Being a true conservative, my political stance has not appreciably changed, overall, since the late 1970s. However, my political leanings have GALLOPED left. Or more like, I stood fast while the political climate galloped right.
I started out as your basic, law-and-order, individual responsibility Republican conservative. I moved from Republicans to Libertarians, as individual rights seemed more important than corporate profits. Note that the Libertarian Party broke away from the Republican Party around 1970.
I will grant you that my understandings of economic theories have changed, since seeing Keynesian economics put to action as Reaganomics, and became an utter failure. Okay, it's an experiment that disproves the theories of Keynes. I saw the utter failure of Somalia as another such experiment with free-market capitalism.
Okay, so those showed me the folly of libertarianism. I stopped being a Libertarian (cap-L) when they moved from freedom, and maintaining individual right to the neo-con ideas of anti-abortion (didn't used to be a PARTY platform - although a monority of candidates saw the unborn as persons whose rights needed protecting - now abortion is one unyielding statement).
Still a law-and-order conservative, I saw what the Republicans had become - when first some of the ultra-right-wing Christian conservatives started living in a different reality than I was, it was alarming. One such person would be considered delusional and psychotic. A large group of them becomes a protected class. Hmmm. As time went on, these were the ones who claimed the "conservative" brand - often heralding NEOCONSERVATIVE. I've lost several friends, who used to be fun, rational people to becoming Ditto-headed neocons, who could only re-iterate whatever nonsense that Rush was spouting. It gets tiring debunking wild theory after wild theory, when they don't believe you no matter what you show them.
Taking from the Libertarians of about 25 years ago, who said that there were "Republocrats" running things, that nothing changes regardless of party at least is no longer is true. Indeed, no matter who was elected, civil rights were eroded, personal freedoms were eroded, society became more chaotic and violent, school standards dropped, taxes went up (on my class, anyway).
The "Republocrat" idea is no longer true. Indeed, the Republican party has been taken over by radical fascists combined by theocrats. They are odd bedfellows, to be sure, but the theocrats are easily manipulated by the wealthy fascists. Meanwhile, the Democratic party has moved right too. While they used to uphold liberal positions, they've become somewhat right of center. I remain somewhat right of center, where I have run into the Democrats shading me.
Long ago I dropped my Republican registration for a Libertarian registration. That is a story in itself, as my Republican district at the time continually changed my Libertarian registration to an Unaffiliated one. This is problematic, since in signing the registration form, under the threat of perjury, they made it nearly impossible to declare myself a Libertarian - which made everything from Libertarians running for office, working on political campaigns, and so forth, difficult. Everyone from the Greens to the Constitution party to the Socialists to the Prohibition Party had the same problem. Eventually it was resolved.
Then, I dropped the Libertarian affiliation, and became an Independent.
Now, with the Republicans apparently off-in-right-field with fascists and religious-to-the-point-of-pathology, proposing and instituting dangerous ideas, the Libertarian experiment having failed, the other left (or right) parties not agreeing with too many of my ideas, to participate in primaries, I must register as a Democrat.