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Politics: Turns out everything is relative
I had dinner with a friend from high school a few days ago and the subject of politics came up. He was saying that he's a democrat/liberal now. Which threw me a bit since he used to be a republican/conservative. This phenomenon has also happened to several of my friends who were pretty die hard conservatives when we were young, but who have become more liberal as they have gotten older.
Or have they?
The alternate explanation that occurred to me this morning is that their values haven't actually changed. The Republican party has. From my completely unscientific and anecdotal sampling of people I know, many of the people I associate with are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. There really isn't a party for this group any more. It usually comes down to a choice of which party you detest the least. And many of them used to choose the Republicans and now they choose the Democrats as the least loathsome party.
And the differences between my own views and the views of my friends from high school or college aren't all that far apart when put in the context of today's political polarization. For the most part, we are trying to achieve the same goals, we just have a difference of agreement of HOW to do it. What seems to have happened in the meantime in the larger sphere of US politics is a fundamental shift as to WHAT we should be doing.