We want to thank Powerline’s Paul (the one without a snappy nickname) for alerting to the book “Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys,” because is sounds, um, fascinating. Here’s part of his review:
The essays essentially narrate the intellectual voyages of twelve leading thinkers under a certain age (I’m guessing around 60, with the average age under 50) who can be considered conservative. They are: Peter Berkowitz, Joseph Bottum, David Brooks, Danielle Crittenden, Dinesh D’Souza, Stanley Kurtz, Tod Lindberg, Rich Lowry, Heather Mac Donald, P.J. O’Rourke, Sally Satel, and Richard Starr.I was wondering how Rich, who (like fellow contributor Dinesh D’Souza) was the editor of a right wing college paper funded by the right wing Collegiate Network, and then went from one conservative sinecure to the next, ever was ever on the left. Now I know that he just became a gun nut (and therefore is NOT just another baby-faced conservative wuss, despite what you might think) somewhere along the line. Yes, this does sound like a real page-turner.
Not all of them actually turned right. Lowry was never other than a conservative — his tale is about how he became an armed and dangerous one.
Crittenden was always conservative — her tale is about how she shed the feminism of the 1970s.Yes, Danielle, who “began her career in journalism as a teenager, with a column in the Toronto Sun” — which her stepfather just happened to have co-founded, is hardly an example of a lefty who eventually came to her senses.
O’Rourke came from good Republican stock and returned to something like his roots after getting (in his telling) as much sex as he could from the “fetching” girls of the left who wore “peasant blouses, denim skirts, and sandals” and “strummed guitars, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and drank beer straight from the bottle.”So, basically this book is about people who were always conservatives, but did sleep around in college, so they can now see how much much better they are than all those deluded liberals who they used to exploit.
Well, Paul does indicate that some of the contributors actually did have a change of heart — presumably either after 9/11, when everything changed, or at a dinner party where their lefty friends ate all the pie, thus revealing the weaknesses of liberalism.
Anyway, now that I know that there is a market for this kind of thing (well, as least a publisher for it), I’d like to edit a similar volume. So, if you would, please share YOUR story of how you saw the light and became a conservative. (If you want to see the template for such conversion stories, TBogg provides a good one).
And if your story is included in my volume (which I am tentatively titling ”‘Why I Sold Out: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Journeys from Closet Jerks to Out-and-Out Bastards”), you won’t get any money (I, as the editor, will keep it all as a tribute to capitalism), but you will get your name on the cover, probably. So, start writing!
Hopefully, At Least One of Them Tells About Being Seduced by Bill Buckley
Eeew. Sudden vision of the three-way with Dinesh and P.J. O’Rourke. I’m off men forever.
S.Z., I trust you’re getting John Stossel to headline and do the introduction? A little advice, if you go on a signing tour with those guys, go with the straight per diem, because O’Reilly will spend all his time whining about the absence of chickpeas at the buffet.
Eeew. Sudden vision of the three-way with Dinesh and P.J. O’Rourke. I’m off men forever.
S.Z., I trust you’re getting John Stossel to headline and do the introduction? A little advice, if you go on a signing tour with those guys, go with the straight per diem, because O’Reilly will spend all his time whining about the absence of chickpeas at the buffet.
David Horowitz wasn’t invited to contribute? That’s gotta sting. He was having Second Thoughts when Lowry was still in diapers.
How about the other way, such as Charles Barkley’s quote: “I used to be a Republican until they lost their minds.” This could be a future growth industry.
I, too, was wondering why David Horowitz was left out. Maybe the title he submitted – Why I Turned Fascist: Leading Baby Boom Paranoid chronicles his hop, skip and jump from Stalin to Mussolini – wasn’t quite what they wanted.
Still, I sort of like this quote from The NY Times about Sally Satels politics:
“although she reached voting age in the early 70′s, she did not cast a ballot until 1992, when she voted for Bill Clinton. (She liked the idea of ”ending welfare as we know it.”) Before then, she said, ”I never read the paper. I didn’t have a political thought in my head.”
Well, I guess from empty-headed to block-heacded is sort of a conversion.
