“Accordingly, they tend not to reach a graceful reformist One Nation consciousness, but remain ideologues, with a Trot-acquired taste for searing factional polemic.”

That works as quite a good description of quite a few first generation neo-cons. I believe I lost my bourgeois socialism around my first year at university, inherited from my parents more than anyone else. Interestingly, they seem to be drifting rightwards too after voting Labour all their lives. I think next election might be the first time they don’t vote Labour in fact.

Are there many examples of conversions the other way? Of Conservatives becoming Marxists in middle age?

“But just for once I wish they would own up to the label they most deserve, which is that of renegade.”

What does that even mean? I’m somebody who has moved rightwards over time, at least in terms of instruments if not goals (i.e. I’m a left-capitalist not a left-socialist) so I ought to be able to emphasize with somebody who has moved all the way right, yet if I imagine myself saying “I own up: I’m a renegade” I have no idea what that’d mean.

Well, there is Alan Greenspan & Phil Gramm, who realise that neoliberalism is a load of bollocks after aggressively championing it when it seemed like a good idea.

empathize

@2 Tim F “Are there many examples of conversions the other way? Of Conservatives becoming Marxists in middle age?”

Doubt it. Once people have realised that socialism inevitably destroys everything that it touches, as has happened for the last three Labour governments, they rightly turn to the Conservatives who champion a smarter approach. Once you moved away from ‘the Dark side’, there is no going back because you realise how utterly absurd your leftish politics used to be.

while holding on to the realisation that unless there is a complete transformation of social relations within the next generation or two, that’s the end of the planet

The avoidance of hyperbole might be another reason to make the switch!

#6 – I think you meant Tim J, not me.

@ 6 -

The last three New Labour governments were not socialists.

Part of the tendency to drift to the right with age is the old heart / head thing. Socialism is a particularly emotive philosophy, “Help the poor”, “The evil rich” etc, that appeals to our support for the underdog. It is often only later, when you see the appaling results of socialism and the contradictions inherent in it, that people move to the right.

I believe that the reason so many of those who have turned “renegade” are so vituperous, is that they are reacting in the same way that they would to a con man. They hate the left for making them believe something that produces such bad results and they hate their previous self for allowing them to have been taken in.

There is of course the possibility that ‘Mad Mel’ and the rest of the turncoats are so strident because they’re trying to cover up the ‘shame’ of their ideological volte-face. Melanie Phillips is right-wing to the point of caricature. Has anyone read her latest Spectator blog on the Obama/Saudi ‘carve-up’ of Israel? Hilarious.

I think Dave answered this question adequately within the article when he said “more often simply a reversion to type, on the part of kids from a good bourgeois background, whose superficial Marxism was largely based on a rebellion against introjected parental authority and never extended much beyond the seminar room anyway.”

Likelihood is these switchers were never particularly bright or self-aware & never understood the socialism they claimed to profess. Then as they lost their teenage angst, their bodies slowed down & they calmed down a bit, they reverted to what they saw as “common sense”, without realising the prejudices it was built on. Because they were formerly naive young things, and because they’re in the habit of trying to make the world fit into their point of view anyway, they assume that everyone espousing anywhere near the views they used to is just the same kind of person as they used to be.

Likelihood is these switchers were never particularly bright or self-aware & never understood the socialism they claimed to profess.

Avoidance of excessive self-righteousness another possible motivation.

Enter into the spirit of things, cjcjc! If #10 can indulge in a spot of speculative pop-pyschology based at best on anecdotal evidence, so can I.

Are there many examples of conversions the other way? Of Conservatives becoming Marxists in middle age?”

I know some, personally, but the liberal-left newspapers aren’t so afraid of their own ideologies and shadows that they loudly embrace anyone who’s become a turncoat. That, thankfully, we can leave to the likes of the Daily Mail and Telegraph – who embrace these people with the relief of people glad that at least someone came over to their side.

Ah yes, the small circulation Mail and Telegraph versus the ever-popular Guardian!

I would have thought that the majority of conservatives were more lefty when they were younger actually, simply because young people are often quite lefty before they come to fully understand the big wide world of mortgages and such like. Furthermore, I would argue that most kids follow their parents’ political beliefs until they are old enough to work things out for themselves. So many young lefties may have lefty parents (as I did) who will then move towards the right when they start to get wiser later on. I think it’s a bit unfair to just completely dismiss young leftyness as being “teenage rebellion” as quite often it is more just a teenager picking up a copy of the Guardian, believing every word that’s written in it and deciding that socialism is great. Surely this explains why the left is associated with youth and the right with age: with wisdom comes a shifting to the right.

Why are they so strident against “the left”? Possibly because they belong to the mindset that characteristics anyone who dares to change their mind as a “renegade” or a “turncoat”; the football supporter mindset, which treats politics like an old firm game and forgets that in ensuring that your “team” wins, you’re messing up people’s lives in the process. Or was it just me who had that reaction?

I’ve never trusted a middle-class socialist in any case. I’ve occasionally admired what they’ve done, but TRUST? No. Not that working class socialists can’t do a volte face and vote Tory (or even BNP) but they never pretended to speak on behalf of a group to which they do not belong and in their sad, deluded way they genuinely believe they are in the right.

“What is more, they hate ‘the left’ as a generalised all-embracing category, stretching from the Socialist Workers’ Party to feminists and human rights activists, from George Galloway to Polly Toynbee. It is all the same to them.”

But doesn’t this also characterise the neo-cons, i.e. Nick Cohen, Martin Bright, Aaronovitch, C.Hitchens and Johann Hari?

