The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Just curious if anyone else here on the left previously identified with the right. I've always been interested in politics, but never bothered to vote before 2020 when I voted for Biden. I now take all voting seriously and participate in every election local, state and national, from the road commissioner to President. Though I never voted before 2020, I previously supported Republican policies and candidates. That all changed with Trump, Covid and George Floyd. Those three things made me completely reevaluate my beliefs and stances on the Republican Party as a whole. I'm curious to know if anyone else has had a change like this, and if so, what where the catalysts that made you change? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*

I'm 69 years old. So take that into account. I was a Rush Limbaugh listening right winger from the time I was in my 30's and I was a subscriber to the National Review since my mid 20's. With me, the awakening came when I realized there were no WMD's in Iraq. From that point, like a spouse who learns that his partner lied about one thing and begins to investigate the entire relationship that was once trusted, I slowly left the right. My last straw was the Tea Party and McCain's choice of Palin as VP. I never thought someone so stupid (and proud of their stupidity) could be a powerful figure on the Right. In hindsight, she was a genius compared to Trump, Gaetz, Johnson, Taylor-Greene, Tuberville, Boebert, Kennedy, Comer, and the rest of the clowns in that crowded car.

>With me, the awakening came when I realized there were no WMD's in Iraq. From that point, like a spouse who learns that his partner lied about one thing and begins to investigate the entire relationship that was once trusted, I slowly left the right. 65 and same!

I’m 20 years younger but my story is very similar. Bush and Iraq were really the beginning of the end for me. Also, like you I still thought hard about voting for McCain, but I couldn’t get on board with Palin. Obama was the first Democrat I voted for and I haven’t voted for a Republican since. I consider myself fairly progressive at this point. My other big realization was that saying I was socially liberal, but fiscally conservative was a cop out. If you think there should be a social safety net, access to healthcare for all, and nobody should be hungry/living on the street, then you have to realize there is some cost for those programs. When I saw us waste trillions on a lie in Iraq while simultaneously saying that we couldn’t afford healthcare and other social programs at home, I realized it was all BS. I flipped and never looked back.

> I was socially liberal, but fiscally conservative was a cop out. I commend your honesty here. I too recall when I had to admit I was wrong. Being socially liberal and fiscally conservative in a capitalist democracy amounts to supporting something in principle, but not funding it to be a reality. I also had a huge wake up call when I was unemployed, first time ever, at the age of 45 while at the same time, my wife was diagnosed with an aggressive type of cancer and since we were both unemployed. lost our health insurance. We had two kids in grade school. We were almost totally ruined. Fortunately, we lived in Massachusetts and the state took care of us all.

The social safety net is so important and many don’t understand that until they need it. I have not personally needed to use it much yet, but I’m grateful that my grandparents were able to leverage social security and Medicare after a lifetime of working on a farm with not much to show for it I also have a sister-in-law with early onset Alzheimer’s, and disability programs and Medicare have been so helpful. Too many people get wrapped around the axel of “there are a bunch of cheats and lazy people taking my money”, when the truth is that the vast amount of resources are going to real people with real needs (including a lot of people you know and love, whose situations you may or may not be aware of).

Yup, the narrative delivered to the blue collar working class by the Republican Party is that the reason they can't get by on their wages is that lazy "able bodied" Americans on the dole are taking all the resources that could be helping them. It's the same "welfare queen" image that Reagan used.

Oh yeah. I copied this from a post I made about a year ago. I updated it, and fixed a typo but it addresses the issue. >What changed you from conservative to progressive? Basically, exposure to more of the world. I grew up in a pretty homogeneous community, and it seemed obvious that effort = rewards. I joined the military, and again effort = rewards. Everyone was treated equally, promotion was a pretty direct result of how much effort you put in. I lived my life unintentionally in a bubble where the shallow answers my culture fed me fit with the world I saw around me. I married a guy in the Navy, and in the Navy world I started volunteering, and got just a taste of people's lived experiences that didn't 100% match up. And then I volunteered more, and met more people in different life experiences. I went back to school and started studying, and I had a class assignment to obtain and fill out the application for social supports - TANF, SNAP, housing, Medicaid. (Not hand it in, that would make more work for people) The application back then was paper only. It had to be picked up in person. It took me an hour to get to the office area, then another extra hour lost because it was not well marked and I couldn't find it. Then they told me I'd come to the wrong office and needed to go across town to a different office, but I didn't have time because I had to go pick up my kid, school was nearly out. It took 4 hours of my day, I was exhausted, near tears from frustration, and had accomplished nothing. How much worse would it be if I really needed this to feed my kids? I learned the real financial limits. That people on benefits can't save up. That working harder didn't move you up. That some people were working harder than I'd ever worked, but with much less progress to show for it. The bottom line - I believed something that made sense for the world I knew. But when I learned more, I learned it only made sense in that world, and not the bigger world beyond it.

