I'm curious why, how, or both, any of us realized we are conservative.  If you don't identify as a conservative, per se, you probably don't identify as a liberal, and view it as a symptom of brain damage, so when did you first know you indeed weren't a liberal?

For me, I was 9 when Reagan was running for re-election, and I remember Mondale saying he would raise taxes.  I knew what taxes were, and I just could not understand why anyone would want to do that.  In class one day, the teacher asked what families are voting for Reagan, and everyone put their hand up except for one girl, who was voting Democrat.  I remember being completely confused as to why her family would do that, and thinking all I had to do was tell her about Mondale wanting to raise taxes and she would understand and her family would support Reagan.  So, I think naturally, I just didn't get liberalism, and has always been a weird concept.

When I was in my late teens, I went through a drug phase (nothing addictive), and did a lot of reading on philosophy and economic theory, and I guess that period when you "find yourself".  Let's just say I can't be accused of not opening my mind.  I was at the age where I was starting to understand the adult world more, but any rebellion that could be attached to me was in regards to government constriction.  Mine wasn't crapping on sidewalks like an OWSer.  Mine was more like "can I just get stoned and sit here and read my book please while you let me be?"  I had a strong grasp of economics, and understood the role of a business and money in our economy.  I always loved people who made a lot of money and knew one day that's what I wanted to do.  I had respect for people who could use their brain to make money.  That doesn't mean I didn't respect others who didn't make a lot of money, but I felt anyone could not make money; that's easy.  I loved how I could become successful, all I had to do was find the right skill and find the right niche, and I could have a good lifestyle, because of the country and system I lived in, thanks to the Constitution and the free market (or, free as it could have been).  I identified as a hard core libertarian in my late teens and early 20s, but always wanted a very strong military defense system.  I loved (and love) the idea of us having weapons in space pointed at the enemy, and the feeling that I live in a country where our enemies wouldn't dare attack us, and if they launched anything at us, we'd just knock it out of the sky.  That just seems like common sense.  Anyway, I would interact and identify with other libertarians, and have always been sympatico with them, but they didn't seem to always get my passion for a strong military.  I always looked at the military as defense, and didn't ever consider it a war machine.  I also was pretty hard core about drug decriminalization, but I'd hear other "libertarians" say how great it would be, and how the government could tax it.  That would just drive me insane, and I'd get in fights about how we have enough of our property and earnings stolen from us, and if something like that happened, letting the government tax it and regulate it isn't cool, and would defeat the whole point.  A lot of them also had a problem with Christianity and Christians, which I didn't get.  I'm not religious, but I didn't understand how they would just think they knew the mysteries of he universe and how we were created.  It really turned me off.  Plus, as someone who isn't religious and considered myself libertarian, my attitude was always "who cares! let them think and worship whatever they want."   

I found myself being annoyed by wanna-be libertarians, who I think wanted to be libertarian for convenience, instead of it being the right thing to do and be.  I wanted government regulations, albeit minimal as possible, and an insanely strong national defense.  Eventually, I realized I wasn't a libertarian, at least in the circles I seemed to be part of.  I consider myself a conservative with a libertarian soul.  My heart wants everyone to get along peacefully, but the logical conservative part of me slaps me in the head and says "hey dummy, there are others who want to control you and take your shit".  My heart wants someone to induldge as much as they want in alchohol and drugs, and to arrest them if they infringe on one's life, liberty, and property, but the conservative part of me takes over and reminds me we don't want drunks driving over the road, even if they happen to make it home without killing anyone.  Abortion was another area I disagreed.  This was still split, I'd say, but it seemed more were OK with allowing it and just writing it off as a non-human, under the guise of "freedom".

So, as I was growing up, I naturally rejected liberalism.  Welfare, taxes, defense, social, anti-individualism, etc., etc., I just always considered it a side effect of brain damage, because it makes no sense.  Welfare, for example, where my earnings are stolen and given to others.  I never ever understood that for as long as I can remember.  I never had an issue with people giving their own money to whoever, and I think the way I was brought up had a lot to do with that.

