The Evolution of a Conservative

I don't remember all of the "how" of the evolution, but I do remember the "when."

I grew up surrounded by political contradictions. My parents were reformed hippies.. well on their way to becoming George W Bush voters, but in the late 70's still not totally past the idea of the principled protest vote. I remember them telling me they planned to vote for John Anderson in 1980 because he had pledged that he would never institute a draft. Well that made plenty of sense to me, I didn't want to get drafted either.

But at the same time, the first real exposure to politics I can remember was going to Washington in the dead of winter to see Reagan's first innagural parade. And I was fascinated. I was still young but my parents were political junkies and so Reagan was ALWAYS on our TV making speeches and debating, and being Reagan. And I loved him. What's not to love about a leader who can articulate what's special about America in ways even a ten-year-old can comprehend?

The second thing I remember was coming home from school one day and my dad telling me Reagan had been shot.

My brother and I both wrote him letters.

I can remember being surrounded by the vestiges of my parents' hippie past, and yet at the same time, listening to the things Reagan said about personal responsbility and limited government and keeping more of what you earn and thinking, even then, "this makes sense to me."

And yet I can also remember listening to him talk about the "Evil Empire" and knowing that while what he was saying about the evils of collectivism made a crazy kind of sense, that he had probably doomed us all to nuclear war the moment he walked away from the Soviets in Rekjavik.

Let's just say they were confusing times.

And still as I went off to college, I still didn't quite know what I was, politically. There was still quite a bit of me that would have voted for John Anderson, but there was a bigger part of me that believed what Reagan had told me about the free market. I could see that tax revenues did indeed rise with lower tax rates... just like he'd said they would. I loved that our athletes traveled the world and regularly beat those super-human products of collectivist engineering that we saw coming out of the oppressed nations of the Eastern bloc, and was horrified by the stories of men women and children shot down trying to reunite with families members who just happened to be on the wrong side of some random line in Berlin.

And so, in about 1989, still a year from the fall of that damned Wall... there I was in the lounge of my freshman year dormitory when a guy I'd only known for a couple of days strolled through on his way to somewhere else. I said "Hey Mike, where ya goin?" And he replied "To see PJ O'Rourke speak."

"Who the hell is that!?"

Mike laughed at me, "Oh he's hilarious, you have to come."

So I did. And an hour later I went right from the lecture hall to the bookstore and bought every PJ O'Rourke book I could find. After 16 years of confusing and contradictory messages, I'd finally found one that made sense. Over the years, I've come back to PJ over and over again because he always seems to be feeling exactly what I'm feeling about the state of the world and politics at any given moment.

So I suppose it's no surprise that PJ has written what resonates with me as the best post mortem on the 2008 election I have yet to read.

We Blew It.