Party Hoppers
"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart," goes a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill. "If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain." And indeed, the general trend is that people become more conservative as they grow older. But what about people who make sudden U-turns? Here's a list of the better-known political about faces.
The Repenter (Conservative to liberal)
Self-described "conservative hit man" David Brock earned his keep doing journalistic hatchet jobs of people like Bill Clinton and Anita Hill. When assigned to assassinate the character of Hillary Clinton, he got to know her first and couldn't bring himself to do it. Over time, he realized he'd been "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine" and wrote Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.
The Gadfly (Conservative to liberal)
Described unironically by her own ex-husband as "beautiful" but "evil," arch-conservative Arianna Huffington took her name from millionaire Michael Huffington, the conservative Republican who won a seat in the House of Representatives after marrying her in 1986. They later divorced and he came out as gay. She eventually decided that the Republican Party doesn't help the "less fortunate" and reinvented herself, not as a moderate but, as Al Franken put it, as "some strange, liberal, green kind of thing to my left."
The Communicator (Liberal to conservative)
While earning a reputation for being the "Errol Flynn of the B-movies" in the '30s and '40s, Ronald Reagan was a Democrat, supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Then, during two stints as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, he crusaded against communist influence in Hollywood, becoming convinced that Republicans were likelier to keep the enemy at bay. He became a Republican in the '60s, running under that party's banner to become governor of California and the nation's 40th president.
The Iconoclast (Liberal to conservative)
Once a Trotskyite journalist known for his savagely witty contributions to lefty publications like The Nation, Christopher Hitchens hardened after the fatwah on his friend Salman Rushdie, decrying what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." Though he's never wavered from his signature blend of atheism, antifascism, and antimonarchism, he found himself siding with the neo-conservatives and resigned his post at The Nation after 9/11.
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