Originally posted by: DealMonkey
Originally posted by: Shanti
Yeah, come to think of it, I've seen quite a few conservatives on this board who wouldn't admit to being wrong either.
But since they are on my side, I tend to not get as irritated by it. Conservative bias of mine, I know.
By the way, just so you all know, I voted for Clinton twice and marched in the anti-war protests during the first gulf war.
Wow, what happened after that? Did a liberal cut you off on the freeway or something?
I was looking for that Winston Churchill quote and found an interesting article that I think sums up my conversion fairly well.
Although I started becoming more conservative around age 25 even though I was still a starving student and minimum wage worker until I got my second degree and started my career as a software developer at age 29.
The article can be found
HERE.
Here is the text:
"If you are not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." That's what former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said, anyway. He was right.
A lot of students, myself included, are about to graduate and become real people. This transition will be a rude awakening for many of us who are about to face the hardships of the nine-to-five world. As Churchill's famous quote suggests, the real world that is unknown to 20-year-olds but all too familiar to 40-year-olds changes one's outlook on politics. It can turn a bleeding heart into a conservative one pretty fast.
Compared with the general adult public, college students tend to be more liberal. In College Park there are 5,193 registered Democrats and only 2,174 registered Republicans, according to the Prince George's County Board of Elections. Now that statistic doesn't distinguish the College Park students from the College Park real people, nor does it account for students who are registered to vote in other states, but still it says something about the political makeup of this college town. Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2 to 1. If the entire voting population in the country had that composition, Republicans wouldn't control the White House and both chambers of Congress.
The bottom line - and it's hard to dispute - is that college students in general are more liberal than the rest of the voting-age population. They see poverty, and automatically they argue government should be spending more. They see war, and right away they condemn it. They see budget cuts, and immediately they blame those who made the cuts, not those who spent irresponsibly in the first place. They see tax cuts, and they complain the wealthy don't deserve to keep more of their own money.
These liberal ideas inundate college campuses because they feel good inside. It is satisfying to advocate big-government spending, peace, instead of war and universal health care. And since most students are still at least partially dependent on their parents, we can believe in these ideas without having to consider the costs.
We don't pay as much in taxes as real people, nor do most of us have families to worry about. We have the luxury of being liberal. The fact that liberalism doesn't work in the real world has little bearing on us. It feels great.
But soon we graduating seniors will make the conversion from college life to real life. And whether it happens right away or over time, I bet this transition will convert many of us from liberalism to conservatism.
We'll watch our paychecks be slashed by taxes. We'll start investing, and soon we'll realize that markets are more efficient than government and that big spending doesn't always equal better results. We'll start working for big corporations and stop hating them. We'll raise children in a world infected with terrorists, and we'll start to understand the need for eliminating the sources of such threats. The realities that are about to smack seniors in the face will also push many of them to the right in their political leanings.
I'm not saying every college student is a liberal, and every college graduate automatically becomes a conservative. But on college campuses, the political breeze blows to the left. It's undeniable. When we enter the real world, the wind will swirl and begin to blow to the right for many of us.
I'm already over here on your right. According to Churchill, I'm 20 years ahead of schedule. Maybe I just grew up too fast. I have the political views of a 40-year-old trapped in a 20-year-old's body. To all the other graduating seniors out there, good luck. We've had our fun here in the college world where liberalism feels great. Now off to the real world, where conservatism begins to make more sense.
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