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Political Deconversions

Matthew Sitman left the conservatism of his youth because he saw it didn't work. What's your deconversion story?
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Here’s a good essay by Matthew Sitman, native of small-town Pennsylvania, born into a working-class family of Reagan Democrats turned Republicans, on why he left conservatism. He describes his mom and dad’s conservatism, and how it affected him:

This was a conservatism of the heart—less a set of political and economic doctrines than fierce patriotism and an instinctive suspicion of cultural change, and I made it my own.

This was partly because, despite this blue-collar background, there was a real sense that I would inherit a country that provided more opportunities than my parents had. Neither of them had gone to college, but it was taken for granted that I would. My father’s small business was very small indeed—just him working in a converted garage in our backyard. He never made much money, but he made enough to keep going, and he craved the freedom of being his own boss. And because most of his clients were scattered across the country, and my mother worked for the local public school, my family didn’t directly suffer from the deteriorating economy we saw all around us. It all amounted to a not-quite-implausible story of upward mobility, however tenuous and incremental our gains. We certainly were not middle class, and not even lower-middle class; but in the singular way the nearly-poor take pride in not being genuinely poor, we attributed the distinction to our own thrift and virtue—especially the latter.

The Sitmans belonged to a fundamentalist Protestant church:

This vision of the spiritual life was based on an exalted understanding of human freedom. Our wills were not bound and our ultimate fate was dependent on nothing but our own decisions. Sanctification came through individual effort and personal reform. It should be no surprise that this Christianity of the altar call proved a ready ally of all the fantasies and political and economic pieties we nurture about America: our belief in our capacity for self-invention and our trust that nearly limitless rewards could be gained through toil and travail. Suffering was ultimately the result of bad choices. You were, in the most profound sense, on your own.

The Bush years broke his conservatism:

This deductive quality of the conservative mind is its most distinctive feature. Certain axioms are true—about the Constitution, about morality, about economics, about our aspirations as human beings—therefore particular policies and courses of action should be pursued. Despite their vaunted claims to grappling with the world as it is, of being mugged by reality, conservatives in America practice a determined anti-empiricism. This is what holds together all the myriad failures of conservative politics: a devotion to first principles that simply must be true, whatever the consequences, and whatever the human suffering left in their aftermath.

The Bush years, then, were not an aberration but a culmination. What mattered to me were not finally the particular instances of bad behavior or misguided political ideas on the right in the early 2000s, but their cumulative force. I came to reject conservatism—fitfully, and without a coherent alternative at hand—because I understood it to be an ideology willfully resistant to reality. The misery caused by George W. Bush and the movement that enabled him mattered both in and of itself and because it revealed the fundamental limitations and failings of conservatism.

Read the whole thing, especially to the end.

I found a lot in this essay resonated with me, though I did not quit identifying as a conservative. Going further back, it reminded me of why, in the early 1990s, I stopped calling myself a liberal. Liberalism didn’t describe the real world, as I saw it once I graduated from college and started having to pay my own bills, and lived in a house that was not far from a high-crime area. As a liberal, I had sorted the world into Good and Evil, and I was willing to find any excuse for the failings and behavior of those I deemed good, and was in turn willing to find nothing but fault in the Evil ones. I don’t know what it was, exactly, that caused me finally to lose faith in the story Liberalism tells about itself, but lose it I did.

Matt’s loss of his conservatism is a lot like my own realization that I don’t believe the story the Republican Party tells either. When the colossal blunder that was Iraq became clear to me, and when it began to emerge that the Bush administration had deceived the people about the war, and when I then became aware of how I had allowed myself to be manipulated because the story Bush told about why we had to go to war made sense given my prior conservative convictions — well, that’s when it began to fall apart for me. If I had to pick a specific moment, it would be Bush’s second inaugural speech, when he boldly proclaimed a messianic role for America, spreading liberal democracy worldwide. Something in me thought: hubris. Which, of course, it was.

The Katrina response was another blow. I’m not one of those people who blames the whole thing on Bush. There was plenty of local governmental incompetence to go around. The specific thing about Bush that got to me was his “Hell of a job, Brownie” moment, in which he praised his grossly incompetent FEMA director, Michael Brown, despite FEMA being unprepared for the disaster. Turned out that Brownie was a Republican Party hack with no disaster management experience. Realizing that despite 9/11, President Bush treated FEMA’s leadership like a patronage prize, and installed someone like Brownie, and that now, people were suffering who didn’t have to suffer because Brownie didn’t know what he was doing — something snapped in me.

The first thing to go was my faith in the GOP as the party of competence. Its foreign policy had led America to disaster. The cronyism revealed by Katrina was a further blow. These guys — my guys — were no different, despite the narrative they wanted to believe about themselves and the world. I lost faith in that narrative, especially the Reaganesque foreign policy narrative. I lost faith that the GOP was the party of common sense. Then, after the economic crash, what little faith I had left disappeared. If a catastrophic dose of reality didn’t force the GOP to reconsider its foreign policy and its economic policy, then I wanted nothing to do with a party that preferred comforting lies to the hard truth.

This is what I had come to believe about the Democratic Party years before, and why I left it, and liberalism: that they preferred the Narrative to reality. Now I saw that Republicans were the same.

Had Republicans decided to learn from their mistakes, we probably would not have Trump today.

Unlike Matt, I did not find a home in liberalism. How could I? The Democrats have their own Narrative, and I find it to be wildly implausible too. The Democrats’ insistence that we all have to call humans with penises “women” if they say so, or else be punished by the law, is, to me, the perfect symbol of the ludicrous Democratic narrative. So I have been politically homeless since at least 2008, and expect I will be for the rest of my life.

So why do I still call myself a conservative? Because I am not a progressive, and I mostly reject liberalism (in the sense that both mainstream parties are liberal), though any reader of this blog knows that I have a lot of internal contradictions around this that I need to work out. Basically, I believe in Russell Kirk’s Ten Principles of Conservative Thought. I identify with a strain of rightist thought Philip Blond has called Red Toryism. I don’t see them instantiated in either party. It is fairly silly to call oneself a conservative but to feel no particular affinity for the more conservative of the two parties. Perhaps it’s more accurate to call myself a traditionalist, or a Red Tory, though nobody in America not named Drew Bowling knows what that means.

I would be interested in hearing from you readers about how you became disillusioned with your previous political views, if indeed you have become disillusioned. In other words, I want to hear your political deconversion story.

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