Still, I sort of like this quote from The NY Times about Sally Satels politics:
“although she reached voting age in the early 70′s, she did not cast a ballot until 1992, when she voted for Bill Clinton. (She liked the idea of ”ending welfare as we know it.”) Before then, she said, ”I never read the paper. I didn’t have a political thought in my head.”
Well, I guess from empty-headed to block-heacded is sort of a conversion.
I’m gonna have to finagle a promotional copy of this thing. It’s just about my favorite topic in American political life–not “how” these people “became” “conservative”, but how the old 60s and 70s itinerant church-basement speaker (“I used to be a hippie/drug dealer/Satanist”) routine morphed directly into this idiocy and remained saleable.
I’m 53, older than most of those people. I still had a learner’s permit when the 60s ended. For a lot of them the era of “Boomer” political and social upheaval (mostly led and achieved by non-Boomers) is merely the era of Freely Pooping in your Drawers, and they’ve displayed precious little interest in getting the history right since then. Their exposure to The Left amounts to watching Charlie’s Angels first-run and having long-haired dope smokers steal their lunch money.
Brooks (born 1961) touts his Road to Damascus moment at regular intervals, but is there really any doubt he was Alex Keaton, not Alex Chilton?
I’m 53, older than most of those people. I still had a learner’s permit when the 60s ended. For a lot of them the era of “Boomer” political and social upheaval (mostly led and achieved by non-Boomers) is merely the era of Freely Pooping in your Drawers, and they’ve displayed precious little interest in getting the history right since then. Their exposure to The Left amounts to watching Charlie’s Angels first-run and having long-haired dope smokers steal their lunch money.
Brooks (born 1961) touts his Road to Damascus moment at regular intervals, but is there really any doubt he was Alex Keaton, not Alex Chilton?
It was the pie at a dinner party scenario, and a liberal bastard at all of it, analogous to those illegal aliens eating the whole “pie” of emergency health care. So, I saw the light, became a conservative.
I became a conservative because a period of unemployment taught me the evils of relying on a social safety net. The unemployment checks that enabled me to keep my home and medical insurance sucked my soul out of my bosom and made me weak. If only I had been left to fend for myself! I would have found the strength to become an entrepreneur, and today I would be as rich as Donald Trump, but with better hair.
September 2001. It was my week, at my anarchosyndicalist commune in the hills of Oregon, to bicycle down to the town. There I would trade our home-baked bread, henna and seedlings for items we weren’t yet able to produce for ourselves, such as toilet paper and news about Ralph Nader’s upcoming visit.
The townspeople seemed very alarmed and too distracted to barter with me. There were mutterings about how America had come under attack and New York City had been destroyed by the forces of evil.
Although I was in a bit of a rush (the camp was VERY low on t.p.) I stayed to watch the terrible drama unfold. The Pentagon was smoldering; New York was in flames; the President was rushing back to Washington via Nebraska, Denmark, Winnipeg and the Ice Planet of Hoth. I didn’t know what to think.
Then like a beacon on the TV screen came the glowing visage of Bill O’Reilly. His sure demeanor and no-nonsense truthtelling made me immediately see the error of my hippie liberal ways.
I traded in my bike for an AK-47. I traded all the bread for a copy of “Atlas Shrugged”. I traded the henna for a U.S. flag lapel pin. The seedlings I flushed down a toilet to avoid them falling into the wrong hands.
I never went back to the commune; I wonder if any of them ever heard the news, or found any toilet paper.
The townspeople seemed very alarmed and too distracted to barter with me. There were mutterings about how America had come under attack and New York City had been destroyed by the forces of evil.
Although I was in a bit of a rush (the camp was VERY low on t.p.) I stayed to watch the terrible drama unfold. The Pentagon was smoldering; New York was in flames; the President was rushing back to Washington via Nebraska, Denmark, Winnipeg and the Ice Planet of Hoth. I didn’t know what to think.
Then like a beacon on the TV screen came the glowing visage of Bill O’Reilly. His sure demeanor and no-nonsense truthtelling made me immediately see the error of my hippie liberal ways.
