When I Gave Up Conservatism

I'm trying to remember when I became a Liberal.

I think it may have been December of 2003. I was preparing to head home for Christmas Break, this being my senior year of college, when I received a breathless instant message from a girl I'd met during my off-campus study in Washington, DC. At the time I was an "out" conservative, and she'd marked me as an MOT, so to speak. On this day, Saddam Hussein had just been captured. I was, of course, pleased with this development, but she was something close to to euphoric.

This was her message:

WE'RE GONNA WIN!

Now, it's important to note through the haze of time that she was not talking about the war. A few starry-eyed op-eds, caught in the moment, might have asserted that Saddam's capture would cause the insurgents to lay down their arms, but no serious-minded person thought that this was going to end it. It was abundantly clear a mere nine months in that we'd bitten off more than we could chew.

No, she meant the 2004 elections. The failure of the Bush Administration to find any WMD (our putative casus belli) or even apprehend the Butcher of Baghdad was a big deal, and my friend thought that now, finally, the GOP could rest easy. It was then, I think, that her use of "we" as a pronoun not for the United States but for the Republican Party threw into relief for me just what I was dealing with. I recoiled at the time, and it was never the same. Eleven months later I was knocking doors for MoveOn and coming near nervous breakdown in the parking lot of UAW Local 599 when they called Ohio for Bush.

The 1990s were an easy time to be a conservative. The good times were rolling, (almost) anyone who wanted a job could have one. The Dow was going to go to 20,000, we were all going to fancy colleges and going to walk out making, at least, sorta-high five figures. Heck, even though we thought it was sky-high at the time, the 1998 unemployment rate for the Flint Metro Area was 5.4%! And for 2000 it was a point lower than that! You didn't have any excuses, at least to my addled 17 year-old mind.

And, of course, I was from a Democratic family in a union town. It was fertile ground for a bit of adolescent contrariness. It pains me to say, but there was a time when I would assert that the UAW boys at the Big Three were making too much money for the jobs they did (which may have been true, but that's not anything like the point and I know that now).

Finally, 9/11 scared me. I knew a few young pinkos who were unflappable the day after, but even their bravado rang hollow. We were all pretty sure we'd wind up in the Army before too long and that there would be marauding turbaned hordes roving suburbia with AK-47s and pipebombs.

I suppose it's the zeal of the converted that's brought me to this place on the political spectrum just a bit right of Che. That, and the implacable march of the right wing toward total moral bankruptcy (and they're close). At least, I suppose, I hope, I can content myself that I got out when I did.