Exit Right by Daniel Oppenheimer

The trick, which isn't a trick at all but the basic art of living, is to be grounded in a strong sense of self but attuned to one's inner frictions and fictions.  It's to be passionate in one's convictions but also open to the data of experience and the evidence of error.
---Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right (Simon and Schuster, 2016)

Oppenheimer's book is intelligent, thoughtful and beautifully written.  It follows the political views, as they change, of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens.  Chambers and Burnham were communists (Burnham was a Trotskyite) who changed views in the thirties, influenced by the Hitler-Stalin pact.  Reagan changed views from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican in the fifties when he worked as a speaker for General Electric.  Podhoretz and Horowitz changed in the 60's and Hitchens switched sides, to a limited extent, when he supported George Bush on Iraq.

With Whittaker Chambers Oppenheimer quotes extensively from his moving autobiography, Witness (1952).  Chambers gave himself over completely to the communist party and when he broke it was because he finally realized he believed in God.  Interestingly, Oppenheimer takes for granted that Alger Hiss was indeed a spy, something that is still being contested by a few on the left.  James Burnham was an intellectual who studied at Princeton and maintained a college teaching post while writing extensively, in academic journals, about Trotsky's positions, breaking away when Trotsky supported the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.  Reagan was a New Dealer and union activist who gradually began to believe that in the prosperous fifties neither the New Deal nor unions played any useful role.  David Horowitz was a Bay Area radical who supported the Black Panthers until they turned to thuggery and started killing people he knew.  Podhoretz was part of the New York intellectual scene until other New York intellectuals turned against him because of the embarrassing naked ambition of Making It.  Hitchens was a Nation columnist until he felt compelled to support the war in Iraq and began to be shunned by his fellow leftists.

Oppenheim follows the lives and political views of these six people from childhood to their switch in orientation; only with Hitchens does he mention much of what happened after that switch.  My own political journey has taken me from right-wing libertarian to left-wing libertarian to a benign socialist libertarian, supporting single-payer healthcare and free state college tuition.  Oppenheimer describes beautifully how personal and political events can change one's views and the different ways we all try to deal with those changes.