Dear MAGA: Open Topic 20190114

I love the half dollar, too!
The value of Q, to me, is how “his” presence has gotten so many enthusiastically paying attention. I am not the least bit vested in whether he is legitimate or a hoax. It cannot be a successful hoax when it has drawn so many to pay attention! And-d-d-d it has brought so many of us here together.
I truly believe God has heard our prayers for the last 3 years. Heck, I turned back to God during the last three years! I bet I am far from the only Christian whose lapsed faith has been reborn through this journey. If that isn’t proof of His Holy Spirit guiding our nation, I don’t know what is. Of course that doesn’t mean we can count on a timeline or certain outcomes. It DOES mean that our prayers are working.
When we get impatient or think we are ‘losing’, we just need to remind ourselves what our lives would be like right now if Hillary had won. Always remember that. There is nothing that compares to the relief of knowing we broke her.

Since we are talkin eagles n injuns-

Over the years, I had an interesting observation about people who consider themselves liberal.
Virtually without exception, I have never heard of someone who started as politically conservative and become politically liberal.
In fact, there are plenty of stories of people who were politically liberal who over time moved right, including a number of books by conservative media personalities that tell their story. Even the NeoCons described themselves as “liberal mugged by reality”. Many conservatives I’ve spoken with can tell a story of how they moved from a liberal to a conservative political outlook.
So what about the few stories where a former conservative became more politically liberal? They seemed to follow a pattern. First 9/11 happened and they felt the need to support the President and defend the nation. In some cases this meant joining the military. They were caught up in the soberness of the moment followed by the emotional crest of patriotism. But a funny thing happened, as the war drug on they became increasingly cynical of the war on terror and of the policies of the Bush administration, to the point of leaving the Republican party altogether.
My observations:
* In this narrative, conservative bona fides are very much suspect. In these stories it was never clear that any conservative positions were actually held.
* This was not an intellectually grounded conservatism, but rather an emotivism.
* When the emotivism changed, they reverted to the liberal position, not on the basis of superior reasons, but on the basis of emotions, particularly cynicism.
I have tried in vain to find an account of a conservative conversion to political liberalism which tells their story in a manner that provides reasons or more than an emotive fickleness as to the reason for their conversion. This includes just blog posts or articles via Google or other search engines – conversion stories showing liberal to conservative thinking are easy to find, but conversion stories showing conservative to liberal are relatively rare, and rarer still are any with any substance.
The simple answer of course is that they don’t exist. While that may be true, it seems highly unlikely to me that given the shear population of the United States that statistically speaking there are virtually none of the memoirs that do a reasonable job of showing a shift left.
This remains one of those baffling conundrums of American political life: How can there be so many political liberals, but so few conversions?
While the statistical data is lacking, my deductive reasoning provides a compelling explanation:
* Political liberals (including the more radical left) today hold their positions not on the basis of facts, reason, or experience, but by virtue solely of their own emotions and passions. This leads me to a very uncomfortable conclusion that I would like to escape but have not been able to: Political liberalism is rooted in emotional immaturity, anti-intellectualism, and inexperience.
* Political conservatives are diverse. Certainly there are the emotionally immature, the anti-intellectual, and the inexperienced in the ranks of political conservatives. But remarkably the reverse is also true: It is easy to find conservatives who embody the virtues of emotional maturity, intellectual wisdom, and the raw grit of life experience that inform their political vision.
* The reason there are no compelling conversion stories of conservatives becoming more liberal is because conservatism’s fact base does not lend itself to an emotional conversion experience, and because the facts aren’t in favor of political liberalism there is not an opportunity for an intellectual conversion experience.
* The reason there is an abundance of conversion stories of liberals or leftists becoming conservative (or libertarian, to be fair) is because in these stories some common factors arise: Our hero gains experience that causes him to abandon old beliefs, or he matures emotionally out of older feelings (for example, getting married and having children), or of course he experiences the intellectual conversion experience.
All of this to say: I am still on the lookout for the counterpoint to the above.
Specifically, I’m still on the lookout for a conservative become liberal conversion story, that is has some meaningful explanation as to what motivated the shift left.
But sadly, it seems like such an animal simply does not exist.