Commentary I was a liberal for most of my adult life, a liberal in the very liberal habitat of academia. When it came to Republicans and Democrats, progressive attitudes and conservative attitudes, I believed what everyone else believed, and that was one of the best parts of academic life. If I had a choice, I would never have wanted it to change. If you’ve never been a liberal, and if you’ve never worked in a uniformly liberal environment, this is a blandishment that you cannot imagine. You have to have experienced the comforts and satisfactions of adhering to ideas and outlooks reinforced by everyone around you to appreciate these particular joys of belonging, especially when those ideas and outlooks are controversial in other spaces. I’m now a conservative who works for a conservative magazine, and the environment is no less consistent, but it has a different mood. There, and in …