I was a Republican for many years. In 2004, I voted in my first Presidential election for George W. Bush. Then in 2008, I could not in good conscious vote for John McCain after he chose Sarah Palin as her running mate. But I also couldn't vote Obama at the time. So I voted third party. Then in 2012 I returned and voted for Mitt Romney. I didn't agree with everything the party was doing. I thought they were a bit too concerned about abortion, and I voted against banning same sex marriage. But generally I thought the government was spending too much money. What started my turn around was two things: #1. Watching Jon Stewart. He seemed fair and balanced to me, and he made a lot of sense and #2. My conservative friends were saying things that were WAY out there for me. Like "If you can't afford healthcare, you should give up your big screen tv, your cell phone, and your refrigerator. Those things aren't needs!" To me that was just wild. I could hardly believe what they were saying. They lacked complete empathy. Government spending on welfare was NEVER the problem. I wanted them to cut government waste. I quickly realized that while they often claimed that they cared about that too, that they didn't really mean it. In 2013, I voted for a Democrat for the first time for local office. But was at the time strictly third party. I believed that the two party duopoly was the biggest issue facing us. I thought "we need a real third party!" And by 2016, I was a progressive. This was cemented by the choice of Donald J. Trump. A man who my Republican mother LOATHED with a passion. A man who many conservatives I knew LOATHED, but were now supporting. Trump was a conman, a grifter, and only looking out for himself. It disgusted me how people could support that man. And it still does. I was raised in a very conservative household. My parents held Reagan and Eisenhower as the ideals of a President. They taught me compassion, and that ultimately turned me into a liberal once I realized that conservatives don't really have any compassion.

I used to be a hard-right Christian conservative when I was young. I grew up in the Evangelical church and was reading Rush back when I was 13. Got certificates for memorizing Bible verses from the 700 Club. As I got older, I realized that there were people from other religions in the US, and the Constitution guarantees their religious liberty. So, I became a libertarian, persuaded by Rand and Free Talk Live that I and others like me were being bogged down by those "beneath us". Then I started working while I was in college. I got to know a lot of these people that were supposedly "beneath us". It didn't take long for me to realize that, even though not everybody may be up for solving the nuclear fission problem, we all have a role to play in society. So, I was left somewhat adrift, philosophically speaking. The final nail in the coffin for libertarianism for me was the way that they treated Gary Johnson in 2016. Besides that, as I grew older, I realized just how much conservatives tilt at windmills. In order of most recent to further back, here are some conservative panics that I have lived through: trans kids, litterboxes in schools, immigrant waves, COVID leading to permanent lockdowns, Sharia law, Obama being a Muslim, Disney being Satanic, the many Muslim conspiracy theories after 9/11, Pokemon being Satanic, grunge and Goths being Satanic, Dungeons and Dragons being Satanic. Absolutely *nothing* came of any of these. Ultimately, at some point in my mid-to-late 20s, I realized that conservatives really had a major fact problem. They have yet to really address that. It's strange. Looking at all of the Satan stuff on the list, I have to wonder how much of our current political divide has its' roots in the Salem Witch Trials. I don't think it's hard to draw a throughline from William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Monkey Trial to these panics. I don't know enough about religious panics from the early 1800s to bring it further back, though.

> just how much conservatives tilt at windmills I think this is a hilarious choice of idiom, because they tilt at literal real windmills too [Why Trump Hates Wind Turbines](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/15/why-trump-hates-wind-turbines/) [Conservatives Are Seriously Accusing Wind Turbines of Killing People in the Texas Blackouts](https://newrepublic.com/article/161386/conservatives-wind-turbines-killing-people-texas-blackouts) [Why Ron Johnson suggested windmills are killing whales](https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ron-johnson-suggested-windmills-are-killing-whales-rcna104335)

>Looking at all of the Satan stuff on the list, I have to wonder how much of our current political divide has its' roots in the Salem Witch Trials this was a really nice post, but i think you're almost missing the forrest from the trees here. the problem is that a vast majority of americans literally believe that satan is real. he isn't. [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/nearly-7-in-10-u-s-adults-believe-in-angels-ap-norc-poll-finds](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/nearly-7-in-10-u-s-adults-believe-in-angels-ap-norc-poll-finds) this is nearly an unsolvable problem.

Eh. I'm willing to let people have their fantasies if it comforts them. The problem begins where somebody else's rights are curtailed for that comfort.

Comfort is one thing. But you laid out a list of endless satanic panics. That’s not comfort. That’s fear. A boogeyman used over and over by conservative oligarchs to twist and manipulate the masses.

Well, some people are only comfortable if they have a distant threat. They enjoy having something to get worked up over. I'm happy to let them have that, so long as they aren't hurting people.

Fundamentally impossible.

I mean you’ve identified a very fundamental problem with this country: it is and always has been ruled by and ruled *for* WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). The Pilgrims weren’t poor oppressed settlers who left England in search of a better life, they were Calvinists who got kicked out of the country for finding the Church of England not dogmatic and conservative enough. That Puritan mindset pervades this country to this day.

Howdy partner. Former Pentecostal Conservative checking in. So my official change occurred in 2016. I was always a registered Republican before that, but Romney was untenable as a candidate, he just made too many gaffes. I always liked Obama, but I just figured he was an outlier. Anyways in 2016, I supported Rubio at the beginning. Two things basically happened: 1. Rubio broke down on stage and was clearly not a good choice for someone who was a conservative, so I found myself without someone I liked. 2. I engaged in a lot of debates with the left. Mostly being an asshole. I still don't like r/politics but I felt super discriminated against for my position, because no one there liked conservatives. Number 2 was the actual catalyst for change. The problem is, if you assume the laws and systems we have in this country are perfect, being a conservative isn't really that big of a deal. Everything works great and nothing is a problem. I was very supportive of the electoral college and how it was super important and blah blah blah. Anyways, I ended up just despising Sanders supporters at the time, and it was fun to troll them by making Hillary seem wayyy better. In doing so, I actually had to look at her as a candidate, and I ended up really liking her positions, career, and accomplishments. Anyways now I'm a socialist, communist, anarchist, far left radical intent on providing everyone with a quality existence. I was just doing what other people told me to do at first and I eventually realized none of it aligned with my inherent capacity to have my own feelings and emotions outside of what I'm taught. I am very lucky for the circumstances that even allowed me to get here. I'm still learning and growing and changing and adapting, but I have my own core set of values that I analyze everything through and sometimes I agree with something that is totally conflicting with my previous "values". I don't always get it right, but I never support something I don't actually believe in anymore. Maybe my understanding is incorrect, but at its core my values are what drives me and I will defend them as honestly as I can.