I traded in my bike for an AK-47. I traded all the bread for a copy of “Atlas Shrugged”. I traded the henna for a U.S. flag lapel pin. The seedlings I flushed down a toilet to avoid them falling into the wrong hands.
I never went back to the commune; I wonder if any of them ever heard the news, or found any toilet paper.
Can I fake being a conservative like D’Nesh D’John D’Phillips D’Souza fakes being liberal to be in your book? I could use the exposure…
Early July, 1970. Dawn. I was standing on the chest of a dead man, in a muddy hole in the red dirt east of An Loc. Scattered around the hole were the remnants of battle dressings, piles of spent brass and three dead NVA soldiers. I was covered in blood and bits of entrails, and the NVA bodies were badly dismembered, spilling their gory secrets onto the red dirt.
People were beginning to stir, to climb out of their holes and look around. I was sitting on the edge of my hole, trying to work up the energy to check the dead for souvenirs. Sergeant McGinnis came by and handed me a cup of coffee and a darvocet. I rubbed at my reddened eyes and looked out once again over the horrors that lay scattered around this nowhere place like forgotton toys in a vacant lot.
That’s when I decided “Hey, this is a whole lot of fun! I want to support more wars and more mindless, meaningless, futile bloodshed and horror” And I’ve been a conservative ever since…
mikey
People were beginning to stir, to climb out of their holes and look around. I was sitting on the edge of my hole, trying to work up the energy to check the dead for souvenirs. Sergeant McGinnis came by and handed me a cup of coffee and a darvocet. I rubbed at my reddened eyes and looked out once again over the horrors that lay scattered around this nowhere place like forgotton toys in a vacant lot.
That’s when I decided “Hey, this is a whole lot of fun! I want to support more wars and more mindless, meaningless, futile bloodshed and horror” And I’ve been a conservative ever since…
mikey
Mikey,
I think you should add “And I wanted to make sure my son grew up to have all the opportunies to kill foreigners that I had”
or something like that.
I think you should add “And I wanted to make sure my son grew up to have all the opportunies to kill foreigners that I had”
or something like that.
I became a conservative because there’s no money in being a liberal.
Is Mary Eberstadt’s book intended as a companion volume to Hunter Thompson’s “Generation of Swine”? Seems to fit, except for the apparent lack of irony and black humor. God, I miss him….
Intellectual voyages, huh? Yeah, right up there with Copernicus and Newton.
It wasn’t about the pie. I was just fed up with the guilt. Liberals always try to make you feel like you should do something about the poor and stuff like that. What’s up with that? Conservatives are lucky. When we’re doing okay, it’s proof of our superior characters and also that God loves us. When we’re screwed, it’s all the fault of wimmin and fairies and mine-ORR-it-tees and the UN and such, stealin’ our white male birthright.
You know, I’m really going to have to limit my exposure to the wingnuts. It kind of amuses me when I can accurately parrot the Moon Landing Hoax mindset, but this is just creepy and wrong.
You know, I’m really going to have to limit my exposure to the wingnuts. It kind of amuses me when I can accurately parrot the Moon Landing Hoax mindset, but this is just creepy and wrong.
“Creepy and wrong,” you said it, girl.
David Brooks was once a witty and able journalist in his WSJ days–he called his stint in Brussels the “‘Whither NATO?’ beat.” But once he got into the Washington groove–the kids, the private schools, the big house, the depressed-looking wife–he had to talk the right-leaning talk in order to support all that.
Brace yourself for two years of college-angst essays: one of his kids goes to school with one of my kids. The hysteria among parents and kids during the college search period is not to be believed.
I was absolutely gobsmacked to read Brooks’ description of the dear, late Molly Ivins as a “victim of Bush Derangement Syndrom.” BDS, as y’all know, is a right-wing meme that hardly could be applied to someone who 1) wrote two well-researched, depressing, substantive, and funny books about W., and also 2) had known him personally since adolescence.
