Love, Hatred, and One Woman’s Journey from the Left to the Right

Via Asylum Watch (a. k. a. Conservatives on Fire), writer and teacher Danusha Goska has a long, thoughtful piece at American Thinker on “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist”.  Be warned that it both uses rude language and frankly discusses some pretty disgusting stuff.  If you don’t mind that, I encourage you to read the whole thing; it’s very interesting.

How far left was I? . . . So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.

. . .

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It’s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

Rational arguments were one aspect of that journey.

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

That is consistent with my experience.  I went to college and, to a significant extent, heard conservative positions, and even the core of Christianity itself, articulated for the first time.  I found them surprisingly persuasive, and converted to conservatism and Christianity partly for that reason.

After I realized that our approaches don’t work, I started reading about other approaches.

She reminds me (again) of Peter Cove’s piece in City Journal, “What I Learned in the Poverty War”; like her, Mr. Cove changed his views when they collided with his real-world experiences.

Nearly half a century ago, I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted as a foot soldier in America’s War on Poverty. . . . I’ve become fed up with the useless policies that I once supported, and I’m trying to change the strategy of our bogged-down army.

But the heart of Mrs. Goska’s journey has to do with love and decency and what kind of people she has encountered on the left and on the right.

In other words, “Love Humanity but Hate People.”

It reminds me of the song “Easy to Be Hard”, from the musical Hair.