[Praetor Lupus]

I was pondering this the other day.

Certainly there are many on the right who were formerly lefties - myself included. Seeing what the left has become these days, I'm not surprised.

But is there anyone you know of, whether famous or not, who was a conservative but is now a left-winger?

[Horus]

For celebrities, it would be career suicide to ever express conservative ideas. I suspect a lot of them are in the closet.

[WeFuckGoats]

I know one. She was a Mormon girl from a very traditional family, pretty conservative views. Then she went to college and went full blown "I Fucking Love Science" athiest+. Last time I saw her she had blue hair, two nose rings and told me to vote for the NDP so Canada would become truly progressive.
Honestly, the change was so drastic it startled me.

[RoadKill503]

Had a buddy in high school who was always rather soft, but still conservative. He drives a subaru now covered in stereotypical liberal bumper stickers. I blame the hippie university in Portland he went to, plus his family is die hard left.

[Dubby]

I was decently conservative before I went to college, only to fall for the preachings of my professors. I lived on campus, so it was even worse. It hard to explain, but you basically become left wing just by breathing the air. Basically, if you wanna get along with most people, you have to be left wing. You just adopt it through osmosis because it's leftism isn't even debatable at that point. Conservative counterpoints are literally met with arguments like "oh my god, are you serious...".

But then I entered the real world and swung back to the right.

[EDantes]

I used to be more left-wing when I was younger; mainly over issues such as drug de-criminalization; I also grew up around fundamentalist Christians and felt that they and some of their beliefs (such as young earth creationism) were pretty stupid.

Later on I identified more with the right once I saw how much the modern left is motivated by a victim mindset, and how unlike religious extremists they seem to have a lot more influence in academics and the mainstream media. Also learned that the far-left is just as "anti-science" as fundamentalist Christians; what with claiming that an unborn child isn't a human unless the parents "decide" so, or that sex has nothing to do with biology, just "feelings".

Not to mention things such as climate change hysteria, and deification of science as "gospel" basically just taking the place of religion for atheists and leftists; as far as evolution goes, they simply use evolution as a 'creation myth' and use it to justify as "life is meaningless, do whatever you want" view of the world.

[Leonard D Neubache]

I suspect it happens from time to time when people come out of university on the left, join the workforce and swing to the right, then get disillusioned with the two-party-one-party system and swing back towards libertarianism, mother-earthism or some other kind of protest mentality.

Those protest mentalities are more closely associated with the left, despite the fact that most people in them wouldn't be able to stand the company of progressives OR conservatives.

[All or Nothing]

(07-02-2016 03:54 PM)Dubby Wrote:  

I was decently conservative before I went to college, only to fall for the preachings of my professors. I lived on campus, so it was even worse. It hard to explain, but you basically become left wing just by breathing the air. Basically, if you wanna get along with most people, you have to be left wing. You just adopt it through osmosis because it's leftism isn't even debatable at that point. Conservative counterpoints are literally met with arguments like "oh my god, are you serious...".

But then I entered the real world and swung back to the right.

I have had an affinity for right-leaning politics for a long time. A lot of it came from being a little bit of the black sheep of my family who were generally liberal leaning while idolizing my uncle who was a small government type. Going to my uncle's farm and being around him a few summers influenced how I saw things politically.

On the other hand, I have perpetually been around people who are liberal leaning, so my adaptation was to become chameleon-like in my beliefs. I have always gone out of my way to avoid believing in any ideology whole heartedly and have focused on facts and evidence for shaping a viewpoint over ideological prescription of how to see things. Even this election cycle I have had to de-invest emotionally to try and avoid creating a polarizing climate around the people I work with and spend time with.

Even here I avoid showing my whole hand in how I view things.

