I've been meaning to join this thread as I've read each and every single post and have really, really enjoyed seeing everyone share their different perspectives and life experiences. It's really fun to get to know a little more about each poster personally. Obviously the vast majority of us don't know one another in real life, but this is a pretty tight-knit community online and I've grown to admire a whole lot of folks with whom I share this tiny speck of the internet.
I've shared several times over the years that I grew up in a rural, working class/low-income, deeply religious Southern Baptist family (the 'twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays' kind, with lots of hellfire and brimstone in between). I was the very first person (and still one of the very few- less than 5) in my entire extended family to go to college- out of parents, four grandparents, 18 sets of aunts and uncles, and 62 first cousins. The overwhelming vast majority of my family still live exactly where they grew up. I think I'm one of maybe 5 or 6 in the whole family who don't live in the same county in which I was born.
I grew up as a deep-red, hard-core conservative Republican. I thought Ronald Reagan- though he was before I as even born- was the be-all, end-all of presidents. I listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio with my dad. I got books written by Ann Coulter and Ron Paul for Christmas and thought they were hilarious ("How to Talk to a Liberal...If You Must" and "If Democrats Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans" and "Treason: Liberal Treachery" and "The Godless Left"). I generally believed immigrants were criminals, brown people were mostly lazy free-loaders, poor people needed to just get a job, gay people were gross (and sinners!), America was the greatest at literally everything and every other country and culture sucked, and so on and so forth. That's all a bit hyperbolic, but in general described my world view growing up.
I remained conservative all throughout college and even beyond, voting for Trump in 2016 because I thought that the guy who was the "You're fired" guy from The Apprentice must be a super smart businessman who "tells it like it is" and was a political outsider who would reign in all of the corruption in Washington...and plus he annoyed liberals as an added bonus. Oh, and Hillary Clinton was, like, public enemy #1 to any good God-fearing, red-blooded, America-loving patriotic conservative.
For me personally, my political and ideological change began occurring gradually during the first Trump administration. There was never a singular "flip the switch" moment or anything like that- more of a steady 'drip, drip' drip' type thing. In mid-2017 I changed careers and began doing what I currently do, which involves a ton of traveling all over the country, meeting and interacting with a ton of different people with different backgrounds. It was the first time in my life I had ever traveled extensively outside of North Carolina. So for the very first time, I was going to places that growing up I'd heard were big, scary, crime-infested liberal shitholes- places like New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc. And not only did I find that those places were actually absolutely amazing places with tons of different people and cultures, they were safe and....gasp...fun! It became a heck of a lot harder to believe that immigrants and brown people were lazy free-loaders when I'd see them working their asses off in hotels, in restaurants, on construction sites. It became a lot harder to think that LGBTQ people were icky when I started meeting them and enjoying their acquaintance or friendship. It became harder to think that poor people just needed to get a job when I saw them doing just that, working their tails off in thankless jobs for few wages.
At the same time as my world view was expanding and changing due to my newfound ability to actually get out and see the world, I started paying a lot closer attention to politics. And what I saw and heard when I did so was a whole bunch of lying, gaslighting, and shocking nastiness from the president of the United States- a guy I'd voted to elect. What I saw and heard was nothing at all like what I'd heard and read of Ronald Reagan, or George H.W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. And then I saw so many sycophants and enablers in the Republican Party at the national level- especially in Congress- who refused to reign him in. That started to really irritate me.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was the way that Trump handled the onset of the pandemic in early 2020. Even by that time I had soured on him and the GOP tremendously, but had told myself that the economy was doing great, I was making a lot of money, things felt 'good' overall, and why upset the apple cart- I could probably hold my nose and vote for him again. Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and instead of being a leader through adversity, Trump was a coward and a liar who exacerbated the adversity and was the primary force that turned what should have been a unifying moment for our country to come together to help each other, into partisan nastiness. And the rest, as they say, is history. If one were to look back on my posting history on the old ZZLP, you'd see outright defense of Trump in 2017 turn to half-hearted defense of Trump in 2018, to general hand-waving dismissiveness about Trump in 2019 because the economy was so good, to disagreement in February and March 2020 with his rhetoric around the pandemic, to outright anger in April and May 2020, to full-fledged hatred in June after I watched him use the United States military to shoot rubber bullets and beat the hell out of protestors in Lafayette Square.
I am certain that my politics and my ideology would have changed and moderated tremendously even if Trump never happened. I have no doubt about it, in fact. That's what getting out and seeing the world and interacting with tons of different people and seeing tons of different places can do. But there's no question in my mind that the way the entire Republican Party has completely surrendered every single solitary aspect of classical conservatism to a conman criminal who is the exact antithesis of conservatism, is something I don't think I'll ever get over. I won't rule out voting for Republicans again in the future, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it isn't happening at any time in which any vestiges of Trumpism remain. I don't identify as a Democrat or as a liberal, and I certainly do not like or agree with everything that the Democratic Party does, but I am more than happy to vote for them and with them these days as I believe that however flawed their methodologies or ideologies may be at times, they genuinely have a better vision and better goals and better policy aims for how I personally want the United States of America to be governed.
Sorry the the rambling and for the length!
