"Any individual in a group doesn't believe what he believes as strongly when separated from the group."(John Hardly) "The longer away from the group, the more able one is to view the group's beliefs with a little "distance"."(mousethief)

Can work the other way though, the way you get exiles holding even more firmly to ways that may have become outmoded back home. And you can get that in other contexts, like politics. You can have isolated people who hold on to amd preserve ideas and ideals as part of their whole personality, out in a hostile environment, disregarding changes in political fashion. And that can be one of the places where a whole new cycle of politics can take off, in time.

It's all very like folk songs really. Folk politics.

As for terms like conservative and liberal, as we've found exploring them on other threads, they are a lot more complicated than is often recognised, and in some senses they are in no ways opposites or incompatible.

One of the meanings of conservative is being distrustful of change - and I think anyone who isn't distrustful of change isn't in touch with reality, and in that sense growing older and growing more conservative are to be expected to come together. It doesn't means there aren't changes you want to see, but you want to look at them carefully.

The other meaning of conservative of course is to do with wanting to bring in various kinds of detestable changes, and opposing various kinds of changes that might make things a lot better. And I don't think people need fear that growing older is inevitably going to mean they can look forward to slipping into that way of thinking. Pete Seeger's not the only octogenarian who can see through that.