Never mind

“Gerrymandering is detrimental to our democracy, and it weakens the individual voices that form our electorates. Opposing gerrymandering should be a bipartisan priority.” So said Abigail Spanberger, the newly-elected Virginia congressperson from the district next to mine back in 2019. Now, as the newly-elected Virginia governor in 2026, she has presumably had some kind of conversion experience and so changed her mind just in time to re-draw the state’s congressional boundaries so creatively (and, some say, unconstitutionally) that her party now stands to pick up four of the opposing party’s five seats in the next Congress.

Now, like anybody else in the persuasion business, I’m a big fan of people who are able to change their minds. They’re the people I write for, since I don’t believe they already think as I do. I don’t even think as I do until I make an effort to write down what I think. Changing one’s mind is to me the hallmark of our humanity. Polar bears, as Wyndham Lewis once wrote, are insane, because they’re obsessed with being polar bears. Only people — and then only people at their best — can set aside their obsession with being what they already are and imagine a point of view other than their own.

But that seems to me to be a dying art. Some years ago, I gave a lecture at the invitation of Hillsdale College on today’s Jane Austen industry as it has produced a seemingly endless series of movies and television shows based on her novels. My idea was that these novels and their cinematic or dramatic adaptations are peculiarly interesting to our ideological times because they are all constantly concerned, to the point of obsession, with people like Marianne Dashwood or Elizabeth Bennet or Fanny Price or Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot who have to struggle with countervailing moral, social and familial pressures, not to mention internal ones, to change (or not change) their minds.

I’m so old that I can remember a time when it was not unusual, let alone not impermissible, to hear people say that it was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. That might be considered sexist today, though it seems to me both complimentary to womankind and historically very true. In Jane Austen’s day — I say nothing of our own — a woman’s whole happiness could depend on her assessment of men as potential husbands. If she made a wrong judgment about a man she were well-advised to acknowledge it quickly and completely and without shame, lest she be trapped into marriage with a scoundrel by her own pride of opinion.

In the case of Elizabeth Bennet, her initial judgment of Mr Darcy was wrong the other way — in thinking him a bad, conceited and ill-natured man, and in fact “the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.” Having been so emphatic in her rejection of him, she could not presumably have expected either to change her mind or to be asked again. But (spoiler alert) Jane Austen makes the miracle of their eventual union happen, to the intense gratification of generations of readers, by showing that Darcy, too, can learn to change his mind and so set her the example.

But I digress. I only mean to establish my bona fides as a champion of mind-changers everywhere before saying that I don’t think Governor Spanberger was really such a one. Do you? Her change of mind reminds me of President George H.W. Bush’s when, less than two years after making his famous “read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes, he announced that circumstances “now” required him to “be flexible” and “consider tax revenue increases.”

It was always pretty clear to me that the first President Bush was born flexible — no bad thing in a politician, by the way — even to the extent of mouthing, in the words of Peggy Noonan, an inflexible principle that it was completely foreign to his nature to believe, simply because he thought it would go down well at the 1988 Republican convention. And it did. So much so that he later paid the price of his flexibility by losing the 1992 election.

I think that in our age of ideology, most public changes of mind are of this and not Elizabeth Bennet’s kind. They are not, that is, instances of people who become different in their opinions and beliefs but people revealing themselves to be the same as they always were, only more so.

When Alan Dershowitz announced in the pages of the Wall Street Journal this spring that he was leaving the Democratic party to become a Republican he was candid about the fact that the change was not in his own beliefs but in those of the party he had left, which had become intolerably (to him) hostile to Israel. He specifically mentioned the news that “all but seven Senate Democrats voted for an arms embargo against the Jewish state,” and also mentioned that an avowed enemy of Israel, Abdul El-Sayed, is gaining ground in the Democratic campaign for U.S. senator from Michigan.” It seemed to be another instance of Ronald Reagan’s dictum that he had not left the Democratic party, but the Democratic Party had left him.

How about those Democrats then? Was it the party, once at least as firmly pro-Israel as the Republicans, which had changed its mind? Obviously yes but, equally obviously, not by a sudden conversion or any reasoned argument about Israel’s right to defend itself. Rather, as Mr Dershowitz wrote, his former party’s “hostility to Israel” was not just bad for Israel but “represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world.”

