Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009’s Conservative Political Action Conference
when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for
conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a
future star of the Republican Party.
Now 17, Krohn — who went on to write a book, “Defining Conservatism,” that was blurbed by the likes of Newt Gingrich
and Bill Bennett — still watches that speech from time to time, but it
mostly makes him cringe because, well, he’s not a conservative anymore.
“I think it was naive,” Krohn now says of the speech. “It’s a
13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live
in Georgia.
We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was
something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions.
You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your
ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t
done enough.”
~
“I started reflecting on a lot of what I wrote, just thinking about
what I had said and what I had done and started reading a lot of other
stuff, and not just political stuff,” Krohn said. “I started getting
into philosophy — Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kant and lots of other German
philosophers. And then into present philosophers — Saul Kripke, David
Chalmers. It was really reading philosophy that didn’t have anything to
do with politics that gave me a breather and made me realize that a lot
of what I said was ideological blather that really wasn’t meaningful. It
wasn’t me thinking. It was just me saying things I had heard so long
from people I thought were interesting and just came to believe for some
reason, without really understanding it. I understood it enough to talk
about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it.”
You live and you learn. Luckily, that is what Krohn has done so far. What is heartening about this story to me is not that he went from being a staunch conservative to being...not so conservative, it's that he made the effort to expand his mind. He read, he educated himself, and in so doing, it changed his outlook on not just politics specifically, but humanity and life in general. Would that more people in this country (and the world at large) took it upon themselves to do the same.
Make sure you read the whole piece, it's a truly good read.
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