, Ramparts, and a confidant of Black Panthers leader Huey P. Newton, and cited experiences with his involvement in the Panthers as the primary catalyst for reassessing his views.”

 

“Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary magazine, said of Horowitz: ‘…David Horowitz is hated by the left because he is not only an apostate but has been even more relentless and aggressive in attacking his former political allies than some of us who preceded him in what I once called ‘breaking ranks’ with that world. He has also taken the polemical and organizational techniques he learned in his days on the left, and figured out how to use them against the left, whose vulnerabilities he knows in his bones…” (Front Page Magazine)

David Mamet, American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director, recently wrote an article with the intriguing title, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal, an election-season essay’” (The Village Voice, March 11th, 2008), in which he stated, “The conservative…holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention. I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind…As a child of the ‘60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart…I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances…”

So, if my own reasons for being a “conservative” do not pass muster with liberals, perhaps the reasons of others far more accomplished than I will be acceptable. But, that’s just my opinion.

 

 

© 2008 Harris R. Sherline

All Rights Reserved

 

Read more of Harris Sherline’s commentaries on his blog

at http://www.opinionfest.com.