Converting to conservatism started simply enough – intellectually. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Personally? It was still a tough pill to swallow, growing up in what passed for a “liberal” home in rural North Dakota in the eighties. Conservatism made sense. Conservatives<\/em>, as people, made sense – to the extent that stereotypes always do. . Conservatives <\/em>looked and acted – in the stereotypes that drove much of my 20-ish year old mental model – with Jerry Falwell’s seeming smug sanctimony, with Pat Buchanan’s aggressive know-it-all-ism, the cloying certainty of some of the Young Republican crowd I’d met, with all the usual stereotypes that the media culture, then as now, made the official narrative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The stereotypes, applied to the people I knew or knew of<\/em>, made sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Me being one of those people <\/em>did not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not until I found P.J. O’Rourke. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reading the essays that led to his 1987 book Republican Party Reptile<\/em>, in Rolling Stone <\/em>and Car and Driver <\/em>and the usual dog’s breakfast of magazines that paid the freelance journalist and humorist’s bills, O’Rourke told the tale of the “pants-down conservative” – the person who played their music too loud, liked a cocktail or two, had a liberarian outlook on day to day – with a caveat:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty the duty to take the consequences”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n