“I’m not transitioned to another ideology,” he says from his mother‘s silver car parked outside his grandma’s retirement home. “I keep saying I really want to be myself. I don‘t’ want to be identified as this ideology or that ideology.”Do I ever. This is why I resist calling myself a "conservative" or "ex-liberal", even though most of my left-leaning friends would undoubtedly call me a "right-winger". (I use the term "neoconservative" in my blog header with a healthy dose of irony.) As I mentioned in my previous post, I think a responsible liberalism has an important part to play. And when your position is perceived as changing, people - especially in the media - want to read all kinds of things into it.
Either way, he embraces Obamacare, gay marriage, and abortion — his social conservatism, he says, was the first thing to go.
He throws out sentences such as “when I was conservative,“ and says ”my views are a lot more liberal than they are conservative.“ He slips in phrases like ”the ideological anger that comes from the right.” And if you point that out, he admits that it’s hard to describe his story without using widely-accepted terms.
“I see that, and I agree,” the 17-year-old, with black plastic glasses and slightly disheveled hair, admits. “My problem with calling myself something is I’ve had bad experiences labeling myself. And I feel that the problem is that if you label yourself you get locked into an ideology with all the trappings. You have every little thing you have to agree to to be a part of an ideology, you know?”
Go read all of Jonathan Krohn's interview at The Blaze. According to a certain narrative, Jonathan shifted "from right to left"; according to another narrative, I went "from left to right". But I think the truth is that Jonathan and I both went in a new direction - and we're not really all that far apart.
