A person’s ideological evolution varies with the person and his or her shaping experience. In my case, I grew up in the deep south Bible belt as a religious and conservative person. The culture was deeply racist, but some experiences left me with distaste for the racism and its effects.

At the age of 18, I started my move away from religion, but still was politically conservative. As a soldier in West Berlin in 1960, I voted for Richard Nixon for president. My experience in Berlin, where I could see communism in action in East Berlin, I also moved to be a bitter opponent of communism and Marxism and have remained so.

In 1964, I was actually frightened by the right wing extremism of Goldwater. Hiss emphasis on dismantling the federal government to literally cripple it was not something I wanted. His extreme militarism which might provoke World War III cared the crap out of me. That left me open to a rational reconsideration of my conservatism.

Then came the Vietnam War and my entry in graduate school in 1967. As a heavy reader, I knew enough about the facts surrounding the war to believe that our entry into that conflict was unjustified and unwise. The graduate study in political science, political science, political ideology, and intellectual history completed by consolidation of thought to move me away from political conservatism, b It drove me totally away from racism, reactionary thought and action, and ethnocentrism in any form. I was a moderate to somewhat liberal. That still did not affect my grounded belief in how wrong Communism is, a stance which I hold even today.

Since then, seeing how untruthful and dishonest many conservative politicians are, how conservatives block actions we need for the benefit of our people and country, how they attempt to steal, hoard, and use power to benefit themselves and he privileged who support them, I am just as anti-conservative as I am anti-communist. I guess that places me in the center left, as a caring, pro-democracy, pro--moral integrity activist — but decidedly not an extremist at either end of the spectrum.