What Made You Change Politically?

[The Dowager Mod]

When Newt declared the contract on America.

So right after you rid yourself of the big hair days, the brain started working, eh? 

Something like that

[Person Man]

When Newt declared the contract on America.

So right after you rid yourself of the big hair days, the brain started working, eh? 

Something like that

lol

[Hatman 🍁]

Only when I learn new facts that contradict previously held beliefs.

[RINO Tom]

I've always been a fairly liberal Republican.  I guess I agree with the GOP on a few more issues than I do the Democrats, but also registering with a party/what primary you vote in is more of a personal choice than some PM score.  I actually find it admirable when people register with the party their family has always registered with even if their views have changed a bit ... I mean they can still vote for whomever they want on election day, right?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The events of Bush's second term largely defined a lot of the issues that I emphasize (competence, transparency and opposing corruption/gerrymandering, immigration and the economy). Around that time, I did abandon both blanket protectionism and became pro-life, both were a break from the biggest defining political influence in my family, my mother who is from a ancestrally rural PA Republican family) both were a result of independent reflection and not some event or outside influence. Ironically she has moved to right on many issues particularly since Obama has come into office and has always been rather militantly "deport them all" on immigration.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Circumstance changed me.  I wouldn't wish my life on anyone.  Nobody ever becomes a left winger through rainbows and unicorn farts.  I wish my life were stable and secure enough to warrant voting GOP. But when you're just hanging on and everyone around you is falling into the abyss... At least Nancy Pelosi will let you see the doctor.

Granted... Since my mom died, I've become far less worried about GOP victories. 

[politicus]

Circumstance changed me.  I wouldn't wish my life on anyone.  Nobody ever becomes a left winger through rainbows and unicorn farts.  I wish my life were stable and secure enough to warrant voting GOP. But when you're just hanging on and everyone around you is falling into the abyss... At least Nancy Pelosi will let you see the doctor.

That's actually quite common.

[Murica!]

Well first I was a Christian Liberal with family values but was insanely anti-war(that didn't change.) Then I started getting into science at school so I lost the Christian edge and became more Liberal(pretty much a Progressive.) I then had a short period of time as a slightly more liberal Stalinist. Then I read some books and things of the type and became a Democratic Socialist, And now I'm an Anarcho-syndicalist after reading Kroptkin ,Bakunin, and Nestor Makhno(and not to mention life as a prime factor for my leftism.)

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Wife, child, job.

[ingemann]

I have not changed much political (except on the issue of EU), I have grown more anti-immigration (at least from some countries) after having dealt with and lived beside Muslim immigrants. I have become somewhat more pro-free market (through I still think that state run companies are sometimes needed) after having visited eastern Europe before and after the Fall of Wall, especially in the last decade. My visit to eastern Europe have also made me more pro-EU, through the financial crisis have made me support slower and more organic integration.

I have also gone from very pro-Democratic Party to only see them as the least of two evils (and sometimes only with margins), that I can and will thank Atlas Democratic posters for.

[Boston Bread]

Opposition to Harper and Bush made me more concerned about politics than I otherwise would have been. Around 2006 I would have been a solid liberal but I think I grew to find their record/promises lacklustre compared to the NDP which made me more open to voting for them. The moment I began to support more ambitious ways to address social problems like inequality was when I became an actual centre-leftist and lost my loyalty to the liberal party. I still vote liberal strategically when I can accept them however. There were times in the recent past when I feel less orange and more social liberal, though I think my views have largely stabilized.

My parents are a lot different from me politically yet I think we've almost always supported the same candidates. We don't talk policy much but maybe their (big-L) Liberalness rubbed off on me as a preteen. After all I do think my first impression of Harper came from my parents who didn't like him. My parents are so-cons on everything but abortion and economically centrist, but are staunch ABC voters (even willing to strategically vote NDP), mostly because they feel conservative parties don't represent the working class, whereas I oppose them more on ideological grounds.

Also, my experience with immigrants, including muslim ones, have overwhelmingly been positive. If anything these experiences have made me less xenophobic, not that I had a reason to be xenophobic in the first place. I understand why one might distrust immigrants but those reasons don't make sense to me for the most part.

[hopper]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

[Murica!]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

[hopper]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

Yeah I think so. I find myself leaning to the right on economic issues but centrist maybe even leaning a little bit to the left on social issues. Leaning to the right on economic issues is why I vote Republican mostly.

[Slander and/or Libel]

The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't.

Assertion not backed by evidence.

[Murica!]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

Yeah I think so. I find myself leaning to the right on economic issues but centrist maybe even leaning a little bit to the left on social issues. Leaning to the right on economic issues is why I vote Republican mostly.

Well the American Libertarian Party is center to far left on social issues and center to far right on economic issues.

[Slander and/or Libel]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

Yeah I think so. I find myself leaning to the right on economic issues but centrist maybe even leaning a little bit to the left on social issues. Leaning to the right on economic issues is why I vote Republican mostly.

Well the American Libertarian Party is center to far left on social issues and center to far right on economic issues.

But like Libertarians in practice, he's a Republican. Left on social issues doesn't matter if you're totally willing to vote for people who falling off a cliff to the right on social issues.

[TNF]

From the point at which I decided I was a socialist, I wasn't really sure on what kind of socialist I was and where I really fit in in the grand scheme of things. At first, I thought I might be a democratic socialist, but that's a fairly hard position to maintain when you understand that the state is set up to protect the property and rule of the capitalists, and as such, you really have no shot of reforming it from within. That put me on a revolutionary track, and the first stop was some vague amalgamation of 'libertarian' socialism (i.e. anarchism), left-libertarianism, and Left Communism.

