I was beginning to come into my political consciousness around Bush's first term and it was mainly a reaction against liberalism: the liberalism of my parents, relatives, friends, teachers, college professors. I increasingly disliked the socialism, the nanny-statism, the national and international bureaucracy, the political correctness, the victim and identity group politics, and sundry other aspects of the Left. I'm a Catholic and was also beginning more serious about my religion at this time. In reaction against liberalism, I gravitated towards "conservatism," which at that time seemed to me to mean Bushianism and whatever O'Really and Vannity were bloviating about. I just didn't know anything else.
One thing that happens to so many, many people, is that they only perceive the two "sides" present in the media, they align themselves with whatever side that seems to represent their personal beliefs best, then they start to feel obligated to defend even those aspects of their "side" that they may otherwise not agree with against the "enemy", then they finally believe those things themselves. It's unconscious, to a large extent. It's what happened to me. Some part of my brain probably knew I'd never support the Iraq War or the Patriot Act if, say, Clinton were pushing them, but that all seemed vastly unimportant compared to making sure the dreaded liberals were never given an opening to take power and inact those left-wing things that a really did hate and still do. In listening to and talking with other "conservatives" and debating with liberals, I learned all the pro-war argument forward and backward to convince others of them. Do you know that trying to convince others of something is a really great way to convince yourself of it?
In 2004, I was singing and dancing over Bush's win (remember he was running against Kerry). I was (and still am) happy about Roberts and Alito, but I became more and more skeptical of Bush throughout his second-term when everything else he touched seemed to turn to dust. At first I assumed to was the leftist media twisting everything against him, but by the time he was whoring for amnesty it became clear to me, and to so many others, that this was no conservative.
This certainly made me for open to questioning other aspects of what I hitherto accepted, even things that were still promoted by the other "conservatives" I knew and was listening to (Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin). But it was until Ron Paul really came onto my radar screen and I heard him define his positions, that I really began to understand that one could be a true conservative (as he obviously was with the issues I actually cared about, moreso than practically anyone I'd ever heard of) without being pro-war or pro-Patriot Act. It still took awhile before I could get on board with the pull-the-troops out thing (I still wish he'd define his plan better in that area and worry about what could happen if Iraq actually does lapse into chaos and is taken over by Iran or whatever--but more and more I think it's more likely that our presence is actually a destablizing influence rather than the opposite). But my views have become much more well defined.
What Paul did was really take a lot of the scattered things I was thinking and/or feeling, through the garbage out, and tie the good together into a consistent, interconnected philosophy. That's where I think his real genius lies: he doesn't consider issues as if they are in seperate little boxes that so often leads to internal contradictions. Instead he has a fully-realized philosophical base on which everything else is built, to a degree I don't believe I've seen in nearly any other political figure.
I also learned that just because someone's considered conservative, doesn't mean that they're right (or conservative). Though I would have always mouthed that, I probably didn't really practice that principle. And I also realized that just because liberals are against something doesn't mean that they are wrong or it is right.