[Parzival]

There is this quote: Who isn't a socialist with 20 has no heart. Who is it still with 40 had no brain.
When you are young you want to rebel, change the world and feel immortal. You want to have everything fair and right. Its kind of a natural tendency and when you are from a very conservative background it even mix with the natural rebel period. On the other hand what should kids rebel against today? We have freedom of expression, strange family models and all kind of liberty. Things seem less stable and so younger people tend - at least in Germany - to bring back traditional values. Family, kids because in the outside world the things are less stable and so they want to have at least the private life stable. This leads also to this strange behavior with kids. Kids become a project for insecure parents because no matter what, you can lose your partner, your job, your friends but your kid say.
Furthermore there are some articles out there that younger people have the tendency for less sex partners. Don't know how accurate it its. For me it feels like those hyper liberal SJW types are at their peak. When you look at some twitter trendes or social media outrage, it goes always back to the same few sources of people / groups. So the only drive away from be conservative is when you did grow up in a super strict environment.

Personal I don't like the term conservative. Conservative people are for me people that want to keep and restore the past. Then they come up with things like Rock music is bad, video games are bad, the internet is bad because they are not able to adapt new things of society change. When you want to keep your values you have to adapt and transform them to the new circumstances.

[ElFlaco]

Two useful heuristics come to mind for choosing sides when you have limited information:

1. When only one side attempts to address the arguments of the other, go with that side.

2. When the vast majority of defectors change to the same side, go with that side.

Conservativism wins on both of these.

[Latinopan]

(07-02-2016 01:04 PM)Horus Wrote:  

For celebrities, it would be career suicide to ever express conservative ideas. I suspect a lot of them are in the closet.

The rumor is Robert Downey Jr is a libertarian/conservative, and he was the one who anonymously published comments talking about Hollywood pedophile and prostitution ring.

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/201...rt-in.html


Do not forget when Channel4 was trying to bullied shame RDJ for not identifying as liberal.

[dasher]

Robert Downey Jr is on record as being not liberal and he attended the 2008 republican convention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/movies/20carr.html

Quote:

I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.

I could absolutely see him leaking that kind of thing: No doubt he is sick of the gross hypocrisy of the hollywood elite.

[Dantes]

Hillary Clinton's father was a republican. Early on Hillary was a Goldwater girl.

Elizabeth Warren had early ties to the Republican Party but I wouldn't classify her as having been a conservative. I believe she voted republican mainly on economic issues.

[Dr. Howard]

(07-04-2016 08:23 AM)Dantes Wrote:  

Hillary Clinton's father was a republican. Early on Hillary was a Goldwater girl.

Elizabeth Warren had early ties to the Republican Party but I wouldn't classify her as having been a conservative. I believe she voted republican mainly on economic issues.

That seems appropriate. Hillary Clinton, like Bill fall into the "southern democrat" category. Southern democrats are essentially more corrupt republicans, which is hilarious as thats they way they would like to paint actual republicans.

[Wutang]

(07-02-2016 03:54 PM)Dubby Wrote:  

I lived on campus, so it was even worse. It hard to explain, but you basically become left wing just by breathing the air.

Sounds like me. I was more left wing when I was younger and in university even though I was never a super crazy SJW type. I called myself a moderate at the time but looking back I really was more center-left. The phrase you used, "become left wing just by breathing the air" stuck out to me cause I think it described the way I was. The environment I was in as well as the people I was around and the sort of media we were consuming all worked to transform into being left leaning whether we consciously were aware of it or not.

The interesting thing was that I was never really that enthusiastic about being left leaning. Rather I felt like I was left leaning just by default and that I HAD to be left meaning if I wanted to be taken seriously. The only right wing ideas I was exposed to were filtered through left wingers; typically it would be them pointing out something dumb that some conservative pundit had said as an example of intellectually bankrupt the right was. The typical target was Fox News. If you would have asked me what I thought of Fox News back then I would have give you the scripted "It's just some trashy dishonest super conservative right wing outlet" even though I never had actually sat down and watched an entire broadcast and my exposure to that channel were clips that people would edit out to paint the channel in the worst light possible.

It wasn't until I was starting to enter my mid 20s and found this forum and the by extension, a lot of the other red pill/manosphere sites that are read by people on our corner of the internet that I realized there was an alternative. Like I said, the only right wing ideas I had really been familiar with by that point were the kind that got caricatured by the left and of the cuckservative variety. I couldn't go along with those ideas so I felt like I had to be left leaning by default. It was a pick the least of two evils sort of situation.

