For my write-up today on Tim Pawlenty's Courage to Stand, I'll highlight something that Pawlenty says on page 67:
"My
siblings were in a starkly different place from me politically during
their early adult lives. My brother Steve was a union steward, an
organizer who passed out union cards, got union authorization for
workplace representation, even picketed. My older brother, Dan, was a
union member at an oil refinery. Later, he went to work for a city and
was part of the union there, too. Over time, both of them saw the
shortcomings of the liberal agenda and started to be open to other
arguments."
I can identify with this passage because I myself had
strong ideological convictions yet came to the point where I became open
to other arguments. I was a conservative, but I got to the point where
a number of conservative arguments rang hollow to me----the notion that
tax cuts for the rich will trickle down and create a host of jobs, the
argument that the American health care system is so good because
emergency rooms are required to treat everyone (as if that is adequate,
and does not contain problems of its own), etc.
Pawlenty does not
detail (at least in this passage) what problems his brothers had with
"the liberal agenda". I can only speculate. Perhaps they concluded
that unions were flawed, with their bosses, and other factors. Maybe
they came to distrust government, or to believe that runaway government
spending creates a lot of debt, which would even hurt the little guy
whom they championed. There is enough human nature on all sides to
convince people to be open to other arguments. The situation many of us
are in is trying to decide which imperfect policy is better.