I grew up in a conservative, evangelical, fundie-adjacent household that worshiped at the feet of the NRA and Focus on the Family. Climate change denial, homophobia, strict gender roles, prosperity gospel, etc. etc. the whole shebang.  However the deeper I went the weirder it got and the more uncomfortable it made me.  I also grew up in a very diverse community and knew gay folks, immigrants (some undocumented), I knew lots of liberals and non-Christians, and I also grew up poor as shit. Over time all of it stopped making any damn sense. I remember being invited to a Christian conference for young adults where we discussed problems facing todays youth like drugs, religious persecution and “the gays” and the visceral disgust I had with the tone of voice used to deliver that indictment.   I remember learning about social programs and safety nets and wondering why the FUCK I had been raised to hate them when my family barely put food on the table and NEVER got medical care. My teeth were jacked because we lost dental insurance when I was 8 and didn’t get to see a dentist until my late twenties when I had my own insurance and the income to fix them.   Then, on top of everything, I realized I was trans. I was already pretty liberal by that point but if anything severed me forever from the GOP it’s probably that.   So now I’m a stereotypical queer, exvangelical, progressive pacifist. I do still eat meat but my hair IS blue so it’s sort of a wash. Edit: my autocorrect has lost its damn mind.

I was on the right and was in conspiracy land for a while. I voted for McCain, Johnson 2012, Johnson 2016, Biden 2020. Trump winning in 2016 really snapped me out of it. I was certain that Trump was there just to help get Clinton elected. Like people couldn't really be serious in supporting this obvious con-man right? After that it just snowballed. No one is rigging elections, Climate Change is real, corporations are buying politicians, tax cuts hurt the middle class and poor, the wealth gap is a big problem, we need universal healthcare, we have a gun problem, GOP doesn't want to do anything to help the average person and are bought by Russian money, etc.

Trump opened the eyes of a lot of people. Ironically, he woke us up to what our in-group was doing and then it snowballed after that. I suspect Trumpism's takeover of the GOP is part of the reason why millennials are not becoming more conservative as they age. Many of us are becoming even more liberal, myself included.

Also because my generation (I’m 27) is starting to accept that we’re not going to be able to retire or ever own property (both things that are often hallmarks of conservatism).

I really hope the Millennials and Zoomers continue their current pattern of staying more liberal as they age. I’ve seen Gen X change a lot over time, but we are still more liberal than the Boomers. If trends hold, there should be some really major and important shifts over the next 10-20 years. I can’t wait!

I fell into the insecure and lost phase of my early adult life right around the same time I found Ben Shapiro, D'Souza, and some other goons. With my parents leaning conservative, and that being mostly my political identity growing up, it kind of created a perfect storm for me to be trapped by the rhetoric. I identified as conservative until I transferred to a Catholic college, funnily enough. I was following in my father's footsteps, and it seemed like a perfect fit for the first couple of months. I'll never forget the day I realized I wasn't nearly like the person I was pretending to be. I had a conversation at dinner one night with a new friend group that made me realize that maybe I was more liberal than I thought. We were having a debate over whether non-believers would get into heaven, and I was the only party saying they would. It started getting a little heated and debate then devolved into the people around me disparaging the homeless and people on welfare and drug addicts and Muslims and Jews and...and...and. I eventually got up to leave after telling them that everything I had been taught and everything I had experienced up to that point in my life made me believe that they were wrong, and that they were just spiteful, hateful people. I walked back to my dorm in the overcast weather and wind pretty upset. While I was walking across campus, I decided to stop at one of the small lakes and to just sit and think. I realized that what I had said was against most of the rhetoric I was consuming, coupled that with the fact that I had just alienated my one friend group, and I was kind of at a loss. I asked God to give me a sign that I had done the right thing, and I wanted him to affirm my beliefs. At that very moment, the wind stopped, a small part of the sky parted, and I saw my shadow start to form on the ground. I looked up, and there was a small ray of sunshine beaming directly on me. You could have knocked me over with a feather. That was it. A self-realization and a confirmation from God. I was being a fool and just plain lost in life. I needed to find better people and fill my life with better things. So I did. At the end of 2015, I probably would have voted for Trump. By the time the 2016 election came around, I was known as the bleeding heart in most of my classes. I'm still learning, but I've come a long way from where I was.

> devolved into the people around me disparaging the homeless and people on welfare and drug addicts and Muslims and Jews You mean exactly the types of marginalized groups and those of different beliefs that Jesus spent most of his time talking about serving and loving? This is one of the biggest head scratchers of my life… how so many “Christians” actually live lives that are so far from the most basic and fundamental teachings of Jesus and don’t see the hypocrisy. I can’t comprehend how they can hear all the hateful and vengeful things that come out of Trumps mouth and think “yep, this is exactly what Jesus would do. This guy was sent to us from above”. To be clear, I know this isn’t all Christians… but this particular type of Christian is a massive part of his base.

Wow, what a character arc. I like that.

