My rightward swing continues!

[Ben.]

Don’t Worry Boss at my first election back in 2000, I was a died in the wool lefty, Hell I seriously thought for a while that Communism was a viable and reasonable thing to strive for… that said I have never ever lost my commitment to the belief in cooperation and community that is at the centre of all centre-left thought. Back in 2000 I did consider voting for Nader, but in the end voted for Gore.

My belief in community also developed through my faith into a belief in obligations and responsibilities. Now I’m not a radically religious guy, but I go to church and I do pretty much believe the whole darn thing. But my outlook on things really was affected by my faith. And reading some work by the pollster Philip Gould and the political philosopher Anthony Giddon also changed my rather blinkered view of the “third way” political philosophy, it was not that I became concerned with my party getting elected its that I began to see that sticking to outmoded and inflexible polices was a mistake that needs and demands of your supporters change and that further more the needs of society change, not simply what society thinks constitutes its needs, but what is the best policy to adopt to leave people better off, changes over time and extremist and zealots really don’t realise this.

Also if a party fails to move with these changes in the needs and aspirations of its base it becomes a party that ceases to represent its bases of natural supporters and comes to represent only ideological activists, and worst of all its comes to equate activist with its base of support, this is what happened to the British Labour Party and to a lesser extent to the Democratic Party and it was quite simply wrong.

This was when some of the allergies of the left to things like tax-cuts and private business and faith based initiatives really began to start to seem absurd and unwarranted. Still I seem to have pretty much settled and my core belief in social justice, the importance of community and that there is a positive role for government remain unchanged, the means by which I think we can achieve these things have changed radically but the basic principle endures and I think the changes in my attitudes where for the best. I mean I feel pretty secure in my my political belifes these days which i never felt when i was on the far-left. But i think most people for a short while at least turn to the hard left.