Molly was too polite to say that herself, or that while she got into the “best” school in Houston, St. John’s, W. did a year at Kinkead (Kinkeade?) before being sent to Andover. That is where, in his disastrous fling with a thesaurus while looking for a synonym for “tears,” he wrote, “Lacerates ran down my cheeks” in an essay that his appalled English master marked with a zero.
And Danielle Crittenden… don’t let me get started. One can skip university when one’s stepfather slides one into a journalism job, and when one marries an immensely wealthy man in one’s twenties. If you don’t do THAT, well, my dear, it’s your own f**king fault what happens to you…
I’m not looking forward to THAT family’s college-angst or smug-legacy essays, either.
David Brooks was once a witty and able journalist in his WSJ days–he called his stint in Brussels the “‘Whither NATO?’ beat.” But once he got into the Washington groove–the kids, the private schools, the big house, the depressed-looking wife–he had to talk the right-leaning talk in order to support all that.
Brace yourself for two years of college-angst essays: one of his kids goes to school with one of my kids. The hysteria among parents and kids during the college search period is not to be believed.
I was absolutely gobsmacked to read Brooks’ description of the dear, late Molly Ivins as a “victim of Bush Derangement Syndrom.” BDS, as y’all know, is a right-wing meme that hardly could be applied to someone who 1) wrote two well-researched, depressing, substantive, and funny books about W., and also 2) had known him personally since adolescence.
Molly was too polite to say that herself, or that while she got into the “best” school in Houston, St. John’s, W. did a year at Kinkead (Kinkeade?) before being sent to Andover. That is where, in his disastrous fling with a thesaurus while looking for a synonym for “tears,” he wrote, “Lacerates ran down my cheeks” in an essay that his appalled English master marked with a zero.
And Danielle Crittenden… don’t let me get started. One can skip university when one’s stepfather slides one into a journalism job, and when one marries an immensely wealthy man in one’s twenties. If you don’t do THAT, well, my dear, it’s your own f**king fault what happens to you…
I’m not looking forward to THAT family’s college-angst or smug-legacy essays, either.
Oh! I have an unanswered question about Bill Buckley! If he’s such a strict Catholic, how come he only had one kid?
And question 1a, why does Pat Buckley look like a drag queen? Do we know she’s female?
And question 1a, why does Pat Buckley look like a drag queen? Do we know she’s female?
and drank beer straight from the bottle.”
Wow, those leftist chicks are crazy!
Wow, those leftist chicks are crazy!
Hey can I tell the opposite story? Lets organize a meeting for former reupblicans. I can say how I was a republican until I realized that they did not conserve money and seemd more interested in sex between two male consenting adults than they did about anything else?
I was a liberal until I became a small business owner, at which point I became a communist, because the ‘free market’ consisted of a game between Barnes and Noble and Random House and where they were going to put the Oprah books and I figured that communism would at least smash the state first, then go after the multimedia multinationals next. But when I found I didn’t like the fashion of being a Red (burlap), I went libertarian. But that phase lasted for as long as it took me to realize that “libertarian” wasn’t the same as “libertine” (I was drinking a lot at the time), so I became an independent for awhile, and was SO FUCKING INDEPENDENT that Joe Liberman himself promised me piece of a small dutchy in the “non-chafing dry air” of someplace that he said would soon be called the “Anbar-Lieberman” Estates. But being SO FUCKING INDEPENDENT, I guessed that he was trying to sell me something, so I dabbled in anarcho-syndicalism while writing a thesis on the threat of an activist judiciary and their effect on nanotechnology. Suddenly, I found myself running in the same mock-cyborg technophile circles as Glenn (the second ‘N’ stands for Nano) Reynolds and he said I might like this club he and some hillbilly lawyer buddies formed — “a gun club”, he said with a sweet robotic lilt — so I became a Republican. But when I checked it out, I found that it was just a department at some State School and not a place where anyone actually shot guns. Reynolds called it a “utopia factory” where people theorized about what would happen if other people shot guns. That’s when I tried Jainism…
P.J. was an underground newspaper editor in my town when he was a 20-something and I was a teen. He was quite the hippie wit in those days. I saved those papers. Heh.
i thought bush derangement syndrome was where a woman suffered trauma to her midsection resulting in a visible dislocation of the skin around her uh … oh wait, is this a political blog? Never mind.
