Danusha Goska – a former card-carrying leftist, with the Berkeley degree to prove it – voted GOP in 2012, after a lifetime of being a “progressive”.
Here are her top ten reasons she made the switch. Many of them track with my own reasons, 30-odd years ago. Many others were things I’d never have dreamed of. They boil down to “the left is motivated by hate; the right is not”.
Read the whole thing. It’s worth it. .
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Pretty powerful. Tough to argue against anything in it (although we know some on here will try!). Never saw that Milton Friedman video before. What struck me most, apart from Friedman’s logic, was that the liberal questioner in Donahue actually let Friedman speak and have his say without interrupting. Think that would happen today on any news shows?
I believe you read Ann Althouse of Madison. (UW Law Professor). AA is a bonified liberal with a gay son. And lives in and loves the ultra-leftwing city of Madwackistan. But she blogs from a more libertarian view, and attracks the center-right.
She says that it is the totalitarian (my word) behavior of the left. Shouting down conservative speakers. Using the IRS and Justice Dept for political means. The total war the left has declared on Scott Walker and his family. The nasty personal attacks on any Republican running for office. Things like that can make a principled traditional liberal turn a bit to the right.
From the article:
This goes back to the beginning of modern Leftism, that is Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and his gang of psychopaths. Given how unpopular communism was with the poor people of Russia (who, overwhelmingly, were not workers, but peasants), Lenin came up with the idea that society was led by a ‘vanguard’ consisting of a small part of the population who had the duty to lead society into “that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!” (yes, they used to talk that way).
To love the future, you have to hate the past. The America as it does not exist is loved, the America that does exist is despised.
Progressives are like the husband or wife who claims that they love their spouse for what they will be, once they’ve changed everything about them. until then, not only must everything about them be hated, but they must be made to hate themselves.
One thing that strikes me about the list of reasons is that it is an emotional, not a logical, reaction against liberalism. Now granted; there is a lot of good grounds for such an emotional reaction against liberalism. I just don’t know how long such a decision can stand. At some point, you’ve got to start using sound economics to back things up.