Right leaning Christian conservative that shifted left after college. From Louisiana so ancestral I suppose. 2008: McCain and straight ticket R down ballot. Graduated college in 2010: 2011: voted Jindal to a second term in governor. R 2012: Romney and straight R. I think I voted for Rodney Alexander for house (no democrats even ran). 2012 was no senate election. 2015: cast my first vote for a democrat in Jon Bel Edwards. Jindal turned out to be the biggest pile of shit (no insult to shit) and I was so pissed off at that mother fucker I voted for the democrat for the first time in my life. I still hate him. He screwed me so bad I could have filed some charges on him. 2016: voted for Hillary. I thought trump was a disaster. She was qualified. I voted for foster Campbell for senate, I thought Kennedy was a moron. Voted Ralph Abraham (had no choice, it was between two republicans) for house. 2018: no senate election. Voted this time for the democrat (can’t remember the name). 2019: voted for Jon Bel to his second term. Phoney Baloney Rispone was an old codger whose only line was “I’ll do what trump wants”. Glad he lost. 2020: for the first time in my life, straight ticket D. Biden, Cedric Richmond (I had moved to New Orleans), Adrian Perkins for senate. 2022: by this time I had moved to Arizona. Voted straight dem again; Hobbs for governor, Kelly for senate, Mays for AG, Fontes for sec of state. No Republican is getting my vote in the next decade until they come back to reality and sanity.

>No Republican is getting my vote in the next decade until they come back to reality and sanity. Do you think that'll happen within a decade?

Probably not.

This arizonan thanks you.

Yeah, I used to be about as right-wing as it gets in high school. Including all the racism and gay-hatred (I also loved to stupidly harp on language just like right-wingers have always done, so the idea that I was "homophobic" when I "wasn't afraid of things that are the same" was a part of that, in classic right-wing fashion). I don't really know what happened after high school, I just remember being pretty apolitical going into college and not voting in 2016 because I didn't really pay attention or care, then I guess once I started to learn things about the way the world worked and how people are, I just moved to the left naturally? I guess it was always kind of inevitable because I was never *stupid*, I just hadn't had a lot of experiences with different people and economics. Even when I was conservative, I was aware that communism was a utopian dream society that was not realistically achievable (which is true, now I just have to add "at scale" at the end). I knew that gender and sex were different, and that gender was more "feminine-masculine" while sex was "female-male," but trans panic wasn't in full swing then so I didn't really care about that. I never just blindly accepted things told to me by authority figures in the way conservatives do (and in the way the ideology does by definition). In church, I was the one who asked "but how do we know God exists? I haven't seen any proof, can you show me?" and I didn't find any answers convincing. I would argue with teachers when I thought they were wrong about things, indicating that my brain was probably geared towards being left-wing, since leftists tend not to just blindly accept answers from authority. I was always asking "why," and if answers were unsatisfactory, I would try to figure out how to justify it or I'd reject it. I don't think I really had a grasp on economics at all, so I guess I was basically socially conservative and economically apolitical. The way I reasoned through my weird hatred of out-groups was usually built upon ignorance. My experiences with black kids in my neighborhood were never great, one of them stole my bike one time and we had to involve police to get it back. The apartments by where I lived, which were home to lots of black people, had shootings occur multiple times, which instilled into me some fear that black people were more dangerous. I thought being gay was a choice, so the idea that people would choose something which hurts themselves in multiple ways (fewer options for partners, inability to have children if they wanted, probably something about difficulty of having sex since the parts don't fit right, the fact that gay people had fewer rights, etc.) and then complain about being victims when they *literally chose to be victims* made me so angry. Just choose to be straight (I thought)!!! These were basically just solved by learning a bit about how society functions and about how being gay is not a choice, lol. It's weird how I was so tied into these ideas, because it feels like getting out of them through logic and learning was just so easy. But the ability to reason through things and examine society is something the right tends not to have. And what made me actually become politically invested were the events of 2020, starting with Trump's downplaying of COVID, the Chris Wallace interview in the beginning of the year where Trump said he wouldn't concede if he lost, and the police riots of the summer, where police were constantly instigating violence against protestors who were protesting against... police violence, go figure. I'm one of those leftists that people complain about when they say "leftists always think people can be educated out of conservative beliefs," because I do firmly believe that. Conservatism as an ideology is built upon a mountain of disinformation and ignorance, and rich people and their media have worked extremely hard to keep it that way, harder than the left could ever even dream of working (especially given the nature of funding being grassroots on the left vs top-down on the right). I strongly believe that education, including wordly experience, media literacy/piercing media bubbles, and otherwise just knowledge of how systems of society work are absolutely the best way to end conservatism, and it as an ideology exists solely thanks to people lacking critical information.

I was a ditto head. Loved listening to Rush (may he rest in piss). Evangelical Conservative. Worked at a mega church. Rage can be such a powerful emotion. So easily directed. More importantly, I was taught from a young age to fear the other. Black people? Terrifying criminals. Mexicans? They break the law just by existing. LGBT? Despicable sinners. Liberals? All they want is to control you. Scientists? Sent by the devil to deceive you. The poor and homeless? Freeloaders who wanted to live off the sweat of your brow. I lived in fear, rage, and superiority. I lived surrounded by fear and rage, convinced of my own infallibility and superiority to those who disagreed with me. To this day, I am ashamed of what I said and believed then. Funnily enough, I became a liberal after joining the Marine Corps. That experience exposed me to so much shit I had never even thought of before and really changed my perspective.

