Beliefs at Age 20 and Age 40

If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.

This famous saying is attributed to Winston Churchill (although it may predate him).

I saw this quoted recently on an online forum, in a discussion about changing one’s mind. I could only think of a few examples of major issues on which I have changed my mind. But there were a lot of examples in which I had come to appreciate the nuances of an argument and realized that my earlier position had been one-dimensional.

This realization inspired my version of the 20/40 aphorism:

At 20 I believed in simplistic answers and held firm convictions, at 40 I understood nuance and was more willing to listen to multiple sides of any position.

May need a little work to make it a snappy quote, but I like it. 

Liberals: Exactly What Are We Celebrating?

Liberals have been excited ever since the November 2012 election; they seem convinced that Republicans are destroying their own party. The evening shows on MSNBC are filled with ridicule of the latest conservative’s statement and celebrations of the imminent demise of the Republican Party.

In my opinion this celebration is misguided.

I believe liberals would be much better off spending their time explaining why the country would do better with liberal policies than conservative ones. It’s so much easier to trash the Republicans—and it has more entertainment value.

But just because the Republicans have lost some elections, and are having trouble finding new voters, doesn’t mean the party is going to disintegrate. As many people have pointed out, the Democratic Party went through a similar experience in the 1970s and that party is still here.

Perhaps the main reason I believe liberals need to focus on communicating their message is because conservatives have been winning the national political debate for decades now. After the 2012 election David Frum wrote that conservatives shouldn’t despair, because “Whatever you think of the Obama record, it's worth keeping in mind that by any measure, free enterprise has been winning the game for a long, long time to this point.”

American People Rejecting Conservative Ideology

I have been feeling so optimistic in the weeks since the political conventions as President Obama has pulled away from Mitt Romney in the polls. The reason I'm feeling this way is because that tells me the American people are waking up; they have taken a look at the radicalism of today's Republican Party and they are saying NO.

When the Tea Party won big in 2010 they got cocky and strutted their stuff on the national stage. They pushed the Republican presidential candidates to take extreme positions; Mitt Romney has not been able to recover and "pivot to the center" like most candidates do.

The 99% meme introduced by the Occupy Wall Street movement somewhat penetrated the nation's consciousness, but I think Romney's 47% comments (particularly the line that people in that group aren't responsible for their lives) really pushed the American people into a new awareness that there is something very wrong with our society.

This election was supposed to be an easy win for a Republican--the pundits have talked endlessly about how no incumbent has ever won re-election with an economy this bad. But it's starting to look like this election could be a landslide for Obama. And, in my mind, the major reason this will happen is that the American people are rejecting conservative ideology.