The legitimacy of change                               

The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals
- Ralph Nader

I once thought that early 2000s Nader quote clever, a pithy encapsulation of a large truth. But I now know it to be flawed.

Nader's words assumed a person's early ideas were correct and reflected their best character. Any later altering or even abandonment of them as life was experienced, priorities shuffled, and additional lessons learned was cast as negative diminution.

To those secretly entertaining 'uncharacteristic' political values and inclinations, I say: Come on in -- the water's fine.

I was among those who founded the Iowa Green Party and I also served as its first media coordinator. I labored to ensure our candidate Ralph Nader's position on Iowa's ballot, even traveling to St. Louis, Missouri's George Washington University to join protesters on the night of one Bush v. Gore debate. ("Let Ralph debate!" was our rallying cry.)

I later served as Iowa coordinator for Nader's 2004 independent presidential campaign.

Prior to my Nader and Green Party work, I'd been a loyal Democrat. I voted in the Marshall County, Iowa caucus and drafted a plank condemning anti-gay bigotry. Later a resident of Black Hawk County, I submitted anti-execution platform language.

I had also worked the phones for various Democrat candidates, including Sen. Tom Harkin and Bill Clinton. And I'd done volunteer work for NARAL.

I assumed -- perhaps naively, but preferring to believe the best of people -- that most Americans shared patriotic sensibility. And that we then we went in different partisan directions based from that common floor.

The progressive siren of sharing wealth was attractive, as I desired comfort for all. Like many, I suppose, I'd cast my lot with progressivism to ensure freedom from want.

But as I learned more about similar political experiments elsewhere in the world, both historical and contemporary, and their failures to make good on sunny-sounding theoretical promises, I understood that progressivism would surely likewise fall to ruin in America.

It would produce more suffering than it eliminated. The road to Venezuela is paved with good intentions.

I came to understand that universally equal wealth was neither practically possible nor truly desirable. Controlling mechanisms intended to cultivate it would reward under-performers and rob them of chances for individual successes.

It also would hinder those inclined toward greater effort.

Beneficial innovations and realizing the greatest good for the greatest number, I came to understand, could only be got within a system that offered equality of opportunity, not one that enforced cookie-cutter outcomes that never really worked.

I listened as my mother remembered the American mood during WWII. The robust sense of national identity, the plucky 'we're all in this, together' spirit that impelled home-front efforts like rationing and scrap metal drives that made possible our eventual triumph over fascism.

Americans then were proud of this nation, and proud to be citizens of it. I found myself wishing much more for a return to such 'we are one' patriotism than for the utopian vision of globalism.

Regardless of demographic differences, Americans of that era saluted Old Glory, honored the National Anthem, and were contemptuous of all within or without our borders who meant harm to us and our national sovereignty.

Faith that the indivisible America of my mother's recollections should again rise, and mature reconsideration of my rosy-dory misjudgments, led me to conclude that change was only logical.

I'd had an epiphany.

Issues that had been important to me through Democrat, Green Party, and Nader days remain so, though with maturation has sometimes come reconsideration. I am now pro-life, for instance, having altered my opinion as new medical findings and my return to Catholicism dictated. 

I remain a staunch opponent of executions. (On that, I disagree with President Trump.)

Freedom of speech had for decades been my primary passion, and an article of faith among classical liberals. But given Resistance-Age Democrats' mania for speech codes, legal restrictions on 'hate speech,' stifling of public speakers, and media-advertiser boycotts calculated to silence perspectives their interest was clearly no longer mine. 

I became a Trump supporter in 2016 and wrote essays promoting his candidacy in numerous Iowa newspapers and online venues. I caucused for him in February 2017, and that November joined the tens of millions of Americans who surged to general election polling places nationwide to buoy him and our America First movement to Pennsylvania Avenue.

As his unfortunate 2017 end neared, civil libertarian columnist Nat Hentoff, for decades a promoter of Democrats and outspoken on issues like freedom of speech, racial equality, and defendants' rights, wrote that he was inclined to cast ballots in favor of Republican presidential candidates over Democrat ones. 

He reasoned the former was more likely to protect the Constitution whose guarantees he'd long advocated, whereas the latter seemed increasingly radical and set on shredding its important guarantees.

There's nothing shameful in admitting you've miscalculated. Changing opinions when the superiority of contrary reasoning becomes manifest is healthy. It indicates intellectual honesty and openness.

Re-evaluation of ideals is not erosion. But obdurate refusal to amend assumptions as appropriate is foolish.