Really good post.

I tend to think, however, that ex-left rightist fall foul of the Stupid or Nasty dilemma.

If you are on the right, you are either nasty and don’t care, or stupid and don’t realise you are nasty.

Most ex-left rightest aren’t stupid.

Ergo…

OK i’m being flippant, but I do suspect that flipping to the right helps one sleep at night if one goes on to make a lot of money (say) in a world of poverty, and knowing intimately that this is unjustifiable.

I actually believe a lot of ex-left rightists are deeply unhappy with themselves, and that their rightism is both a coping mechanism and a smoke screen for an unhappy interal schizophrenia.

“Are there many examples of conversions the other way? Of Conservatives becoming Marxists in middle age?”

he’s pre-Marx, but Leo Tolstoy is a good candidate.

Oh, and Max Weber moved to the left as he got older and developed his (absolutely brilliant) socio-political ideas.

As did John Stuart Mill.

The drift of the RCP/LM from being contrarian Marxists to being right libertarians is another example.

Most people become a bit more conservative when they realize the revolution isn’t going to happen in their lifetime and make do as best they can with the life they have. That’s more a case of the ‘dull compulsion’ to conform in order to survive rather than swallowing rightist ideology per se.

People like Philips or Hitchens who flip ideologies (or simply flip-out) are an exception to the norm rather than exemplors.

As did Gladstone, started out as a proper Tory

who knows, maybe George Osbourne will become a communist

Also seems a bit harsh to refer to far right neocons as ‘Burkeans’ just because the conservatives turned to his brand of liberalism a hundred years after he died

They haven’t changed. They’re still control freaks at heart, they’ve just replaced political rules with moral rules.

Also, why do so many people here think that changing your mind is a BAD thing? Isn’t it better to think carefully about your political position and then change your mind, rather than being a stick in the mud?

@28 – Like I said, they haven’t changed their mind, they’ve simply changed the buzzword they use to describe it.

“People like Philips or Hitchens who flip ideologies (or simply flip-out) are an exception to the norm rather than exemplors.”

Mm, I like this. Hitchens the flip, Melanie the flip-out.

I didn’t realise that apostasy was so unpopular on the left. I can see why lefties and members of a certain religious ideology get on so well together.

‘Accordingly, they tend not to reach a graceful reformist One Nation consciousness, but remain ideologues, with a Trot-acquired taste for searing factional polemic. In short, they become Monster Raving Loony Judeo-Christian morality-crazed free marketeers, eager to slag off even David Cameron as a reprobate socialist wuss.’

YES!

To anyone trying to claim it’s anything else, I will simply respond: Paul Dacre. A man famous for his sense of ‘balance and proportion,’ of course.

Turncoats simply lack inner balance, and certainly can’t engage with reality. Melanie Phillips on Obama’s victory:

‘What this election tells us is that America voted for change because America is in the process of changing – not just demographically by becoming less white and more diverse,’ [my emphasis]

GEE Mel, you only just noticed? In 2008? *shakes head*

I’ve definitely become more left-wing with age & experience, because (like Keynes) I change my mind when the evidence changes – the demonstrated failure of right-wing policies on war, terrorism, and economic deregulationism (*) seems pretty convincing to me. John Cole is a fairly well-known US example of someone who’s done the same kind of things for the same kind of reasons.

I think the problem that people like LFAT have is that they think 1997-2009 Labour is a left-wing party, when on every objective measure it isn’t.

(*) deregulation has a place, and like Luis I’m a left-capitalist, but the ideology that all government intervention in business (apart from giving them copious amounts of money for no terribly good reason) is evil, as espoused wholeheartedly by Bush and fairly comprehensively by Blair, is rubbish.

the ideology that all government intervention in business (apart from giving them copious amounts of money for no terribly good reason) is evil, as espoused wholeheartedly by Bush and fairly comprehensively by Blair, is rubbish.

I can only assume that john b has no direct experience with the degree of Government intervention in business. The new Companies Act 2006 is the largest piece of legislation in British history, weighing in at 1600 sections, plus a further 16 schedules. Add that to the raft of alternate business regulatory legislation (FSMA, the Insolvency Act, and so ad infinitum) and then add in the vast complexity of the British tax system (as witnessed by the 15,000 pages of Tolley’s tax code) and whatever you want to call the result, utterly deregulated laissez-faire capitalism it is not.

“Are there many examples of conversions the other way? Of Conservatives becoming Marxists in middle age?”

We’re all children of Marx in one sense or another, but it depends on whether we see Marx’ work as ideological or intellectual.

If you see it as promoting definitive and ‘inevitable’ conclusions (ie Marxist politics) then you’ll support the fashionable outcome and follow the herd wherever it leads, but if you consider it to be an analytical process (ie Marxian economics) then the rest of us use as a valuable addition to our individual critiques.

The question revolves around whether Marx himself was inconsistent and drew false conclusions contrary to his own premises. However, it’s also possible to argue that correct political conclusions to be drawn from his work are contingent and subject to change over time…

As far as I’m concerned Marx is something for academia and has completely degraded as a reference point for definition: any person or party who moves across the political spectrum actively concedes their propensity to confusion and whose advocacy can therefore be discounted as unreliable.

What about Andrew Sullivan, does he count as someone moving from right to left?

I’m not sure, as it could very easily be argued that he isn’t left-wing, & still cleaves to conservative values, but has realised that the GOP turned their backs on conservative values long ago. But it is quite an interesting case nonetheless.