That’s “Bush Disarrangement Syndrome”, trashfire. Close, but remember, close only counts if you’re a republican husband. The rest of our wives expect us to actually cause an orgasm occasionally.
Also available: the twenty-one volume compendium “How George W. Bush Made Me Reconsider ‘Conservatism’: Stories From The Reality-Based Community”
For me personally, it was the treatment of his coke habit by the right-wing during the 2000 elections compared to how the same people treated Clinton’s botched bong hit.
For me personally, it was the treatment of his coke habit by the right-wing during the 2000 elections compared to how the same people treated Clinton’s botched bong hit.
I just can’t imagine being the sort of person who claims to be conservative these days. I tried- my brothers & Dad are, but they are filled with hate and rage. They gobble up and regurgitate the neocon lies like addictive junk food. Why, I don’t know.
…or at a dinner party where their lefty friends ate all the pie, thus revealing the weaknesses of liberalism.Umm, that wasn’t me. That was Fafnir!
And question 1a, why does Pat Buckley look like a drag queen? Do we know she’s female?Only her hairdresser knows for sure.
Kathy, I’m curious: Do you see your brothers and dad often, or at all? If so, how do you cope when they say something with which you vehemently disagree?
The junk-food analogy, by the by, is quite apt. One of my sisters, a junk-food shoveler (even AFTER stomach-stapling surgery) told me in ’84 that she’d voted for Reagan. “He’d do more for my pocketbook,” she insisted.
I was stunned, cited a few of Reagan’s middle-class-screwing outrages, and tossed in ignoring AIDS as well. To shut me up, she waved her hands and said, “Okay, okay, I won’t do it again.”
“Honey, you CAN’T do it again.”
“I can’t? Why not?” So I had to explain the two-term limit, which came as an utter surprise to her. Oi veh.
The junk-food analogy, by the by, is quite apt. One of my sisters, a junk-food shoveler (even AFTER stomach-stapling surgery) told me in ’84 that she’d voted for Reagan. “He’d do more for my pocketbook,” she insisted.
I was stunned, cited a few of Reagan’s middle-class-screwing outrages, and tossed in ignoring AIDS as well. To shut me up, she waved her hands and said, “Okay, okay, I won’t do it again.”
“Honey, you CAN’T do it again.”
“I can’t? Why not?” So I had to explain the two-term limit, which came as an utter surprise to her. Oi veh.
I became a conservative when the rape charges were dropped by the DA.
I couldn’t get laid in a prison shower with a dozen pardons jammed up my ass. I became a conservative so it’d look like I was single by choice, for ideological reasons (no sex til marriage!)and hence look like less of a loser. When I kept repeating the explantion to people until I believed it, I even felt like less of a loser.
Once I realized how much money I could get for being religious and right, I went for Jesus like a crack-whore for the pipe. My baby-face and aura of availability worked like a charm. These fundies are so easily fooled by my innocent looks and fake piety, even after Abramoff they keep giving me their dough.
“I became a conservative because there’s no money in being a liberal.” — Realist
Man, you ain’t never lied.
“When we’re screwed, it’s all the fault of wimmin and fairies and mine-ORR-it-tees and the UN and such, stealin’ our white male birthright.” — D.Sidhe
How come that never works on my job applications?
“Oh! I have an unanswered question about Bill Buckley! If he’s such a strict Catholic, how come he only had one kid?” — Mrs. TQBB
Mrs. Biscuitbarrel, darling, I would think that THAT would be self-evident, honey. Kinda the same reason that Laura only conceived (well, to full-term, anyway) once.
I personally gave up completely on capitalism when I saw that the Violent Femmes had sold out for a fucking WENDY’S COMMERCIAL.
*sob*
*sob*
*sigh*
“I couldn’t get laid in a prison shower with a dozen pardons jammed up my ass. I became a conservative so it’d look like I was single by choice, for ideological reasons (no sex til marriage!)and hence look like less of a loser. When I kept repeating the explantion to people until I believed it, I even felt like less of a loser.” — Bill S
Bill, will you marry me?
