My Ideological Journey: From Left to Right and Beyond, Part 2

From Conspiracy Island to conventional conservatism

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We began yesterday with a question, prompted by the teasing of an old friend: what is better—to retain an ideology established in youth or to find one’s way to something new?

The answer, of course, depends on where you start and where you end up. I was raised on the left—a bad place to start and a worse place to stay. Thus, the first part of my journey had to be one of escape. But where was I escaping to?

Before I could figure that out, I needed to spend my proverbial 40 years in a sometimes-strange desert…

Phase 3
Deconstruction

Acknowledging that one has been wrong about one’s political alignment—for one’s entire life!—is not an easy thing to do. It is a psychic blow to one’s ego, confirmation bias, and sense of self. It is also difficult to move from the ideological camp of one’s youth straight into the “enemy” camp, without at least some transitional period. For me, this transitional period was one in which I significantly deconstructed much of my world view.

I was already well underway in the process of deconstructing my left-leaning presuppositions when two events occurred that pushed me to a new level: the government’s appalling actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Suddenly, I wasn’t