I went from identifying as a libertarian to a conservative.

What is your story?  How did you realize, at the least, you're not a liberal?  I'm very interested.  My favorite stories are the liberals who realized it was all BS.  Liberalism falls apart when thinking occurs.

Very simple. It was after 9/11. I lived many years in north Jersey. Been to New York hundreds of times. Been in and on the top of the WTC at least 10 times so the idea they came down was almost surreal. My dad was supposed to be in the towers that day but didn't go because he wanted chips with his dinner (a story for another time) Living in Baltimore I was a bit stunned by it all. So I watched all of the news coverage I coud. Then the networks gradually went back to their usual programming. I knew of a 24 cable news network (CNN) so I tried to find it. I found Fox. They eventually went back to their usual programming like O'Reilly and Hannity etc. I had no idea what a liberal or conservative was or the difference between a Republican or a Democrat However I found certain people on these shows to be whiny disingenuous, lying and overall unlikeable. They were all liberal.

That's it really. I knew I was Conservative because the liberals made me sick and angry. They didn't seem natural.

Hey Taxed,

So enjoyed this read.  It is always ok to spell out where you come from and I'll attempt to try this as well.

Growing up, I remember that my parents were democrats and I didn't ever know what shaped them as this but I do remember when they switched parties and became Reps.  It was after FDR became president because they told me but they didn't say why.  I do remember that my Dad didn't like the "New Deal". 

When my Dad was growing up in Hot Springs, NC there wasn't a lot of jobs there.  He and his brothers and his Dad were carpenters.  When mills opened up around here in SC, they decided to relocate here and so they did.  Temp housing was provided to people wanting to live here until housing was provided which the mills did provide.  Dad and the rest of his family lived in  abandoned army barracks located in Arcadia, SC (Camp Wadsworth).  Sound familiar in today's scheme of events?  Dad and grandpa and my aunts and uncles went to work in the mills.  Later, my Dad didn't like the confines of the cotton mill so he went to work with his Dad as a millwright and carpenter.  The other uncles stayed in the mill until one of them was drafted in WW2.  He came home injured. 

I will soon be 71 years old.  Born during WW2, I was the youngest of 4 born to my parents and my birthday fell before the end of the war.  This was the war that I read about mostly.  I was intrigued by it really.  I couldn't believe that so many Jews were being murdered just because they were Jews.  I couldn't understand the hatred of a people so incensed that murder and annihilation were the only answers.  But, sensing that this hatred was being realized everywhere, I set about in trying to keep myself untouched by it.  I first noticed that this hatred that I was seeing started by seeing blacks sent to the rear seating in public buses.  Further, seeing these same blacks getting their water from "blacks only" fountains and eating in blacks only cafes.  I guess you might identify me as a liberal on these views but not so.  My parents may have started out in life as dems but I'll have to say that they were conservative in the way they lived their lives.  Being brought up in  the mountains, they lived frugal lives, very poor.  Everyone worked and everyone shared the bounty of that work.  They took care of themselves and their own.  They never would have asked anyone to do anything for them unless they could pay or repay in some way whatever it was that they were asking for.  What turned them against dems is the help programs that were put in place for the economically disadvantaged.  They couldn't wrap their brains around the fact that able-bodied men and women needed to have the necessities of life provided by a government.  After all, they worked hard to provide for themselves and their families and they were not offered anything besides a job and to hear that they would be taxed more to take care of these give-aways was too much to swallow. 

I can remember when there was no social security too.  I had a great-grandma who was widowed.  She was on my mom's side and raised my mom and her sister after my grandmother died.  My mom was orphaned at the age of two, her sister was three and a half.  They had a brother who left home after he turned twelve.  They couldn't abide their new stepma so great granny took them home to live with her.  They lived with her until they married.  Both worked in the mills their whole lives.  After great grandpa died, my great grandma was taken care of by her family.  I can remember her coming to stay at our house for a few weeks and then she would visit my aunt for a few weeks and then on to her other daughter's homes for the same amount of time only to start the whole process all over again.  This went on until she passed away.  No safety nets for her exc.  ept family.  I didn't hear the first complaint about granny either.  She was very industrious and somewhat of a spitfire, no nonsense and very Christian.  We loved her. 

