Response to Last Week’s Posts About Debating Lefties, + My Dark Secret (posted 5/15/25)

By the time you read this, I’ll be on the road up to Tennessee, and then on to Illinois.  I think I’ll be posting a column tomorrow on the Dems’ entertaining, continuing implosion, and I’ll do my best to post at least one or two columns next week from the road.

Last week I posted a slightly edited version of an email exchange I recently had with an old friend of mine who is a committed lefty, on the subject of the rule of law, and the potential for a “constitutional crisis” that may arise if SCOTUS doesn’t shut down the dozens of district court judges who are filing frivolous lawfare TROs against every move he makes.   

Many of you asked how he responded to the points I made, and many said that they have stopped even trying to discuss politics with the lefties in their lives. 

I haven’t heard back from my friend about my last two responses yet.  He received the first one the night before he was leaving on a two-week trip, and said that he’d need time to go through it and think about it, and I sent him the second one while he was on the road, and said we could talk about it when he gets back.

But over many years of such exchanges, I think that each of us has changed the other’s mind on individual points, but not on any of our larger beliefs.  (E.g. I think I’ve been able to prove to him that individual lefties have been corrupt and that some conservatives have governed better than some lefties, but not that leftism itself is based on false premises and doesn’t work in the real world.)  He’s one of four leftist friends of mine, and I think that statement applies to all four of them.    

Since none of them are the deranged, extremist, “you’re cancelled if you don’t agree with me” types, I’ve still been able to discuss politics with them, to varying degrees.   And I appreciate that, for a couple of reasons.  As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy clarifying and testing my arguments in good-faith debates.  (Teaching argumentative and persuasive writing was a good fit for me!)

I also think that my friends and I have served a very useful moral purpose for each other: reminding all of us that the other side is not made up entirely of malevolent idiots and worse.  It’s very easy to watch bad-faith hypocrites and liars like Biden, Schumer, Grandma Squanto et al and start thinking of all Democrats as irredeemable creeps.  (And there are plenty of GOP morons who can make regular conservatives look like idiots!)  But knowing my friends reminds me – and I hope that knowing me reminds them – that that’s not the case.

In a way, this point dovetails nicely with my Christian faith.  We’re supposed to be as aware of our own flaws as we are of others’ flaws, and it’s good to be reminded of other people’s foibles in a way that doesn’t lead us to demonize them.  People make ridiculous choices in many areas of their lives, not just in politics.

Some people willingly drink ouzo.  Some are vegans.  Some root for FSU.  Some like soccer.  Some don’t like dogs. And some vote down-the-line Democrat.  What are we going to do?  Uncle Jesus tells me I’m supposed to love them anyway, and reminds me that I might have made a few stupid choices along the way myself.

I mean, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me, with my smoke show wife, my great kids, and my Wonder Dog, living my best life in the Free State of Florida.  But even I have had some dark chapters in my life. 

What I’m about to share with you needs to stay between us, and if you repeat it, I’ll deny it.  Like Joy Reid when her homophobic posts came out, I’ll just claim that my email was hacked.  (Joy Reid is this angry racist lady who used to be on tv.  Or on MSNBC.  Which is kind of like tv, except without the viewers.)

So if others are in the room or reading this over your shoulder who can’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut, please go somewhere else, or ask them to leave. 

Okay.  Here it goes. 

I was basically a Democrat until I was in my late 20s.

I know. I just threw up in my mouth a little, too.  And Cassie just looked at me with her head turned sideways, because I forgot that she can read.  Annnndddd… now she’s trotting out of the room, giving me a withering look back over her shoulder. 

Please, let me explain! 

I was pretty a-political as a teen and young adult.  I was one of those weird young men who was preoccupied with sports and girls, with an added layer of voracious-reader book nerd. 

Then I went to grad school for seven years (the PhD took me an extra year because I wrote a novel instead of my dissertation in my fourth year), where I was surrounded by lefty professors and students.

The pressure to conform was pretty strong.  If taking a lefty position in class was more likely to get me the 4.0 that I was looking for, okay.   If pretending to have read Das Kapital and Noam Chomsky’s latest drivel increased the chances that a female classmate would overlook my pedestrian appearance and thrust herself upon me, I’m in.  (If not like Flynn, at least like a young, proto-Martacus.) (100-year-old movie references for $100, Alex.) 

Whew, this is tough to write.  In the years since, my shame has driven me to confession about this multiple times.   And I’m not even Catholic!  I’d just randomly stop in a Catholic church and step into the shame booth.  (Have I mentioned that I’m not Catholic?)  But even then, I’d be tempted to falsely confess to murder or robbing a nun, just to avoid saying the words, “I once voted for Jimmy Carter.”

In my defense, I’d never paid enough attention to politics to be a down-the-line lefty.  I’d always had enough common sense to know that affirmative action was just reverse racism, and that abortion was wrong, for example.  And as I was forced to read leftist literary criticism – anti-Americanism and CRT were already making themselves felt, even in the Midwest, in the 1980s – I started to feel more and more repulsed.

By the time I finished my PhD, I had resolved never to read Lacan, Derrida, Marcuse or any of those weirdos again.  In fact, I started to read a lot of history, and then military history.  And then I came across Thomas Sowell, and Milton Friedman, and eventually VDH. 

Within two years of getting out, I was a confirmed conservative.

My transformation was completed a few years later, when I realized that the vow of poverty that I’d taken when I became an English professor was not a joke.  I started researching ways to buy fixer-upper real estate so that I might be able to retire before age 90. 

Some real-world experience with entrepreneurial risk-taking quickly cured me of the last vestiges of my youthful dalliance with liberalism, and I started down the road to becoming the conservative stalwart you know and admire today.      

Thus I became the old political cliché: a soft-hearted, naïve liberal at 20, but a reality-appreciating conservative by 30. 

My example does give me hope, though: sometimes it seems as if everybody is in their own bubbles, and people cling so stubbornly to their own priors.  But I made the change, both through reading ideas from the other side, and from life experience.  My guess is that the latter changes a lot more minds – the old “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged” idea. 

But as a bookish type with a taste for logic and argument, my conversion began and moved pretty far along purely because of reading and thinking, before I staked my meager life savings on several real estate investments, and thus sealed the deal.

So while it often seems that our politics are so polarized in recent years, I still retain some cautious optimism that at least some liberals are persuadable.  In fact, their own party’s insane race to the far left is pushing some of them toward our side by default.  

I think many of these types now feel – or soon will – like Reagan did when he said that he didn’t leave the Democrats, the Democrats left him.  Elon certainly does.  A year or two ago he posted a cartoon showing him standing in the same place, but the leftists running so far to the extreme left that his unchanged position – which was once a little left of center – is now firmly on the right. 

A similar process happened for RFK Jr., Tulsi, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, and many more.

So I enjoy debating my lefty friends, even though I don’t expect that any of them will necessarily undergo the conversion that I did. 

But even if they only become more aware of and turned off by the extremists on the far left, they will be doing themselves and the nation some good.

Our country would be better off with a sane, center-left liberal party, and a much more marginalized and impotent far-left fringe (rather than the radicals who are steering the Democrats today). 

Such a centrist party could mitigate the damage done when the Dems next have power, and could even be cooperative partners with some conservatives on a small range of issues where we have some common ground. 

If I’m being honest, I can’t say that I see that happening anytime very soon.  But we’re cautious optimists around here, and I’m trying to keep that hope alive!

Hamas delenda est!

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