Elizabeth Warren was once conservative - now she's heading to the left of Bernie Sanders

[ehrnst]

If a person is not a liberal when he is 20, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is 40, he has no head.” No one is sure who said that (it’s sometimes erroneously attributed to Churchill, like everything else), but everyone is familiar with the sentiment: we are supposed to get more conservative as we age.

Elizabeth Warren didn’t get that memo. The 69-year-old Democrat and US presidential hopeful was a free-market-loving Republican when she was younger, described by old friends as a “diehard conservative”. Now Warren isn’t only a Democrat – she is one of the most progressive voices in US politics, with a similar ideological stance to Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Warren may be heading even further to the left than Sanders. On Monday, she proposed a plan to forgive $50,000 (£38,000) of student loans for people earning less than $100,000 a year, with the money coming from a new wealth tax. Warren also proposed an ambitious plan for free higher education, which she described as “bigger” than Sanders’ free college bill.

Warren has explained that she joined the Republican party because she believed in its conservative approach to markets. She left the party in 1996, she has said, because it started siding more with Wall Street, tilting the playing field against the little guy. While she has discussed her political journey in some interviews, it’s not something she has been keen to advertise, which is understandable: inconsistency isn’t seen as a good thing and we tend to look upon politicians who change their views with suspicion.

There is a big difference, however, between thoughtfully changing your mind and opportunistic flip-flopping. It would behoove many politicians to do a lot more of the former and less of the latter. After all: “If a person doesn’t change his mind when the facts change, he has no brain.” I believe it was Churchill who said that.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/24/elizabeth-warren-conservative-heading-left-bernie-sanders-arwa-mahdawi

[at140]

1. I have no problem with those who evolve

As they become older, gain more experience, become wiser and change. Stupid people never change.

[ehrnst]

2. Many consider it a very bad thing for a candidate to evolve at all except if they are already

to the far left.

Any at all closer to centrist than the far left, it's considered "pandering" and "flip flopping" even if a large part of the job of a representative is to do as their constituency wants them to do.

God help the politician who says that they got something wrong once and now regret it.

[Hortensis]

3. General terms used wrongly lead to great misunderstanding.

Personality and environment typically create almost infinite combinations of complex goulashes of opinions that usually average out either dominant liberal or conservative, but those vary dramatically in types also.

We know Elizabeth Warren was intellectually economically conservative and a Republican until the party purged traditional conservatism and went extreme, both socially and economically. Then she left.

However, she was never a social conservative to any degree -- tribal, with a rather dark view of humanity, distrustful and even fearful of everything different, resisting change. We know that above all because, though people whose genetic wiring predispose them that way are also greatly influenced by environment, we don't evolve so completely differently from our basic wiring. She'd have had to have a secret brain transplant.

I'm guessing that last line explains her as well as any one sentence could. “If a person doesn’t change his mind when the facts change, he has no brain.” Warren has a brain, an independent one.

The facts about what the right became and was doing changed enormously in many ways after its takeover by ultrawealthy extremists aligned with far-right social and religious conservatives. The Republican Party became increasingly extreme and extremely corrupt, and she did not.

And along with the new giant problems created by the morphing of the Republican Party into a destructive force inimical to democracy and the wellbeing of its people, it also destroyed the platform for battling them and for restoring health and prosperity through the economic policies she'd once believed would work best. So, being a fighter, instead of going passive as so many do, she joined the Democratic Party where our liberal foundation was strong and vital, and committed to protecting our democracy.

And now she's running for president.

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Nancy Pelosi, quoting Louis Brandeis at her swearing in.

[Gothmog]

4. Here is some good news for Warren

Link to tweet

[ehrnst]

5. Not surprising. (nt)

[crazytown]

6. When you switch sides

and your former friends and allies start attacks, you get a better view of who they are.

[ehrnst]

7. The very day after she endorsed HRC, the flaming of her as "selling out to corporate

interests" and other more crude misogynistic riffs on that flooded social media, from those who hitherto claimed that there was no way that misogyny was any part of their hatred for HRC, because they would TOTES vote for Liz Warren...