Back to the war.  I compiled a report about the Nazis in my eleventh grade World History class which earned me the highest grade in a class full of A+ students.  Even drew a model of a concentration camp (Autzwitz).  I was told a few years later that my teacher kept this report and drawings for the rest of his teaching career and used it as a reference when teaching about the tyranny of that time.  The report was twenty handwritten pages and I could have written more but I just got tired and got to a good stopping point.  Wonder how many pages I could write about our own dictator?   

After high school, I enrolled and took a business course at one of our business schools here and went to work at one of our mills as a lab tech.  Most of my career was as a lab tech even a chem lab tech before I retired.  One job as a supervisor in a steel mill.  I managed to get my children raised and am happy to report that they are all gainfully employed at jobs that they can do well at, some have even taken advantage of their youth and have finished college.  I have grandchildren who are entering college now.  We are a self sufficient and very work motivated family.  Contrary to what liberals think, it is possible to make it on your own steam.   

We do not like the idea that so many of this world can just come here to live off the labor of the many who have made this country what it is.  Granted, this country is made up of immigrants but the criteria for that existence was vastly greater then than it is now.  Now, all any of them has to do is make it to our border and we'll pull them across if need be.  Not only that, they won't have to strike a lick at anything until they get good and ready because our dictator has promised them anything as long as they vote for the next democrat running for president.  Their very existence is guaranteed by the labor of those here that pay taxes.  We are in for a rough ride under this dictator and so will all who fall for his BS. 

I guess I am best described as one who wants only what I am willing to sacrifice to get, a person who might not like what you say but I will defend your right to say it.  I love my home and family and love this country.  I don't like the idea of having to ward off terrorists but will use any means available to me to protect what I have gained.  I do not like what I see and identify as moral decay in our society and will continue to speak against such things in my circle of friends and acquaintances. 

One stench in our world is especially bad to me and that is abortion.  I can't bear this subject and supporters of it either.  Only a monster kills babies.   

Like Keyboarder, I grew up in the south being born during WWII. My family were all FDR democrats as were most in the south. I remained a democrat. The when I graduated from college my wife's family introduced me to conservative thinking. It really hit me when I started receiving my pay stub and saw all the taxes.  I really started paying attention to what was going on. I realized the democrat principles were in opposition to my core values. I have been a conservative since the late sixties.

I first became interested in politics around the time Barry Goldwater made his run for President.  Inspite of the duck and cover drills and the daisy political ad, I thought AUH2O was RIGHT.  (and he part of his camplaign said that He'd rather be RIGHT than President)  I was very impressed with Ronald Reagan's nominating speech of Goldwalter at the GOP Convention. 

I claim my conservative roots when I changed from being a registered Independant in order to vote FOR Ronald Reagan and AGAINST both George Herbert Walker Bush And Bob Dole, in the GOP Primary.  I agreed with everything Reagan said and admired him very much.  Reagan was the best POTUS in my lifetime and I came to love the man, because he said what he meant and meant what he said and loved this country as much as I do.  Some people fault Reagan for not being perfect ignoring the simple fact that no human being IS perfect.  Reagan was as good as it gets, in this imperfect world of politicss and goverment!

The Liberals and the left of Conservative Republicans, spend so much of their energy trying to fix what ain't broken, by constantly tearing away at the problems they see with both our country and the concept of capitalism and free enterprise.  I found that Conservatism places it's emphasis on improving what is good rather than chasing the elusive rabbit of what is Perfect; throwing money down a rat hole to fix things that are either unfixable or not the business of goverment!   Even Plato defined "Utopia" as meaning "no such place"!

