Mona Charen

David, you guys improved Washington immensely.

Well, I don't want to bore people too much, but I became interested in politics out of a sense of gratitude.

My family came to this country at the turn of the century, turn of the last century, I should say.

And I became aware at a young age of what had happened to Jews who were left behind in the communities from which my grandparents had fled and understood that this was political in nature.

And so when I was in my adolescence,

not something I recommend as a fun way to spend your teenage years, but I sort of immersed myself in Holocaust studies and trying to make sense of how human beings could have done that.

And the result was that it made me very, very grateful for the institutions, the stability, the human rights protections that the United States affords.

And so that kind of made me a conservative.

I felt

Some people have said the primary emotional response of a conservative is gratitude, whereas the primary emotional response of a liberal is dissatisfaction, wanting to improve things.

And so I became interested in reading conservative writings.

I also was highly aware that totalitarianism wasn't just a phenomenon of the right, the Nazis and the fascists, but that the communists were just as bad or almost as bad, I would say.

And so I was an anti-communist from a young age as well.

Became a conservative writer.

began reading Bill Buckley in my local paper and then reading National Review, then began to read other conservative thinkers.

I was very drawn to Edmund Burke because he was, you know, it spoke to me, right?

He was a gradualist.

He didn't want any abrupt changes that he saw as dangerous and possibly contributing to despotism.

And so that's how I became a conservative.

And I stayed that way for a very long time.