That’s the most perfect answer to the question that I’ve seen thus far. The “Ralph Reed” quip is cute, but yours resonates so much more truly.
Besides, it’s not like I couldn’t find you some cute guys, as long as you did the dishes…
Man, you ain’t never lied.
“When we’re screwed, it’s all the fault of wimmin and fairies and mine-ORR-it-tees and the UN and such, stealin’ our white male birthright.” — D.Sidhe
How come that never works on my job applications?
“Oh! I have an unanswered question about Bill Buckley! If he’s such a strict Catholic, how come he only had one kid?” — Mrs. TQBB
Mrs. Biscuitbarrel, darling, I would think that THAT would be self-evident, honey. Kinda the same reason that Laura only conceived (well, to full-term, anyway) once.
I personally gave up completely on capitalism when I saw that the Violent Femmes had sold out for a fucking WENDY’S COMMERCIAL.
*sob*
*sob*
*sigh*
“I couldn’t get laid in a prison shower with a dozen pardons jammed up my ass. I became a conservative so it’d look like I was single by choice, for ideological reasons (no sex til marriage!)and hence look like less of a loser. When I kept repeating the explantion to people until I believed it, I even felt like less of a loser.” — Bill S
Bill, will you marry me?
That’s the most perfect answer to the question that I’ve seen thus far. The “Ralph Reed” quip is cute, but yours resonates so much more truly.
Besides, it’s not like I couldn’t find you some cute guys, as long as you did the dishes…
[...] http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=374 gives us a lovely summary on a new book about Baby Boomers who became conservative, and puts out a call for submissions. So, basically this book is about people who were always conservatives, but did sleep around in college, so they can now see how much much better they are than all those deluded liberals who they used to exploit. [...]
Does it count if I’m not nearly as lefty as I used to be (I think I was a Maoist for a while) but would still be considered an enemy of the state by the right wingers who consider themselves centrists in America?
David “I used to be a left wing asshole, now I’m a right wing asshole” Horowitz has already written extensively (to say the least) on this subject.
Oh! I have an unanswered question about Bill Buckley! If he’s such a strict Catholic, how come he only had one kid?
And question 1a, why does Pat Buckley look like a drag queen? Do we know she’s female?
Ms Bicuitbarrel? Don’t you answer your first question with your second?
And question 1a, why does Pat Buckley look like a drag queen? Do we know she’s female?
Ms Bicuitbarrel? Don’t you answer your first question with your second?
I had always been a card-carrying liberal. I marched with King in Selma. I joined the Peace Corps after college. I voted for Bill Clinton – twice. But one day I was reading the comments at Eschaton, and I noticed the word “fuck” being used…
Oh. Guess I did, actor 212…
Annti, you flatter me. 
[...] Richard Lowry is a wingnut pundit originally from Virginia and now based in New York. He has always been of the wingnut hivemind, though never quite so impressive a reactionary, contrary to what he’d like to think, as an “armed and dangerous one” (except, perhaps, when he’s frying turkey). If the Lowry egg was conceived and nurtured by his vaguely conservative parents, then his pupae stage must have occurred at the University of Virginia, where he wrote for the Virginia Advocate, a college “news”paper along the lines of the infamous Dartmouth Review, and like the Review funded by the same sources: primarily, the Collegiate Network. Not yet ready to fly, his next stage of development was as go-fer of and apprentice to the insane psychiatrist-cum-columnist Charles Krauthammer, from whom he presumably learned the fine wingnut art of Strangelovian foreign policy advocacy. And from thence into ugly: after leaving Krauthammer’s service, Lowry went on to contribute to wingnut fink tanks and to write for rightwing propaganda mills like The Wall Street Journal as well as the National Review, where is currently editor. Lowry has also come to pollute the airwaves, predictably at Fox News (where he is often a substitute for the reprehensible Sean Hannity) but also, disturbingly, at PBS and NPR. [...]
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