"Perfect is the enemy of Good"   
               ~ Voltaire

For me, it was just a way of life, didn't really know there was a difference till I met a liberal in the early 60s.
They were the antithesis of everything I held dear. They were creating the gap between Yin and Yang, anarchists of Western culture. They literally despised everything Americans held dear, they wanted to undue the American family.

Discovering Marxists in SF preaching to young idealist kids/wannabe hippies, telling them drugs were enlightenment, that free love was the rudimentary law of man, that everything they had been taught was wrong, solidified my disgust for liberalism.

What I saw then was a cancer on American culture, and in my wildest imagination, could never have imagined they could institute as much damage as they have in those short 50+ years.
But looking back, and having the Communist Goals 1963 as a road map so to speak, it became clear that PC was their weapon used to bring everyone into compliance with the new religion created by the left, replacing Christianity.

I don't remember for sure.  Just sort of happened over time.  I wasn't particularly interested in politics.  My dad was always talking politics and my parents were Democrats, and I just assumed I was one too.  My problem was not understanding the issues when I went to vote.  I remember going into the voting booth and walking out.  I didn't know who these people were or how to vote on the issues.  I tried to get serious at the next election, talked to people, read the paper etc. and made up my own mind.  I realized after awhile, that what made sense to me on a party basis, was that I aligned more with Republicans.  But, it's taken me years to understand how politics REALLY work.  All that stuff about how you think it's supposed to work or should work isn't the reality of it at all. 

I was born and raised in the South and at that time the South was "Solid" Democrat.  Naturally, I just assumed I was too.  After I finished college and was married to a young doctor, he secured a position as resident in orthopedic surgery in the Washington area.  I got a job as executive assistant at a conservative lobbying organization.  As I learned what conservatism was, I realized that that was really what I believed.  I never was really a Democrat, just didn't know it and I know that members of my family are the same.  Sometimes when I describe why one is a conservative without identifying what it is, some of my relatives agree with me, also without knowing what I have just described.  I think a lot of Democrats are that way.  They just follow like lemmings.  I have a sister who admires Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.  She will hear nothing critical of them, but when I say something without identifying it politically, she often agrees with me.  I have a signed photograph of three Republican presidents framed and hanging on my den wall, sent to my husband.  My sister tries not to look at them and once criticized me for having them.  We didn't speak for several years after that until she admitted what I have hanging on my wall is my business, not hers.

But she still thinks she is a Democrat although I have brought her around to knowing that Islam is not a religion of peace.

We campaigned for a guy running for office.
He had the girls washing cars to help with the finances. We went door to door begging.
After he got elected, he would not even talk to us peasants.

It is amazing how many "recovering" democrats we have here. Hence the passion. 

Quote from: supsalemgr on May 18, 2015, 12:13:56 PM
It is amazing how many "recovering" democrats we have here. Hence the passion. 

Totally.  These are great stories, and sort of supports the notion that kids reflect their parents' voting and politics.  In my personal story, in that class where the teacher had us students raise our hands for who our families were voting for, there were I guess 20kids?  30kids?  Whatever size the classroom might have been, every single kid raised their hand for Reagan, except for that girl.  In retrospect, that accurately reflected the results of that election.  I remember thinking how silly it was that she was asking that question, that it didn't even occur to me that someone wouldn't vote for Reagan.  That girl, I bet, probably grew out of that when she started thinking and discovering the world.  People don't go from conservative to liberal.  99.9999999999999999% of the time, it is the other way around.  I can't think of a story where I knew a conservative who said "this is just crap!".  I have seen it a few times the other way over the years, where a liberal friend frog-boiled towards a conservative.  It seems kids are major one for ladies, where a liberal view on abortion might change, they want their man to keep all his money for the family, she would defend her kid with a firearms, etc.  I've seen two of my sisters go through that transormation, where they think they identified a little more left, or was on the fence, but after kids, different story.