I stayed in that area for a little while, read the important texts of the council communists, all that jazz. But it became increasingly clear to me that 'Left Communism' offered no real solutions. It was, as Lenin aptly described it, an 'infantile disorder', with no hope of ever achieving much of anything. And that's how I found my way into Trotskyism. In all honesty, I still consider myself both a 'libertarian' socialist and a 'democratic' socialist in that I support a socialism which is both open and democratic, and one in which working class democracy forms the basis for the entirety of society. I don't think either of these labels conflicts with the vision that Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky laid out, and as such I also don't categorically reject the critiques or viewpoints of either. I still often read a lot of anarchist and reformist literature, which I think helps me sharpen my viewpoint while also helping me to fully understand why prefigurative or reformist approaches are wholly inadequate.

At this point, I suppose you might describe my politics as 'Trotskyism with libertarian (in the traditional sense, not the American sense) characteristics.' I don't categorically reject defending the deformed workers' states on account of the world that they developed in, nor do I feel that the Soviet Union was in anyway 'state capitalist' after the rise of Stalinism, so I pretty much wholly reject Tony Cliff's line of thinking when it comes to the Soviet Union and its adjoined states itself. Likewise, I reject the petty bourgeois anarchism of people like Noam Chomsky, who don't understand in the least what Leninism is, falsely attributing it to the horrors of the Russian Civil War and subsequent Stalinist counterrevolution, without laying any of blame, of course, on the multinational invading force destroying the Russian proletariat, industrial capacity, and then subjecting Russia to an economic and political embargo.

[Murica!]

I used to be an Indie(still am) since I am not a registered Republican but I vote mostly Republican. I think when ObamaCare passed that changed me. I didn't want the bill. Don't get me wrong I got sick of Bush W toward the end of his presidency because of the recession but I don't like Obama either. Republicans just make more sense to me than the Dems do. The Dems just think government can do everything but it can't. I just feel closer to the Republicans economically. I wish they will get out of I will get primaried if I vote for this and this or I will piss off The Deep South States(the base states of the party) if I say this or I vote for this. I am A Moderate and have no apologies about it. Just call me a Rockefeller Republican!

I support a number of Dems social policies: same sex marriage, gun control, and protecting social Security. To me they have gone so far on talking about race, abortion, and same sex marriage its hard to listen to that all the time over the past few years. I just find it polarizing.

Shouldn't you be a (right)libertarian?

Yeah I think so. I find myself leaning to the right on economic issues but centrist maybe even leaning a little bit to the left on social issues. Leaning to the right on economic issues is why I vote Republican mostly.

Well the American Libertarian Party is center to far left on social issues and center to far right on economic issues.

But like Libertarians in practice, he's a Republican. Left on social issues doesn't matter if you're totally willing to vote for people who falling off a cliff to the right on social issues.

True.

[RR1997]

I used to be a hard-core libertarian back in 2011 all the way until October of 2012, but then I grew up.

[Murica!]

From the point at which I decided I was a socialist, I wasn't really sure on what kind of socialist I was and where I really fit in in the grand scheme of things. At first, I thought I might be a democratic socialist, but that's a fairly hard position to maintain when you understand that the state is set up to protect the property and rule of the capitalists, and as such, you really have no shot of reforming it from within. That put me on a revolutionary track, and the first stop was some vague amalgamation of 'libertarian' socialism (i.e. anarchism), left-libertarianism, and Left Communism.

I stayed in that area for a little while, read the important texts of the council communists, all that jazz. But it became increasingly clear to me that 'Left Communism' offered no real solutions. It was, as Lenin aptly described it, an 'infantile disorder', with no hope of ever achieving much of anything. And that's how I found my way into Trotskyism. In all honesty, I still consider myself both a 'libertarian' socialist and a 'democratic' socialist in that I support a socialism which is both open and democratic, and one in which working class democracy forms the basis for the entirety of society. I don't think either of these labels conflicts with the vision that Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky laid out, and as such I also don't categorically reject the critiques or viewpoints of either. I still often read a lot of anarchist and reformist literature, which I think helps me sharpen my viewpoint while also helping me to fully understand why prefigurative or reformist approaches are wholly inadequate.

At this point, I suppose you might describe my politics as 'Trotskyism with libertarian (in the traditional sense, not the American sense) characteristics.' I don't categorically reject defending the deformed workers' states on account of the world that they developed in, nor do I feel that the Soviet Union was in anyway 'state capitalist' after the rise of Stalinism, so I pretty much wholly reject Tony Cliff's line of thinking when it comes to the Soviet Union and its adjoined states itself. Likewise, I reject the petty bourgeois anarchism of people like Noam Chomsky, who don't understand in the least what Leninism is, falsely attributing it to the horrors of the Russian Civil War and subsequent Stalinist counterrevolution, without laying any of blame, of course, on the multinational invading force destroying the Russian proletariat, industrial capacity, and then subjecting Russia to an economic and political embargo.

Wait how is anarchism "infantile disorder"?

[Free Bird]

I used to be a huge neocon. But then I met real people affected by things Republicans all collectively say NO on, such as people on welfare, stupidly rich people, and gay couples. Combine this with Mike Huckabee attacking and deionizing atheists, and I have definitely moved to the left. However, I am strategically a Republican because I cannot stand what the Democratic Party has become, and am too pro gun to register as a Democrat in good faith. I also feel that the GOP will be the bastion of libertarianism in the future as the old bigots begin to die off.

[TNF]

Because anarchism is idealist.

[Murica!]

Because anarchism is idealist.

Durruti and Makhno. Nuff said.

[TNF]

Because anarchism is idealist.

Durruti and Makhno. Nuff said.

Exceptions to the rule, not the rule. Durruti and Makhno alike adopted a vanguardist position in the midst of their respective civil wars in spite of the fact that doing so ran counter to anarchist principles, not because of it.