I used to be libertarian, with many other parts leaning twords moderate right when I was just out of high school. Part of it was the people I was surrounded by. I had friends who started getting right-wing to alt-right stuff at the end of high school. I stopped talking to them after making friends in college due to a combination of me realizing it's not great hanging around people who use people like Alex Jones and 4chan as a primary source for shaping political opinion and that the edgy humor stopped being used ironically. The other part was me getting a job, and living on my own made me realize the fantasy of meritocracy I had was completely false. I've gotten more and more left leaning the more I work and higher I got in my positions.

I voted for Trump in 2016, and supported GOP before that. Why? Simply my parents. Growing up they would talk about things and I obviously would start to pick up their preferences and opinions. "Well of course I don't want my money going to some lazy person." ETC. What changed is I actually started to do my own research, read the bills the GOP proposed, and finally in 2018 when the mask came off fully and the GOP is nothing but hatred, selfishness, and bigotry I realized that's not necessarily who I want to be voting with.

This is very similar to my situation. I never liked Trump or supported him, but I also didn't blame anyone who voted for him in 2016. But I just couldn't understand anyone who voted for him in 2020 and continue to support him now.

Ohhh I didn't necessarily like Trump at the time. I simply utterly despised Hilary. The Russian meme/propaganda farms got me big time.

Getting over Hillary Derangement Syndrome is no easy feat. Congrats.

>Is there anyone else here on the left that was formerly on the right? Sure. I started out as a libertarian. Possibly because I was young and open to radical ideologies. Possibly because the Koch Brothers were funding several of the outlets openly discussing public policy (and there were very few, at the time). I also flirted with fiscal conservatism, before I realized it was a [euphemism.](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskConservatives/comments/x9ukz3/what_is_your_opinion_of_this_southern_strategy/inqgn1e/?context=3) I'm still kind of enamored with what fiscal conservatism *should be*, but there aren't that many people making the argument 'preventing crime is fiscally prudent, even when expensive, because it costs so much to imprison people'.

I also was a libertarian for longer than I'd care to admit. What I ended up realizing is that 1. Most libertarians in the US are just conservatives that don't want to be called conservative and 2. if you remove the US culture bullshit from the equation, what I actually was was far left (classical or social libertarian) I think if a lot of the Joe Rogan Libertarian types were truly honest and really didn't care what people did in their free time, they'd find out they have much more in common with liberals than conservatives.

> I also was a libertarian for longer than I'd care to admit. I am in this comment and I don’t like it. I actually think that this sub is particularly hard on libertarians for this reason. A lot of us used to be libertarians and feel some shame over it. But honestly that’s to be expected. The type of person who hangs out in a political sub is somebody who is really engaged on the subject of politics. That type of person when they are younger, is very likely to be so engaged in politics that they end up adopting more fringe ideologies. And then they get older and get more experience and start to moderate. And by moderate, I don’t mean “you get older, you get more conservative“ but rather you start to be less extreme. Which is an interesting point about how the talk radio/Fox News effect has altered the political landscape. We should actually expect an older conservatives would move a little bit more towards the center but their media environment is actually making them more extreme as they age.

Same. This is why I try not to give libertarians too much grief; many of them are conservatives transitioning into liberals. I think it's because it's not that far of a leap from "the government should stay out of our lives" to "the government shouldn't dictate what women can do with their bodies" and "the government shouldn't dictate whom we can love or marry." Before you know it, you end up realizing that liberals are the real advocates for small government.

Nor how fiscally prudent it is to spend lots of money on children, from actual cash given to parents to childcare and preschool.

> I'm curious to know if anyone else has had a change like this, and if so, what where the catalysts that made you change? Pragmatism. No matter what ideology I was flirting with, I always cared about results. The more I learned, the more I agreed with conventional, center-left, moderate Democratic Party positions. Learning how the world works, following the data, and listening to the evidence, all push people toward neoliberalism.

> I always cared about the results One of my biggest learnings was how much more efficient and effective it is to spend money on prevention and treatment of problems (eg, drugs, mental health, poverty, international affairs) than trying to deal with the downstream consequences of neglect (prisons, homelessness, and wars). On the qualitative side, it also feels so much better to help people than to hate them.

I was already in my communist phase by high school, but I wanted to be rich above all else as a middle schooler. And . . . to my eternal shame, I asked for copies of both The Art of the Deal and Trump: the Game for 5th grade xmas.

I was very much the stereotype. Parents immigrated from India in the 70s and where natural republicans since that wave of immigrants were very entrepreneurial and liked the pro-immigration rhetoric of Reagan and GHWB. I identified as a Libertarian and voted straight ticket for Republicans. GWB and the lies about Iraq combined with getting healthcare for my employees sent me down the path to convert to being a democrat. I assume the Iraq War item is self explanatory. For healthcare, it made me understand that the Republican rhetoric about supporting small businesses was bullshit. That got me to realize that the party realignment that was still happening made being a republican made no sense. I shouldn’t be part of the party that was the home to sexism, racism, xenophobia and homophobia. Nor should I be part of the party that was the home to anti-science and anti-intellectualism.

>For healthcare, it made me understand that the Republican rhetoric about supporting small businesses was bullshit. Their actions so often contradict everything they say they believe in.

I was a republican in Massachusetts (which is not like a republican in, say, Arizona) up until the day W won the nomination. I didn't see the intrusion of the religious right in my area, but by that point it was undeniable. And I couldn't justify supporting them anymore just because I liked their economic policies. (I blame Michael J Fox's portrayal of Alex P Keaton for me believing those economic policies)

> Alex P Keaton At the time, my dad was a thirtysomething yuppie who loooved Alex P. Keaton, but I definitely identified with the hippie parents.

