When did your son have his epiphany ?
I had mine when I got married and had to start paying the full freight.
No epiphany that I could tell. He just became a conservative very gradually. I would describe situations at the dinner table or in the car, sometimes from the news or neighbourhood, and we’d talk about fairness, ethics, responsibility and humanity. I knew the time had been worth it when he came home from university that first semester and talked about all the “damn liberals”.
He said the most impactful story I ever told him was one everyone here has heard 10 times. It was in response to him saying that people who have more should give up a fair chunk of it to people who are unlucky and have less. I knew that was his socialist teacher talking. I deftly changed the subject after a few minutes and asked him how his friend Andrew was doing. My son said Andrew still had consistently bad grades. I said, in the interest of fairness and equity, maybe good students should be required to give up part of a letter grade to the students who weren’t doing as well. He was very indignant and almost shouted that he worked hard for those grades and it wouldn’t be right to take them from him and give them to someone who didn’t put in the effort that he did. All I said was “Welcome to the Conservative Party.”