I tend to be less optimistic about the future, especially as people have very ideologically biased sources online that polarise opinion and lead to people not even agreeing on the basic facts. Normally I’d have thought that Trump is likely to do such a bad job of the next four years that his term would galvanise support for a more liberal candidate, but now I’m not so sure.
I think the first time I heard that quote was from a conservative when I commented that I wasn’t convinced by many of the conservative arguments anymore. I think his point was something like that the worst thing is to be a convinced conservative all your life – if you aren’t drawn to liberal arguments and concern for minorities when you are young, and therefore shaken in your conservative perspective, you have no heart. Of course almost everyone thinks that the view they end up with is more reasonable than the ones they had before (or else they wouldn’t hold it), and in his view the liberal arguments were not as successful in practice (e.g. he felt that some policies rewarded failure rather than providing a way for people to thrive, or that many of the ideas were too idealistic and didn’t take human nature into account). I guess the idea was that there should be a synthesis of ideologies and you should look beyond easy solutions, not that being a liberal was stupid.