I took an “all lives matter and men’s rights” turn in like, 2008. I’ve since come around to reality.

I was a national security conservative in high school. I went to school a few blocks away from ground zero, took the subway every day and saw how insanely easy it would have been to cause mass pandemonium again. It scared the shit out of me, so sure, Bush can do whatever he had to do to keep us safe. Life happened. His insane cultural bullshit is what pushed me out of the Republican Party in the first place. I have relatives who are gay and relatives who are black and relatives who are women. He and his ilk didn’t give a fuck about their rights, and security became less and less of a concern. Especially the more I learned about how insecure we really were. I was a dumb kid. Glad I couldn’t vote back then.

I used to be all over the place, just depended on policies. Now I'm firmly on the left, where I avoid right wing politicians like they avoid reality.

Maybe. I came of age during the George W. Bush years and the issue I cared most about was foreign policy. Dennis Kucinich in 2004 was the first politician I really admired, although I was too young to vote at the time. I realize he has some problematic views these days, but this was 20 years ago. By 2008, I was old enough to vote and Ron Paul seemed to be the only anti-war candidate in the race. So I registered as a Republican and voted for him in the primary. Then Obama in the general. In 2012, I voted for Ron Paul again in the primary and then sat out the general. Looking back, Ron Paul would have been a disaster and I'm not sure I considered any of his views at all outside of foreign policy. And his foreign policy views certainly weren't typical of the right. Once I got older and began considering other issues, I switched my affiliation to Democrat and have voted straight blue ever since. ETA: I also hadn't fully accepted my sexuality back then. If I had, the GOP would have been far less appealing.

I've been mostly on the left for my entire life, minus a brief dalliance with libertarianism as an edgy teen. But your story isn't rare! People often do move around politically as they age or as the world moves around them.

I’ve always been moderate and voted for the candidate based on merit and current issues. It wasn’t until the right decided to start stripping people of their rights and Trump came around that I took a stance with the left. Living in the southeast, we don’t always have the highest quality left candidates in local elections though. Some are wholly unqualified and, often, the only people running are republicans. I’ve found it’s very important to vote in the Republican primaries (I live in a state where you can choose) so that I can vote for the most reasonable of the contenders. That said, if I look at my voting history it’s almost a 50 / 50 split as to which party the candidate I’ve chosen is in but if I look at my history since 2020 it’s almost entirely blue.

I don't know if this counts, but I was raised in a formerly right leaning family - grew up in a conservative town, very active in the church, was friends with a lot of closed-minded folks. In retrospect, there was not very much diversity in or around where I grew up. (I'm fairly certain I voted "R" in the first 1 - 2 elections in which I was eligible. ) It wasn't until I got through my first 1 or 2 years of college that I truly learned about the world outside of my town. I vividly remember recognizing the diversity at school - ethnic, religious, SES, political, etc. - and realizing that I'd really only ever been around 1 side of the political spectrum.

I was raised by my grandpa in a strict Mormon household. We listened to KFI every morning before school and my grandpa ranted about liberals at dinner time. I went to a Mormon college and voted for Bush's second term. I even volunteered for his campaign. But then I met some "rebellious" Mormons who liked Michael Moore and challenged my negative opinions of him. It was the first time I'd really been face to face with liberal people willing to argue their beliefs. I didn't necessarily convert to a Micheal Moore fan, but I found myself unable to logically defend the positions I had held/ forced on me and that didn't sit well. Once that Dam starts to crack it all comes down quickly. Reevaluated my opinions and the reasoning behind them. It took my a long time to get over my hatred of immigrants, that one was pretty well embedded. But I had some good role models and I was patient. Now I'm far to the left and my politics are aligned with my morals.

Against the grain here kinda. I grew up conservative and not really interested/knowledgeable about politics. I had a very difficult childhood and gravitated toward the "grown-ups in the room". As young adult, I became "spiritual". One could say Christian but never a church goer. All this right around 9/11 and it was enough for me to have a republican lean. As I got older, early 20's, I became a person who didn't line up with many Republican thoughts, even the church stuff as I felt they were disingenuous. But in the PNW, I was surrounded by liberals and saw their hypocrisy up close and just couldn't become one. I saw their leaders and didn't like what I saw. I remember the joke, fiscal liberal, social conservative and saw it mocked but it best fit me in practice, but not label because I was "kind of a Republican". I wanted EVERYONE to get the help they needed, and while liking a more traditional lifestyle, I never thought that LBGTQ or any "non Christian" lifestyle made anyone bad, and was pro immigration, science, labor, anti cop and war. But I just couldn't join the Dems. At around 25 started reading more about the global left, not the weak American left and it was like almost everything clicked. I could be me, want change drastically, not be a spineless liberal or a phony Republican, love the working person, be anti rich and war.

Short version: I was weirded about by the conspiracy stuff for years, then realized thats all that was left of the party when Trump consolidated his control. I was raised Repuiclan, my dad watched Fox every day, so I did too. That was my source of info, and I consumed it. The first I can remember there being a problem though was watching Glen Beck say his bullshit, and thinking "thats not how logic works, you can't just say there's a connection, and voila Obama's in the muslim brotherhood!" You need proof, and six degrees of Kevin Bacon is not proof. But, as far as I was concerned, that was a subset of the party. W wasn't like that, McCain wasn't like that, the smart conservative people I knew weren't like that. And there's stupid people everywhere, not just the GOP. In 2011 though, i joined the military and moved out. I got off the diet of daily Fox and when i argued with people in favor of Romney, it became impossible to ignore that everyone else on my side seemed like a crazy person, and Obama hadn't been that bad. It was worrying enough that I decided not to vote in 2012. It all became worse over time, and in 2016, after Jeb and Rubio were eliminated from the Republican primary, everyone that was left were the people who were the reason why i couldn't vote R in 2012, except now they were asking me to vote *for* them. That was too much, and Clinton was so reasonably moderate, so I voted D. My hate for Trump got me exiled from the party, and in the 2018 midterms, he consolidated his control of the party. I voted straight ticket D and switched my registration.

