The volte face of a voter who found out that the true extremists were on the 'left'.

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I have this friend, let us call him 'Peter' it wasn't so long ago he was standing for Election as
a Labour (left wing Liberal candidate in a local election and nearly winning too,
So why the big turn round Peter? I mean talk about a volte face.

Oh, you know I would attend these Labour Party meetings and I just became so disenchanted with the the complaining and their holier that thou leftist attitude in the end I gave my card back and left the Party. You could not discuss your doubts about the leftist cause...Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive. I got tired of I a m right and your are wrong always cleaving to the moral high round.  If we care about democracy, we have to reclaim our ability to talk to each other

Were they all old codgers? I asked. No they were young mostly,'
(30 % of 30-year-olds have a degree, compared with 10% of 70-year-olds) and higher education tends to make people more socially liberal on issues such as crime and immigration.

You are older now and you have got kids that it?  Who was it who said 'Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
(It's a fact that as we get old we get more conservative as we cling to the status quo.

'Well now that I have a young family has no doubt influenced me but it is about reclaiming conversation in our personal and political lives; technology is changing our world big time, and it’s too easy to hide behind our screens and avoid face-to-face conversation, which is where we confront real differences and learn how to deal with people who disagree with us. Online, we talk more and more to those we agree with. And when we do talk to those we disagree with, our discourse coarsens.  That is one of the reasons I left the Labour Party, their coarse holier than thou, I am right and you are wrong attitude.


We talked about how to use the Internet to enhance the debate:
'but the Internet had already changed what the public would tolerate in a public forum. Online we are accustomed to bullies and vulgarity and arguments in which facts don’t necessarily count. We abbreviate and skip steps until we lose sight of the full argument altogether. And that’s what we were getting in our new political landscape

The truism was that face-to-face discourse makes us civil; hiding behind a screen frees us up is arrant nonsense. Because if our democracy is being tested, we are being tested and something extraordinary is being asked of us. And we are not behaving in extraordinary ways. When I recall those young Turks in the Labour Party rattling idealistically on, but what happens how would they behave
something comes along that demands we take extraordinary action, for them I felt they just assumed  that the grown-ups will tend to it.

That's the best explanation I can gibe for my political volte face.