In advocacy of intellectual evolution

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.

(But it was dispiritingly reflective of the anti-intellectual, anti-Trump 'feelings' mob that prizes ill-considered emotions and primitive instincts over sophisticated reasoning.)

Changes are inevitable as years pass. 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 conclusions. 

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

Growth is positive and to be cultivated; spending one's entire life in the same spot as when you first qualified for a driving license is cause for head-hanging embarrassment.

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 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.

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 will-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.

The Democrat Party's most visible and influential figures once championed free speech, equality, patriotism, a strong national defense, rigorously maintained citizenship standards and borders, due process, and the rights of the accused -- including to presumed innocence. 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 writing 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 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.

The 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.

(One feels confident Hentoff would have been properly acidic in condemnation of the hysterical, guilty-until-proven-innocent senate Democrats-smearing of Brett Kavanaugh.)

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