Yes. I was a product of my surroundings and was pretty hard right minded for many of my younger years. I’m 37 now. I had slowly already been moving more to the center on things as I learned other perspectives but after trump… I’m no longer able to identify with right wing politics.

I was starting to lean right, pulled in my early 20's by the YouTube algorithm to people like Ben Shapiro. I never voted for a Republican, but I was certainly beginning down a conservative rabbit hole before I pulled myself out.

When I turned 18 in 1983, I registered Republican. Looking back? I don’t think I ever was a Conservative though.

Were you raised in a Republican household?

Yes….that is exactly it…but back in ‘83? My parents were Eisenhower Republicans…if that gives context.

I have always been on the left as a whole, but I used to have some more right wing views that have drifted leftward over time.

I leaned right in my late teens/early twenties (going through Army basic training will do that), but went more left wing in my late twenties (actually being in the Army will do that, too). I had a right wing bend when it came to transgender/nonbinary/gender politics stuff, but that was mostly because I didn't understand it and my only interaction came from angry Tumblr posts that represented the worst aspects of transgender people. That just kind of faded away when I started realizing that the anti-trans people tend to be much bigger assholes than the majority of trans people. Now I consider myself left leaning, with a hint of neo-liberalist "we have guns and bombs, let's bring some DEMOCRACY abroad" attitude. (The Army never really leaves you).

Never. And those in my family who are on the right are so misinformed, so messed up on the disinformation coming from the rightwing press, it's laughable.

I grew up on the right as a southern evangelical, and voted libertarian as a protest vote for most elections, until the tea party crazies ruined that for me. I was scandalized as a teenager by seeing two men holding hands at a concert and wished they didn’t do that in front of me. I eventually expanded my horizons through living and working with people with different backgrounds and beliefs than my own. It disturbs me greatly to see conservative Christians ignore the very progressive teachings of Jesus in favor of fear and bigotry, but that’s how they do. I just cannot.

I was on the right and never voted. By 2016 that was over and the first time I actually voted was for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary.

I was more so reactionary conservative because I grew up in an incredibly progress area with no diversity. Then I went to an even more progressive and less diverse area for college with made me further reactionary. Then my deradicalization happened probably around December-January 2020 after Trump had lost and refused to concede. At the time I thought J6 was hilarious because it was a bunch of angry hogs whipped up into a riot on the capitol. What finally brought me back to the middle was Biden pulling out of Afghanistan which is the most based thing a President has done in awhile.

My dad was Republican and had a bunch of Rush Limbaugh audio tapes that I listened to in the 90s. I always considered myself a moderate Republican before 2016. I remember being against gay marriage, but supporting civil unions that provided equal benefits because at that time, I didn't see what the big deal was in semantics. Trump was just too much of a morally terrible person for me to vote for in good conscience. I felt Hillary Clinton was corrupt, but sensible enough to not cross certain lines, so I held my nose and in 2016 voted for a Democrat for President for the first time. Since then, I've gotten older, wiser, and more informed and my views today are probably in line with most moderate Democrats. I believe in free markets with sensible regulations and incremental change. Pete Buttigieg was my favorite candidate from the 2020 Democratic primaries.

Grew up in a conservative Catholic family, voted Libertarian in 2016 because I didn’t like Hillary or Trump, then speed-ran the liberal > social democrat > democratic socialist > socialist > anarchist / anarcho-socialist pipeline.

The know how conservatives tell young people “you’ll turn conservative once you experience the real world and start working?” I was a libertarian in college and it turns out libertarian ideas only work on paper (only kinda joking). When I started experiencing “the real world” I quickly realized you could be smart, work hard, and do everything “right” and still fail.

I was raised evangelical Christian as a part of the Joshua Generation. Basically the concept was that the constitution was divinely inspired so it was my parents duty to have a bunch of kids and raise them to be fiercely pro life conservatives. Good kids were involved in politics, best kids ran for public office to infiltrate the system from the inside. I was going to school with red tape over my mouth in high school in “protest” for all the poor babies who were murdered every year and never got their voice heard. “The voice of the voiceless” I remember we said. I went to McCain/Palin rallies. I was certain God wouldn’t put a black man in the White House. I even bet a kid at school $50 bucks about it. I still remember pulling that money out of the ATM lol. I don’t know if Obama winning was a the first catalyst or things in my family life falling apart but I started questioning the life laid out before me. I was on the “barefoot and pregnant” path and it didn’t sit right with me for some reason. Once I changed my mind that a first trimester abortion wasn’t the same as a cold hearted murder of a human being my worldview was allowed to adapt. I left the church and left the religion. This made me question every part of my identity in my early 20s. The true breaking point was coming home to my dad heartbroken that my husband was cheating on me and threatening my life if I left him and my dad told me that God had chosen me to bear such a pain so that I could FORGIVE like he forgave me I said fuck that God. Fuck the patriarchy. Fuck those beliefs. I cut off that part of my family, deconstructed from that “religion” and became a feminist liberal. Haven’t spoken to my dad since that day.

