Little over a decade ago I'd have defined myself as 'apathetic with libertarian leanings', I guess. Didn't really pay too much attention to politics, the culture war and all that jazz, and when I did I was usually of a 'live and let live' inclination. Was on board the 'dude weed lmao' train, had no problem voting Liberal or NDP (Canada's socialist party), etc. Most of all I was generally optimistic about everyone in politics and believed most people in the field basically had the best interest of the country in mind, with corrupt bad apples being a minority: I was never a 'grr the conservatives are all ontologically evil reactionaries who want to kill/enslave women, bomb minorities abroad and so on' type precisely because of that, but that also meant I viewed even Communists as well-meaning.
Well fast forward to Current Year+8, suffice to say that's no longer the case. I've seen the NDP jettison their union roots pretty much entirely in favor of the campus activist mob which has taken them over at every level and hollowed them out, leaving them in an organizational shambles since the 2015 election and especially since Jagmeet Singh became their leader in '17.
I've witnessed the Liberals fly off so far to the left as to become unrecognizable - just scarcely over a decade ago
the MP for the riding where I used to live as a kid was a pro-life, anti-gay marriage social conservative who had aligned with the LPC for economic reasons, something
completely unthinkable today. I have also seen for myself the arrogance and corruption which they wallow in and which was previously warned about by older Canadians who were politically aware during the Chrétien-Martin years, and which I was able to get a taste of myself on the provincial level (the Ontario Liberals are as vile as their federal counterparts and that's why the province has knocked them down to 3rd place for two elections in a row) in my brief stint as a gov't contractor.
I've observed the Conservatives rigging their own internal leadership elections to ensure the 'electable' milquetoast neocon get elected over a man with actual ideas in 2017, and to eliminate a
real 'strong black woman' who held real socially conservative convictions early on so as to clear the path for an even more milquetoast Liberal wearing a blue tie in 2020. Of course, the 'electable' party leaders then went on to throw two eminently winnable elections in a row to Fidel Castro's bastard.
I've beheld the slippery slope ending in it being made illegal to 'misgender' or otherwise criticize the T in LGBT, lending legal protection to overt child predators like Jonathan 'Jessica' Yaniv, on top of all the other man-made horrors beyond our comprehension like drag queen story time, drag kids, and the infliction of trans-mutilation surgery and hormones on impressionable teens and even children while anyone who protests gets arrested.
Those who claimed to be all for the freedom of women to choose with their own bodies, now basically openly celebrate Molochian sacrifices and/or claim men can get pregnant (and abort!) too.
I've read and heard of an overly permissive stance on drugs and excess 'compassion' for the homeless turning Vancouver into a horrific dump (though the obvious results, and thus any chance for course-correction, are vigorously denied by those behind the policies in the first place to this day), in part from my own relatives who have the misfortune of living in the colder San Fran themselves.
I saw the anti-war crowd, for the most part, fall deathly silent about the wars which the West waged abroad - mostly the Afghan calamity here since we never got mixed up in Iraq, but we also had some schizophrenic involvement in Mali going on too - as soon as 'their guy' (Obama in the US, Trudeau here) got into power.
Similarly I've witnessed probably the one thing which could have unified most sectors of our atomized and fractured society, Occupy Wall Street, get hijacked by identity politics and directly segue into the racialization (which, like 'people of color', the woke say like it's a good thing!) of just about the entirety of our economic discourse, to say nothing of the greater SJW infection of everything in society (or perhaps it had been there all along, bubbling from the '60s onward and trying to emerge first in the '90s but being smacked down then).
So, yeah. Above all I would say that my faith in government and humanity in general is what's been eroded the hardest these past 10-13 years or so, and all other changes in my political outlook stem from that. Certainly I would never ascribe any remotely positive intentions to the left anymore, they're at best useful idiots and that's something I now hold in contempt, not look upon with misguided pity. Nor can I say I hold much faith in liberal democracy these days, my brush with the provincial government started me on the road to realizing that it's basically oligarchy (and an oligarchy comprised of some of the most corrupt, depraved and incompetent among us at that!) by a different name using the various parties and the democratic process itself as fronts for the sake of plausible deniability - and that if anything, the federal level of our government is wayyy worse than the provincial one.
I think whatever part of me still thought there was any way to vote out of this mess died when 68 churches were burned in 2021 over the supposed discovery of First Nations mass graves which, to this day, have never been examined and which almost certainly don't actually exist (indeed all coverage of the issue basically disappeared after the summer of 2021, why it's almost as if it was ragebait spun up to get an anti-Christian pogrom going): witnessing all the race-baiting and baiting in general by Trudeau's government leading up to and immediately after that, his passive-aggressive 'welllll I wouldn't directly tell anyone to burn any churches
but...' nonsense during the episode, and
actual First Nations chiefs begging people to not burn their churches down (and, of course, being ignored) has convinced me that a more militant attitude is in order. God might forgive that atrocity, but I will never - not and mean it - nor will I forget. And that was half a year before the 2022 Freedom Convoy was slandered, glow-op'd against and finally mercilessly suppressed by police and totalitarian bankster tactics while the residents of Ottawa (who cheered on the previous year's destruction of churches) screamed for their blood and clapped like seals for their repression.
These days I would define myself as a 'pragmatic conservative with reactionary leanings', if you'll pardon the mouthful. Suffice to say my attitude toward modernity, its societies and its systems are pessimistic to the core, and that I support curbing its negative effects and undermining its underlying structures by any feasible means (which would not also engender a counter-productive backlash, of course) whenever and wherever possible.