[Wutang]

And to answer the question in the OP, yeah I've known a few people who went from the right to the left. One guy I knew was part of the Young Republicans in undergraduate and vote for Dubya Bush twice. Disillusion with the GOP around that time led him to move to the left even though he's not a SJW type.

The other ones I know are these two girls who were raised in conservative, suburban families going to church and all of that jazz. One of them even led a Bible study at her high school. After graduating high school both of them went YOLO and started getting into booze and drugs. They also started getting more into politics and typical of a lot of girls their emphasis is mostly on these bleeding heart social issues, especially LGBT ones though one of them is starting to get big into gun control too. Both of them are also Bernie supporters, big surprise.

[Dantes]

(07-02-2016 01:04 PM)Horus Wrote:  

For celebrities, it would be career suicide to ever express conservative ideas. I suspect a lot of them are in the closet.

Historically there have been several, although it may be more difficult to do so now.

Donald Trump
Dennis Miller
Bruce Willis
Clint Eastwood
Charlton Heston
Arnold
Ronald Reagon

[Lunostrelki]

(07-04-2016 12:15 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

(07-02-2016 03:54 PM)Dubby Wrote:  

I lived on campus, so it was even worse. It hard to explain, but you basically become left wing just by breathing the air.

Sounds like me. I was more left wing when I was younger and in university even though I was never a super crazy SJW type. I called myself a moderate at the time but looking back I really was more center-left. The phrase you used, "become left wing just by breathing the air" stuck out to me cause I think it described the way I was. The environment I was in as well as the people I was around and the sort of media we were consuming all worked to transform into being left leaning whether we consciously were aware of it or not.

The interesting thing was that I was never really that enthusiastic about being left leaning. Rather I felt like I was left leaning just by default and that I HAD to be left meaning if I wanted to be taken seriously. The only right wing ideas I was exposed to were filtered through left wingers; typically it would be them pointing out something dumb that some conservative pundit had said as an example of intellectually bankrupt the right was. The typical target was Fox News. If you would have asked me what I thought of Fox News back then I would have give you the scripted "It's just some trashy dishonest super conservative right wing outlet" even though I never had actually sat down and watched an entire broadcast and my exposure to that channel were clips that people would edit out to paint the channel in the worst light possible.

It wasn't until I was starting to enter my mid 20s and found this forum and the by extension, a lot of the other red pill/manosphere sites that are read by people on our corner of the internet that I realized there was an alternative. Like I said, the only right wing ideas I had really been familiar with by that point were the kind that got caricatured by the left and of the cuckservative variety. I couldn't go along with those ideas so I felt like I had to be left leaning by default. It was a pick the least of two evils sort of situation.

This describes me to a T except that even as a teen I was always bugged by a few left-wing tendencies like anti-theism or anti-traditionalism that always seemed to go against their otherwise socially beneficial ideas like equality and mutual respect. It was after studying the very real effects of communism as it existed behind the Iron Curtain (and has been silently corrupting society in the "free" world) that I came to recognize the poison that is leftist ideology.

[Slim Shady]

Arianna Huffington

However I question if she ever truly believes in anything, except social climbing.

[StrikeBack]

I know a few, all women from traditional, religious families, and turned leftist while at college / university.

[Eskhander]

(07-06-2016 02:04 AM)StrikeBack Wrote:  

I know a few, all women from traditional, religious families, and turned leftist while at college / university.

And it's almost always a conformity thing.

The phenomena of the often noted shift to conservatism actually has a genetic basis and not just a social one.

I think political conservatism is around 60% heritable. However you will be more influenced by your environment when younger than when you age. Although it's mostly been found with intelligence rather than all personality traits. Mostly because intelligence is more studied and the idea that all personality traits are heritable is relatively new

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2889158/

So it is speculative

[The Beast1]

I went the other way (liberal to hardcore conservative) driven by actually living around liberals.

I don't know anyone who has done the opposite.