The absolutely unhinged anti-TPP screed during my bizarre Romeny-M5S moderate hero phase from 2013 to 2015, for which Oakvale rightfully chewed me out.
You had a political phase where you were at the same time a moderate hero, a Romney supporter, and a M5S supporter? WHAT THE HECK?
Yeah it was bad.
Basically from before 2012 I was a Democratic hack, but in a childish "Democrats good, Republicans are evil people somewhere else" way. Starting in 2012, I realized that many family members (including my father) and friends are Republicans, and of course was maturing and realizing the world was more complicated than good vs. evil, and went through a bit of cognitive dissonance and tried justifying BOTH SIDES being good in some way. On election night 2012, I still supported Obama, but by the time I joined Atlas in summer 2013 I had buyer's remorse. I also lived in the Chicago media market and constantly heard about how awful Pat Quinn and the Illinois Democratic Party was, and really bought into Bruce Rauner's 2014 campaign about him being a
sensible, moderate Republican
who would fix Illinois' problems. But by summer 2015, Rauner's mask came off, and that was also the time that Trump announced he was running for President.
It was also safe for me to "experiment" with politics and the other side since in my area we had no major elections from 2013 to 2015 so me voting for Republicans for Treasurer of Indiana and for county sheriff in 2014 had no effect on anything since the Treasurer candidate was always going to win and the sheriff candidate was always going to lose. But then the 2016 campaigns began and I was forced back into reality, so my little experimental phase came to an abrupt end and by late-2015 I was firmly back in the Democratic column, and as I matured more, learned more, and began pondering ideology and shaping my own beliefs, I solidified my centre-left beliefs while toning down some of my more populist stances.
I was starting to learn more about politics abroad and 2012 was also when I started studying Italian. I had a casually positive opinion of Merkel and the CDU from studying German for 5 years at that time, and followed Germany's 2013 election and casually supported her without understanding much about the CDU. I thought Italy needed change and thought M5S was just a new, normal-ish center-left party without truly understanding the nuances of the party and Italian politics. I didn't understand how wacky they were until 2015 when I had learned enough Italian to be able to read the news and began following the discussion in the Italy General thread on here. I thought Berlusconi was a clown but kind of funny, but again I eventually reached the point where I could read Wikipedia in Italian without any help and learned about how awful he actually was.
It's actually very interesting that many of my beliefs during 2013 - 2015 could easily have made me a Sanders or Trump supporter if a few things were different in my life. I couldn't bring myself to support Sanders because I had this residual warmth for Clinton from 2008 (a lot of this was my mother's influence) and also couldn't support Trump because of how repulsed I am by anti-immigrant and anti-refugee stances.
I also am now able to understand why non-Americans who casually follow American politics would find Trump funny rather than threatening (comparable to my perception of Berlusconi) and why so many people abroad got swept up in the Sanders movement (comparable to my naive support of M5S from abroad).
