“The most common explanation is the one variously attributed to Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George: “Any man who is not a socialist at age twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head.” The move rightward is thus a sign of the hard wisdom that comes with age and experience—or, perhaps, the callousness and curdled dreams that accompany stability and success.”
“Irving Kristol, the ex-Trotskyist who became the godfather of neoconservatism, quipped that a neoconservative was “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Most people are hardly aware of the shift until it’s exposed by a crisis, like a major political realignment that forces us to cross party lines.”
“Even then, they want to believe that it’s the politics, not themselves, that changed.”
“It’s like blaming your spouse for your own unfaithfulness. Political conversions are painful affairs, as hard to face up to as falling out of love or losing your religion. Or maybe harder. Religious faith, being beyond the reach of reason, doesn’t have to answer gotcha questions about a previously held position. There’s a special contempt reserved for the political apostate—an accusation of intellectual collapse, an odor of betrayal. When you switch sides, you have to find new friends.”
“Political identities are shaped mainly by factors that have nothing to do with rational deliberation: family and tribal origins, character traits, historical currents. In “Partisan Hearts and Minds,” published in 2002, three political scientists made an empirical case that political affiliations form in early adulthood and seldom change. Few people can be reasoned into abandoning their politics.”
“Stories of apostasy, he writes, “are worth telling because it’s during the period of political transition, when the bones of one’s belief system are broken and poking out through the skin, that the contingency and complexity of belief become most visible.” This quest is particularly relevant at a time when Americans are dug deep into two opposing trenches, and crossing no man’s land is a great way to get picked off.”
“Burnham became best known: “The Managerial Revolution,” published in 1941, which announced the rise of new totalitarian superstates, neither capitalist nor socialist but collectivist, controlled by a caste of “managers”; “The Struggle for the World,” a postwar tract that predicted and implicitly called for a third world war; and “Suicide of the West,” published in 1964.”
“Liberalism,” Burnham stated—meaning belief in reason—“is the ideology of Western suicide.” His predictions, consistently wrong, were always in effect the same one: democracy was doomed, and deservingly so, because it was too soft.”
“Chambers, Burnham, and Reagan became conservatives in response to an ideology they believed to be evil. Podhoretz and Horowitz were reacting against something more like stupidity.”