North Texas Daily

Your upbringing impacts you greatly, and that impact can be negative or positive. It affects who you are and the type of life you choose to live.

One of these being the political ideologies you grow to have. The values you were surrounded by, or the values you saw the people in your life have, become normal to you and eventually becomes what you believe. As a child, you are very impressionable, so you believe in anything your parents do or say and it can be really hard to break out of the mindset you’ve had since you were a kid.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that either, it is just a way of life.

A political ideology is a set of beliefs about political theory and policy held by a certain group.  There are about five different political ideologies, but here I’ll be talking about the main two, liberalism and conservatism.

Liberalism is about individualism, personal freedom, equality and limited government. Liberals believe that there are rights that all people should have the choice of making on their own. They are people who are open to change and don’t necessarily mind it either. They want change and they want the government to have limited power.

Conservatism is when you prefer traditions and believe in keeping things relatively the same. These are the type of people who you see are more pro-life for example or they believe that the government should have more control over the lives of its citizens. Their ideals are more strict, and they limit the personal freedom that Liberals believe so heavily in.

There’s nothing wrong with believing in either of those two ideologies. They cover a lot of policies and a number of people are able to easily distinguish who they are between the two.

For example, I distinguish myself as a liberal. Why? Because I believe a person has the right to make decisions about their life and body without intervention from the government as long as no one is being harmed in the process. I have that ideology because as a kid I was surrounded by women and men who believed in the same thing. My family taught me that it’s right for a person to decide what they want to do with their own life because it is theirs.

My family believed the government shouldn’t meddle in day to day things, because “ it’s none of their business.” I instantly developed that mindset as a kid, and to this day, my values haven’t changed. I have thoughts that can be more conservative in nature, but those thoughts don’t take away from me primarily believing in those individual freedoms of liberalism.

I’m sure that as a kid if you experienced your family teaching you that there are certain things a person shouldn’t get to decide, or “don’t fix something that’s broken,” that you would end up being more conservative in your ideals.

They could easily go from being conservative to liberal or vice versa. If they decide that the beliefs their family had imposed on them are not necessarily what they believe in, then they can easily flip the switch at any given time. If they experience an event that instantly makes them switch sides, then that is OK, too.

When you become an adult, or even as you continue to grow into who you were meant to be, you can stray away from the ideals you once had and propel towards new ones. The more you experience life and gain knowledge your ideologies will keep changing. Having different ideologies from your peers or family can be difficult, but you are who you are and you can choose to believe in whatever you want.

Featured Illustration: Jae-Eun Suh