Left Hook.

• Author: BOWMAN, DAVID G.
• Position: Former Republican voters - Statistical Data Included

As you get older you're supposed to become more conservative. Am I the only one going the other way?

WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE famously declared, "If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head." But Churchill never met my family. For as long as any of us can remember, the Bowman clan--my parents, their parents, their siblings, nephews, and nieces--have voted Republican. And until recently, so did I, following a predilection that, with apologies to Sir Winston, was much more a matter of heart than head.

I remember, in 1964, when I was seven years old, bending over for a drink of water from the classroom fountain. Behind me, I heard a classmate's sneering voice: "Eeew, that's gold water you're drinking!" As in Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who was running against Democrat Lyndon.Johnson in the presidential election. I turned around and glared at the boy. I wore a Goldwater button on my shirt; he wore a Johnson button.

I didn't know Goldwater from fluoridated water, but because he wore the Republican label, because he was a conservative, he was the "good" guy, the enlightened elephant. Johnson, the rough-hewn Texan, was an ass-backward Democrat, a liberal, the "bad" guy.

The election was a landslide, of course, but I didn't ascribe Goldwater's crushing loss to any failing of his party. The Republicans were virtuous, the Democrats vacuous. We'd come back. We'd get our revenge. Or so my parents said. And so I believed.

I carried the Republican mantle well into adulthood, helped along not only by parental inculcation, but also by the mythology of Abraham the Emancipator, my favorite president. As I grew older, I learned that American political history is full of nuance, of strained loyalties, of opportunism and expediency, and that a particular party affiliation isn't something you have to profess forever.

Perhaps the most prominent exemplar of this sort of ideological evolution is writer/commentator David Horowitz, whose long, eventful trip from '60s leftist to right-wing gadfly has been amply chronicled. Horowitz has often been held up as proof that the old Churchill adage is a kind of iron law of human nature. But over the last decade, a fair number of prominent conservative writers and intellectuals have made the opposite journey--people such as Arianna Huffington, Michael Lind, David Brock, and Marshall Wittmann.

All these transformations have left me dissecting my own slide across the continuum. The older I've gotten, the more liberal I've become. I like to think that, unlike...