It's easy to be liberal -- until they come for what's yours.

Many of us learn that lesson the hard way. I had already begun questioning some of my left-wing beliefs by the time the second intifada started in 2000, but the fact that the left was suddenly hell-bent on destroying Israel certainly prompted me to rethink my political worldview.

I've had liberal friends over the years come up to me over the years and admit that they were having conservative impulses after the government started trying to regulate their business or their hobby. It's fine when the state wants to redistribute someone else's money, or mess with someone else's business, but once they come for yours -- that's a different story.

One of the many drawbacks of an expansive welfare state is that you create that kind of entrenched interest in government programs. "Hands off my Medicare" etc. People have a quasi-"conservative" impulse to protect what they believe they are entitled to, even if it only comes because the state is coercing other people to pay for it. We've even seen some Democrats argue that Republicans should not cut government spending (when Republicans cared about cutting govenrment spending) because doing so went against supposedly "conservative" values, i.e. "conserving" existing government programs.

We've seen the beginnings of a conservative awakening in this country, as the Biden administration has followed the left's direction. But the two forms of "conservatism" -- to protect what exists in the private sector, and to protect what comes from the state -- are doomed to clash. And I'm not optimistic, at the moment, about which of those is likely to prevail.