Ladies and gentlemen, I have a confession to make.
I am a recovering neoconservative.
I am writing this diary in an attempt to explain how I got that way and why I then moved left. From my own experience, I think I can conjecture why some well-meaning and reasonable people get sucked rightwards; and I think I can also suggest a few ways in which the left could go about prying people like me loose.
Continued below...
To begin with, a bit of personal history:
Two years ago, I was out on the right. Not as far out as some, but pretty far.
I read USS Clueless and Instapundit daily. I damned the EU and the UN for corruption and bureaucracy. I raved about the importance of free speech. I saw the whole of human history as a war between empiricists and sneaky transcendentalists, with myself on the down-to-earth, winning side.
Worse. I thought Christopher Hitchens talked a lot of sense. In my eyes, he really was a rebel. Or "contrarian", if you prefer. I would read one one of his columns and go away muttering "Damn those lefties! Damn them for not seeing the menace that is Islamofascism!"
Hitch and me, we were like that. I knew that if George Orwell were to come back to life tomorrow, he'd be in perfect agreement with us both. (Oh yes.)
Still worse. I ploughed through Atlas Shrugged. Yes, all of it. All 1069 pages of it. And The Fountainhead. And The Romantic Manifesto. And I was nodding all the way. I hated postmodern philosophy as a student, you see. The world seemed to be drowning in death-seeking, drivel-talking parasite traitors to reason.
I wanted cleansing light.
I wanted fire.
I wanted lots and lots of lovely fire.
It was hard, in those days, to persuade me to look at anything that didn't agree with my point of view. I would fume with anger at anyone who dared to disagree with me. "How can this person not be ashamed to be a liberal or - worse still - a socialist?" I would say to myself. "Don't they feel guilty for supporting Stalinism? Don't they feel something intuitively wrong about collectivism? Don't they like being individuals? Why do they hate achievement? Why do they hate material wealth? Why do they want to forgive criminals? Why don't they want to save people from tyrants?"
Lurking somewhere in the background, there was another question: why, I wondered, did every minority in the world get to have its own identity and list of grievances, but middle-class white guys like me didn't get to say a damn thing? Most of the things I liked - democracy, reason, scientific advances, great works of art - had been produced by dead white guys. Or dead mediterranean guys who were, you know, close enough.
Women? What had women ever done, except write some whiney poetry about bad dads and get cancer inventing x-rays?
Yes, I was a jerk. A really monumental jerk. And I'm over it now. But for a while, there, I was deep in the belly of the whale. Funnily enough, I never noticed the smell.
That I got out, I owe mainly to good books - books that encouraged me to think about some of the mantras handed down by the right. They encouraged me to say "yeah, but..." every time a columnist mouthed off about how free trade fixed everybody's problems or how those damned liberals were blaming us for stuff again, instead of the real baddies.
They also helped me to see that all of the principles I felt so strongly about were better served by the left (as it should be) than the right (as it was).
I think idly picking up Paul Kingnorth's One No, Many Yeses, and finding myself suddenly hooked, was the turning point. After that, I couldn't read a column about the benefits of globalization without thinking about the citizens of Cochabamba being charged for water. Even if they were right about all the benefits, clearly it didn't work so well for everyone.
Then I read Michael Moore, whom some more intellecutal progressives seem to find a bit incoherent or overly optimistic. But with me, he actually worked. Somehow I hadn't noticed the sheer bile of conservative commentators until it was all gathered in one place. Somehow I hadn't noticed that the Bushies contradict themselves until I saw one statement cut to another the exact opposite.
Then there was all that stuff about the Weapons of Mass Destruction and the continuing failures in Iraq (for which, see the front page of every liberal blog going).
So, I wound up here.
If there's a message from this - just from this small, unexamined slice of personal history - it's that you shouldn't give up trying to convince people. For some - not for everyone, obviously - rational argument, clearly presented, still has the power to change minds. If you say "We're right, and we're right because of X, Y and Z", sooner or later someone will listen. You don't need to apologise for being right. (Sorry, momentary relapse... It'll pass...)
The left has a natural attraction for people who are compassionate or anti-authoritarian. But it needs to get better, I think, at winning people who think of themselves as principled or as rationalists; people with a bit of a selfish streak or a desire not to party all night. It shouldn't have much of a problem with that, though.
Of course, the mere appearance of rational argument, clarity and righteousness can be powerful tools too - and nowadays they are just that, in the hands of the right.
Anyway, I mean to post more about these things later, if anyone is remotely interested; and also about how I think that the left could learn some things about presenting its case from the right (which is not to knock the hard work of people like Kos, Atrios, Moore or any of the other diarists, who do a great job). But this post is already too long, so...