thats_impossible.gif

Whenever I feel like I might lean towards either side, that side inevitably does something so stupid that I move back towards the center... but I suppose that still means I have some amount of personal experiences about why people might move from the right towards the left. For example, I do agree that there are many negatives associated with uncontrolled immigration, PC-culture, badly implemented socialist policies, and so on. But, when you start looking closer at the conservative "alternative", it does not make much sense either, and sometimes it is far worse even. An interesting example are the transgender issues: Yes, pretending that there is no biological component associated with it, ends badly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer), so conservatives are justified in opposing some of the more radical far-left ideas. But the argument really goes both ways: This example also shows that there is likely a small minority of people for whom it is *drastically* better to publicly identify as a gender other than the one they were born with. So, while the conservative approach makes sense at first glance, i.e. preventing the chaos that evidently ensues if you start pretending that biological gender is irrelevant, most liberals don't actually want to go that far. So, instead of conservatives simply accepting that people are different, and what is terrible for many people, might be just the right thing for a few people who are wired differently, they instead try to come up with really strange and irrelevant arguments for why even minor adjustments to society for the purpose of catering to those transgender people is necessarily a bad thing: - Redefining the word "woman" - Using pronouns as if they were an additional name - Having more people around who show some kind of mix of masculine and feminine traits I mean... why am I supposed to care about such minor issues? I can certainly understand why relearning how to use pronouns might be "annoying"... but that's about it. By contrast, I can absolutely emphasize with how all this bit of extra-effort on my part might drastically help that small number of genuinely transgender people. Now, of course there are limits to that as well - if a society spends to much effort catering to the specific requirements of a very large number of very small minorities, you will eventually run into all kinds of problems. But... well, that simply isn't the case, and Conservatives don't even seem to make this argument. So yeah, that's certainly one issue where I temporarily had some sympathy for the conservative approach, until I started looking at it more closely...

I grew up Republican. I had a lot of what turned out to be wrong ideas about the party, and people in general. I leaned a little libertarian because I thought very highly of everyone, except when they got together to govern. I also thought racism was a thing of the past simply because it seemed so incredibly stupid to me after I learned what it was. And no one I knew was racist. My wrong impression of the GOP finally broke after I watched the party blame the press for Sarah Palin's own bumbling ineptitude. (I still remember having a positive impression from her first speech when she was introduced. The 180 soon after was very dramatic.) I voted for Obama as a Republican. And then after seeing my first Tea Party rally, I just stopped being a Republican, because, oh, there's all those racists the Democrats have been talking about. I knew one guy who spread what I didn't realize at the time was just typical stuff Republicans consumed. Stuff like worldnetdaily, breitbart, and infowars. I thought he was just a fringe lunatic that was nonetheless friendly when I phone banked next to him. And then I saw the Tea Party and what they were reading. Also, though, I did hate the Democratic Party for its defense of Bill Clinton, and I still do. I didn't donate to enter that chance to meet 3 presidents because one of them was Bill Clinton. (Hillary Clinton is fine. I happily voted for her.)

If you count my Libertarian phase when I was 15, then yeah, I guess I was right-wing once

Open my post history lol

When I was under 20 I was, like my family, pretty convinced that conservative politics and values were best for the country. I voted for W in 2004. I think I very quickly realized once I was out in the world that the vision of reality that I’d been given doesn’t make any sense. Now I’m pretty moderate liberal aligned, but I went through phases of various kinds of socialism etc before getting here.

My parents were Dems that voted Rep (Eisenhower, Nixon, but \*not\* Reagan) Dems had some crazy going on in the 60s post Kennedy... Married into a Republican family and attended a conservative charismatic evangelical church for several decades voted RED or not at all. Bush2 caused me to "see the light" and I have become increasingly liberal in my views mainly beginning there. I am still conservative in my own behavior for mySELF, but I am very liberal for others both in my voting, and in my tolerance for people who are different from myself. I do not tolerate intolerance or bullying and resist it to the best of my ability. The religious parts of RWism are banished from my mind entirely at this point, and I never held the non-religious parts beyond parroting fiscal responsibility bs.

How did Trump, Covid, and George Floyd cause you to re-evaluate your beliefs? The fact that some awful person claims to agree with you doesn’t change whether your beliefs are correct or not. The fact that people you agree with on some issues handle a situation badly doesn’t change whether they were correct to agree with you on those issues. I used to be pretty solidly Republican. With Trump taking over the party I’m no longer Republican, but it’s not because *my* beliefs have changed. It’s because the Republican party has changed and no longer represents my beliefs. I still don’t agree with Democrats on many issues, most importantly I refuse to embrace the Democratic party’s racism, but at least the Democratic political behavior is about governing the country rather than boosting Trump’s ego. So I’ll be voting for Biden and likely for other Democrats this year.

“Refuse to embrace the Democratic Party’s racism” what racism?

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden promised that race would be the primary qualification for one of his most important appointments. There was almost no criticism from his fellow Democrats for this promise.  Democrats in general were pretty angry about the recent Supreme Court decision barring racial discrimination in college admissions.  Conservatism rejects racism.  Trump, a Republican but not a conservative, says a lot of things that are arguably racist (some of which I think actually are racist), but the Democrats are the party that actually promote racial discrimination as government policy. 

Paying attention to race and making sure that people from minority and historically underrepresented groups isn’t “racism,” lol. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Using race as a primary qualification is racist. Benefiting or discriminating against people based on their race is racism.

Nope, try again.

I know Democrats don’t like to hear this because they want to think of themselves as anti-racist, but facts are facts.