Insights from a former conservative
I grew up Boston Irish Catholic, raised on faith, family, and Republican talking points. Starting in middle school, I attended GOP rallies, collected signatures, and even walked the March for Life in DC.
But by 2018, I had walked away. And looking back now, I can say with confidence: nearly all progressive messaging aimed at conservatives misses the mark, and often reinforces exactly what it hopes to dismantle. I’m not being antagonistic when I say there is a fundamentally different pattern of thinking conservatives hold—I know, because I held it—and progressives frequently fail to address it.
As a conservative, I held an identity; I had my family, my coalition, and the drive to “win”. I hid behind proxy arguments which could be debunked without evoking cognitive dissonance, because I felt that just repeating them advanced a greater cause. If someone called me out for this strategy, I would simply accuse them of making assumptions and redirect the argument. Losing didn’t make me feel like I was wrong, but it felt like I let my family, community, and “team” down by not knowing the right argument to “prove” my point.
I didn’t believe in policies—I aligned myself with a moral and cultural structure built on three core pillars: loyalty, strength, and righteous victimhood. These values, more than logic or evidence, shaped how I thought, argued, and dismissed opposition. Here’s how they worked, and what ultimately broke their hold on me.
Loyalty
Conservatives value putting the “cause” above the self. Your stance on climate change, vaccines, cars, and language can all signal your sense of loyalty, despite having dubious direct ties to politics. When the GOP proclaims support of “small government” while enabling POTUS to assert federal control of DC, followers will overlook the contradiction because it doesn’t matter. Better to support a contradiction than to give ground to “the enemy”.
Loyalty can be shaken by betrayal of the in-group. Loyalty feels safe because it protects, so highlighting a breach in that security is an effective strategy. For me, a major moment was the Unite the Right rally in 2017; I realized that the administration depended on the same loyalty from hate groups that I was giving, and those groups would be hostile to people I loved.
Strength
Tough-guy personas feel like protection. When a candidate sufficiently proves their loyalty to the cause, qualities such as dominance, cruelty, and revenge feel like means to an end. Morality, consistency, and efficacy are irrelevant as long as the power structure is maintained.
Strength can be shaken by losing to weaker opponents. The administration needs to actually beat the people it claims are beneath them, or it risks looking ineffective. My faith in the party was shaken when I couldn’t reconcile the GOP holding all three branches of government, preaching about the “Deep State”, yet being utterly unmotivated to fix it.
Victimhood
In the Bible, Jesus is the underdog: he was born poor, challenged by the dominant theology of the time, and used his infinite power to heal, not hurt. His followers laid the foundations for Christianity by martyring themselves. Martyrdom is possibly the straightest path to Heaven there is, making it appealing, but martyrdom is a rarity in a majority-Christian nation. These values are prevalent in conservatism, religious or not. As such, followers are inclined to always look for ways to feel like they are losing power, have someone to enact revenge upon, and frame their grievances as righteous.
Victimhood can be shaken by redirecting it. Dismissing or challenging perceived victimhood strengthens it, regardless of its validity. My victimhood mentality was challenged upon talking to people in person (LGBTQ and BIPOC) who could articulate their actual struggles. I couldn’t dismiss them from behind a screen, and the reality of their struggles resonated with my appeal to strength as a way to defend them before I formed a more reasoned approach to supporting equality.
The takeaway
These factors pulled me away from conservatism, but it took a while to gravitate toward progressivism due to the stigma, media portrayal, and real systemic issues of the Democrat party. Whenever I argued with someone who tried to convert me, it was easy to stall: identify hypocrisies (real or perceived), tie the worst moments of the party to their argument, and be more loyal to my side than they could be for their side.
If progressives want to reach conservatives, they need to stop trying to win. You can’t out-logic identity. Those who reached me with patience, honesty, and no counter-agenda forced me to wrestle with the naked truth.
Leave a comment
[Guest] Skeptical_Civics on August 18, 2025
This post reads like someone who never really understood the movement and now feels the need to project their own poor reasoning onto everyone else who still holds right-of-center views. You’re basically saying: “I didn’t think critically, therefore no conservatives think critically.” It’s incredibly reductive to boil down all conservative thought into “loyalty, strength, and righteous victimhood.” That could describe any political ideology, depending on how you frame it. The same could be said of progressivism: identity loyalty, performative moral strength, and constant victim narratives.
Also, if you really understood conservatism, you’d acknowledge it’s not about “winning” or “team sports”–at least not for most people. It’s about constitutional principles, skepticism of centralized power, and community values. That doesn’t disappear just because a few politicians betrayed those ideals (and let’s be real, plenty of Democrats do the same).
Frankly, this reads more like an ex-believer trying to justify their switch to a new tribe by demonizing the old one. If you want to critique conservative messaging, go ahead. But please don’t pretend this is some universal insight into the mind of everyone right of center.
📝 massandra (author) on August 18, 2025
If I could rephrase your comment back to you to the best of my ability, I would say:
It’s true that a weakness of my article is that it doesn’t provide evidence that all conservatives think this way. I think I needed to add that this is a critique of how I see the modern self-described “conservative” movement, not just “conservatives”. Even though I turned away from the GOP, I don’t think all the values I was raised to appreciate are wrong. For example, to this day, I am a strong proponent of personal and fiscal responsibility, I recognize the appeal of limited government, and I think that there is merit to a healthy, good-faith scrutiny of rapid change.
I’m not alone in thinking that Donald Trump does not represent traditional conservative values. He has blown up the national debt, expanded the power of the executive branch, weaponized the Justice Department, intervened in the free market enormously, and is a poor representative of “family values”… Yet, he has won the GOP primary for a decade straight. The intent of this article is to examine this seeming contradiction from an inside perspective, when it made perfect sense to me.
To be clear: this isn’t a blind attack on the GOP. I’m frustrated that neither party represents the values I grew up believing. I highly respect GOP politicians that fly under the radar and pull the levers of government at the local level to enact rational policy despite increasing pressure from the national political landscape. So, to your point, this isn’t an analysis of conservatism, and folks on both sides can fall into tribal mentalities, but Trumpism is a particular betrayal of principles that I haven’t seen anywhere else.