>I saw in the _Lingua Franca_ Thernstrom
>piece, that he was described as a liberal driven to the right by the New
>Left, but it is very hard to think of him -- or Alan Bloom, who stormed out
>of Cornell after the African-American students did their armed occupation of
>some buildings -- as ever having been on the liberal side of American
>politics.
This is Mansfield talking on C-Span's Booknotes (during an interview discussing his Tocqueville translation):
>From : http://www.booknotes.org/transcripts/50593.htm
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[BRIAN] LAMB: What's happened to your politics over the years?
Prof. MANSFIELD: Well, I started off as a liberal in college, and I turned conservative in graduate school soon after. That would be in the middle 1950s.
LAMB: What changed you?
Prof. MANSFIELD: Wh--what changed me was communism, anti-communism. I was a very--I was a--a vigorous anti-Communist, and it seemed to me that the conservatives were much more reliable on that issue than liberals, though there were some liberals like my father, a Cold War liberal, who was never tempted by communism and was a strong opponent of it. Nonetheless, it seemed to me that the con--conservatives had the advantage on that issue, and then gradually I began to work into other more conservative positions as well.
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