I was fascinated by conservative political philosophy as a teenager. My parents voted Republican, but my youthful rebellion against their views didn’t begin until I went to college.
In my Catholic high school from 1957-1961, almost all my teachers and peers were Democrats, so as a way of establishing my identity, I rebelled against them by reading Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and William Buckley’s Up From Liberalism. When I was 16, I even wrote a letter to Buckley praising his sensible views but suggesting that he could reach more readers by adopting a less intimidating vocabulary. I even (shudder) supported Nixon in 1960.
As a cerebral type, I found conservative ideas of personal responsibility, fiscal prudence, and individual freedom very rational. They were based, after all, on the liberating ideas of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment we studied in history classes. Even my liberal priest teachers valued the principle of subsidiarity which asserted that problems should be solved from the bottom up rather than the top down. Local or state solutions to problems were preferable to national ones.