Book of the Month

CPAC's boy wonder swings left

by Aunt Sam 7/2/2012 - 2:59 pm

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.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78068.html#ixzz1zUdEMeDe

This is well worth a read.  Hopefully, many will find this thought provoking and a clear message for others.

Read the full article at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78068.html

OOOoppppppssssss....

by cmaukonen 7/3/2012 - 12:51 pm

What apparently hasn't changed is that he's as smart as a whip for his age, capable of learning in great leaps and bounds and with self-reflection, way ahead of the usual adolescent schedule:

“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.”

Krohn won’t go so far as to say he’s liberal, in part because his move away from conservatism was a move away from ideological boxes in general.

“I want to be Jonathan Krohn,” he said, “and I’m tired of being an ideology, and it’s not fun and it gets boring and it’s not who we are as individuals.”

Thanks for the link!

by artappraiser 7/3/2012 - 1:07 pm

It'd be so sad to go through life never changing your mind.  Especially as a kid.  I always wonder about the people who say the same thing, day in, day out, for decades.  Doesn't Steve Forbes get bored advocating for the flat tax?  Doesn't Grover Norquist get bored advocating against any tax?  Doesn't Arthur Laffer wonder if there's more to the world than his curve, which he drew on a cocktail napkin and then allowed to dominate his existence?

by Michael Maiello 7/3/2012 - 1:14 pm (re: artappraiser)

The kid seems to have the best sort of smarts, he is curiously intelligent. He is not satisfied with simply believing, he wants to understand what he believes.

I understood it enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it.”

 He came to know enough about himself to realize the truth of that quote and then went on learning more with, apparently, that not so common facet of intelligence that lets new information change strongly held beliefs.  I admire him.

 
by A Guy Called LULU 7/3/2012 - 1:34 pm

I think what he says just before the portion you quoted is really interesting:

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.

it was pondering philosophy, not politics, that opened his eyes.  I think everyone could use a good dose of philosophy to temper their political thinking.

by Another Trope 7/3/2012 - 1:57 pm (re: A Guy Called LULU)

I've been thinking a lot about shifting my reading away from news and towards fiction, creative nonfiction, historical documents and philosophy.  I feel like I have a lot of information right now but not a lot of perspective.  Which means, in essence, I feel like a 13 year old again.  I think changing my reading habits could bring me back up to my usual sophomore level.

by Michael Maiello 7/3/2012 - 2:05 pm (re: Another Trope)

Also this quote from the Politico article was interesting:

One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative... It just didn’t seem right to me anymore. From there, it branched into other issues, everything from health care to economic issues.… I think I’ve changed a lot, and it’s not because I’ve become a liberal from being a conservative — it’s just that I thought about it more. The issues are so complex, you can’t just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue.

by AmericanDreamer 7/3/2012 - 2:19 pm

At roughly age 12, Noam Chomsky apparently wrote a piece for his school paper lamenting the rise of fascism on the occasion of the fall of Barcelona to Franco.  Am watching the documentary "Manufacturing Consent" and thought of this thread on Krohn as that information was presented...

by AmericanDreamer 7/8/2012 - 9:12 pm

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