Michael Ledeen Quotes

I was a right winger into the 70's but I left the right in late 70's.

As the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the right, I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy and more in line with the philosophy of the Democratic Party.

I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in West Virginia. Not a change in John Raese, but a change in West Virginia and a change in America.

Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me.

There is no denying or hiding the fact that over the years I moved from well on the right of the Conservative Party, much much more to its left, and therefore to the centre of the poltical spectrum.

It is one of the truisms of politics that a conservative is often enough a former liberal who has been 'mugged by reality.'

I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.

The political philosophy of one generation becomes the political anathema of another.

I didn't come up through the ranks of the conservative movement... I came to these revelations about my own personal politics in a realm in which those books, those ideas, the canon of conservatism, is nonexistent.

I like to say now that the reason I'm conservative is because I used to be a liberal, and I learned a lot.

I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant; individual responsibility and community. I do not see those as being mutually inconsistent.

American Conservatism is finished, and its remaining adherents are, whether they know it or not, merely ghosts wandering, mazed, in the daylight.

Two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.

I am a conservative Republican, but I didn't start out that way. I was raised as a Democrat.

I went through a political shift when I was nineteen or twenty. I felt a certain way, and after the shift, I felt the opposite way. And never once did someone yelling at me or making me feel stupid do anything other than reinforce the convictions I had. What did get to me was people listening to me.

There isn't a day when I don't look in the mirror and think, 'How in the hell did I become a conservative Republican?' It's still a weird reckoning, because it shouldn't have happened.

There's Lindsey Graham 1.0 and then there's Lindsey Graham 2.0. I could not beat Lindsey Graham 1.0. That was the John McCain-Lindsey Graham.

Conservatism accomplished a lot of its goals in the latter part of the 20th century. What does 21st-century conservatism look like?

I think that conservatism as we understand it is coming under great strain during the era of Trump.

I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

Something really serious has shifted in the minds of Republicans and certainly others.

A generation ago [the Democratic Party] stood for progressive change. Now they defend every federal program as if each were sacred. They have become the most conservative force in American politics.

When I went off to college, I went believing I was a Republican. And actually I was president of Young Republicans for a couple of months and then I decided that I was much more in the camp of people like, you know, President Johnson - trying to promote civil rights, voting rights, ending poverty.

I was radicalised by being a minister. That's when I saw how the system really worked. And that is not a very usual process, but it certainly happened to me: it gave me a lot more experience, it helped me to understand where power really lay, develop strategies for undermining or changing it, and so on. But that isn't the norm. Mr Gladstone moved to the left as he got older, and one or two other people have, but normally you swing the other way.