Quote from: taxed on May 18, 2015, 01:07:31 PM
Totally.  These are great stories, and sort of supports the notion that kids reflect their parents' voting and politics.  In my personal story, in that class where the teacher had us students raise our hands for who our families were voting for, there were I guess 20kids?  30kids?  Whatever size the classroom might have been, every single kid raised their hand for Reagan, except for that girl.  In retrospect, that accurately reflected the results of that election.  I remember thinking how silly it was that she was asking that question, that it didn't even occur to me that someone wouldn't vote for Reagan.  That girl, I bet, probably grew out of that when she started thinking and discovering the world.  People don't go from conservative to liberal.  99.9999999999999999% of the time, it is the other way around.  I can't think of a story where I knew a conservative who said "this is just crap!".  I have seen it a few times the other way over the years, where a liberal friend frog-boiled towards a conservative.  It seems kids are major one for ladies, where a liberal view on abortion might change, they want their man to keep all his money for the family, she would defend her kid with a firearms, etc.  I've seen two of my sisters go through that transormation, where they think they identified a little more left, or was on the fence, but after kids, different story.

It is called accepting and adjusting to reality. Liberals live in a world of denial as their beliefs crumble under the microscope of reality.

Quote from: taxed on May 18, 2015, 01:07:31 PM
Totally.  These are great stories, and sort of supports the notion that kids reflect their parents' voting and politics.  In my personal story, in that class where the teacher had us students raise our hands for who our families were voting for, there were I guess 20kids?  30kids?  Whatever size the classroom might have been, every single kid raised their hand for Reagan, except for that girl.  In retrospect, that accurately reflected the results of that election.  I remember thinking how silly it was that she was asking that question, that it didn't even occur to me that someone wouldn't vote for Reagan.  That girl, I bet, probably grew out of that when she started thinking and discovering the world.  People don't go from conservative to liberal.  99.9999999999999999% of the time, it is the other way around.  I can't think of a story where I knew a conservative who said "this is just crap!".  I have seen it a few times the other way over the years, where a liberal friend frog-boiled towards a conservative.  It seems kids are major one for ladies, where a liberal view on abortion might change, they want their man to keep all his money for the family, she would defend her kid with a firearms, etc.  I've seen two of my sisters go through that transormation, where they think they identified a little more left, or was on the fence, but after kids, different story.

I graduated High School in 1969 and went to college that fall.  "World Studies" was very big back then, as was the teachings of Chairman Mao and Das Kapital and Karl Marx.  Yes, I grew my hair long and got caught up in the moment, but I woke up...nothing seemed real!  It was all a bunch of stuff to stick it to the man (parents, goverment, buraucracy..whatever.  Like I said, nothing they were selling seemed real at all!  It was Kumbya on steroids for our whole generation.  Under the surface was the terrible truth about those 'people' that the leftist held up as ICONS.  Eric Hoffer wrote a book called "The True Believer" and I, like so many others, rejected the mantra of the left.  I couldn't become one of them because I could BELIEVE the snake oil they all sold to each other!

A passage in the Bible reads, "when I was a child, I thought like a child and my actions were those of a child, but when I grew to be a man, I put away my childish ways".  So many of the Liberal HOPEY BELIEVERS jsut never grew up and looked at reality!

I was born conservative. That is the natural state of man. I was living in SE Ohio when Goldwater published "Conscience of a Conservative."  Coincidentally, the Democrats were dismantling Ohio's industrial base. I had a ringside seat for that display.

My folks suggested I learn about the Democratic Political Machines of Boston and New York.
The MA set of grandparents drew close to the liberals. I concluded they were dupes and fools; they didn't like hearing that and wound up  hating me.  My mother shielded the rest of my MA relatives from me. I never met them.

I opened my mind in college and entertained the liberal argument, for a spell. Didn't last long. Seemed to me they were charlatans and losers, aiming to fill their ranks with other losers, to gain wealth and position by questionable political means. Thieves, truth be told. NYC government has been exempt from audit for almost 100 years, with inevitable consequences.

One problem with the U. S. Constitution is too many loopholes. In the very areas it needed to be made more bulletproof, it was made more vulnerable.  You just cannot let people make their own laws. You'll wind up with what we now have.

In the words of Lady Gaga... I was born that way!