Larson

I once encountered the following online assertion (which I’m paraphrasing): “My politics today are the same as when I was in junior high, in the 1960s.”

It was perhaps the saddest sentence I’ve ever read. The writer was bragging about intellectual and philosophical stasis, of bizarre pride in not having evolved since John Howard Griffin went into paperback.

It reflected the anti-intellectual, anti-Trump ‘feelings’ mob that prizes ill-considered emotions and primitive instincts over honest, sophisticated reasoning. Over exhaustive analysis.

Changes are inevitable as seasons turn. Intellectual grasp develops. Base values are clarified and perhaps even re-evaluated. New information appears. Divergent perspectives of which one may not have been previously aware are paid heed, their counsel duly incorporated into ongoing consideration. Unfolding events can prompt particular analyses that may, in turn, reorder larger persuasions.

And outright epiphanies can change fundamental thinking, turning avowed partisans into their opposites; examples include Christopher Hitchens, Michael Horowitz, Tammy Bruce, and David Brock.

Spending one’s entire life in the same spot as when you first qualified for a driver’s permit is cause for head-hanging embarrassment.

(In the ’80s. the Marshalltown library shelved a book series titled Opposing Viewpoints. In the volumes, authors articulated divergent perspectives. The series’ wise slogan: “Those who don’t know their opponents’ arguments don’t really know their own.”)

A healthy, open mind accepts that juvenile assumptions and prejudices may not have been thoroughly sound. It celebrates maturation. That is as it should be.

For my part, I’ve made tremendous strides. I’ve been a 1980s/90s Democrat Party loyalist who submitted county caucus platform planks and volunteered for state and national campaigns; 2000 co-founder of the Iowa Green Party; independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s 2004 Iowa coordinator; and current-day enthusiastic supporter of President Trump and the Make America Great Again movement. Trump has received my ballot endorsement in all three presidential races he’s entered.

I sometimes adopted different attitudes, but in other instances merely continued adhering to traditionally held, fundamental ones despite partisan permutations. I stuck with basic values and was unimpressed as liberals and the Left jettisoned them in repugnant willy-nilly rush.

I realized external phenomena had changed. I rethought earlier assumptions and occasionally found them wanting. I came to better understand different approaches to reaching preferred destinations. And I made appropriate changes.

For instance, the Democrat Party’s most influential figures once championed free speech, equality, patriotism, a strong national defense, and rigorously maintained citizenship standards and borders. They no longer do.

I didn’t move, they did.

The late Nat Hentoff was internationally recognized as a civil libertarian, First Amendment authority, and tireless participant in the momentous civil rights movement of the 1960s. Today’s discourse would be of greater intellectual heft, and much more rewarding, were Hentoff yet a participant.

In one column toward the end of his illustrious career, he observed that he would in contemporary times be more inclined to support a Republican presidential candidate than a Democrat one. The former party, he wrote, was more likely to honor and defend the Constitution and Bill of Rights to whose advocacy Hentoff had devoted his adult life in the streets, the classroom, and on the printed page.

Democrats, he concluded, had become so destructively radical that they could be expected to rip up America’s founding document and deny its important safeguards to citizens.

It is to Hentoff’s credit that he didn’t cease intellectual and philosophical growth when his morning school bells rang.

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Waterloo’s DC Larson is the author of That a Man Can Stand Up and Ideas Afoot. He counts among freelance credits the Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller, The Iowa Standard, and American Thinker. And his political blog is American Scene Magazine.