Like Governor Spanberger or President Bush senior, then, these anti-Israel Democrats were not really changing their mind; they were simply becoming more entrenched, more extreme, in their adherence to views that they already held — in Ms Spanberger’s case to that “radical approach” that is the hallmark of her progressive ideology. That ideology, whatever it might pretend when out of power, doesn’t “do” changes of mind when it comes to power. Instead it tries to ban contrary opinion as “misinformation,” or to outlaw mind-changing in the form of “conversion therapy” for homosexuals or “trans” people. That even young children might someday change their minds about something as momentous as a sex change seems never to occur to the “gender” ideologues.

What we ordinarily mean by changing our minds is that we bring them more into line with reality, but in a world where reality is presumed to be either unknowable or self-determined — or determined for us by our ideologies — mind-changing becomes a threat to our self-chosen identities. If I am invited to change my mind about something with which I identify myself, or something I identify as my reality, I must see this not so much as a change of mind as it is a denial of who I am.

Thus when The New York Times headlines that the Google co-founder “Sergey Brin Moves to the Right,” it must be because there is “a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side.” It may, of course, be so, but existential permanence of friends and enemies alike is always the default position in ideological thinking. Someone once identified as being on one side or the other of the ideological divide can never be supposed to change merely by taking thought.

This attitude, or something like it, must be what could entrench the view that the President of the United States is a “traitor,” a “pedophile” and a “rapist” — all things which, in that now-unfashionable “real” world of our grandfathers, he is not — in the mind of the young man who tried to kill him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April. No reasoned argument, based merely on fact, could change his mind about what Donald Trump was, according to his chosen ideology.

For, as many others have noted, this particular collection of falsehoods about the president is everywhere to be met with among those who show up for the “No Kings” demonstrations — demonstrations, that is, of determinedly non-changing minds — and in the media. “The Epstein mania turns lethal,” as Tim Black wrote for Spiked Online. It can hardly be a surprise then, if someone is willing to commit murder in order to validate that belief, and himself for believing it, before the world. I believe that assassins, like school shooters, do what they do in order to become famous, but the fame sought by the former is also coveted for an ideological world-view that is not just theirs but them.

In an age of ideology, a real change of mind must mean a change of narrative, and the narrative of the Democratic left, which is also the media’s, is precisely what cannot be changed without a collapse of that whole moral and political edifice. That’s how you get to BlueSky users’ insisting that the assassination attempt was “staged,” perhaps as a distraction from the Epstein files or the Iran war. Kamala Harris professes to believe that the Iran War itself was launched in order to distract her ever-vigilant fellow-Democrats from their attention to the Epstein files.

When Norah O’Donnell interviewed President Trump for “60 Minutes” the day after the latest assassination attempt, she began by asking, “Why do you think so many people may be trying to kill you?” As if she didn’t know! She then ignored his attempts to explain that some people resent presidents who get things done, and the list of things he has got done, to ask:

The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this quote, “Administration officials, they are targets.” And he also wrote this, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” What’s your reaction to that?

What did she think would be his reaction to that? Surely something not far off the reaction she got:

Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re. . . horrible people. Horrible people. . . . But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things.

She should be ashamed of herself, but shame is another thing, besides changing their minds, that ideologues don’t do. And she is far from alone in the media or its wholly owned subsidiary, the Democratic party, in having adopted, like the would-be assassin, the narrative of the anti-Trump “Resistance,” that there is nothing too bad, or too far-fetched, to be believed of the man they routinely compare to Hitler. Perhaps it wasn’t from mere disingenuousness that Ms O’Donnell asked the president, “Do you think he was referring to you?” Perhaps she thought he was agreeing with her and other media figures who like to hint that he had it coming to him.

I believe that what we were witnessing in this interview, as in many other media reactions to the assassination attempt, were the twists and turns of a mind that had been given a compelling reason to change and that was determined not to do so. The fervor of its hatred for Mr Trump is all that binds the so-called Resistance together. Should that fervor begin to wane, the floodgates for mind-changing of a much more serious sort might be expected.

In an ideological age, ostensible changes of mind typically appear to be, rather, an abandonment of the restraints and inhibitions that once enabled us to tolerate and even to like people whose minds were made up very differently from our own. James Carville, the Clinton henchman whose status as that rare thing, a true political celebrity, owes much to the fact that he married a Republican, now advocates a scorched earth policy towards his political enemies. He said in a recent podcast interview:

If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on Day 1 they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state. They should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F*** it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.

Like Wyndham Lewis’s polar bear, James Carville appears to be obsessed with being the creature he always was. Here there was not even a pretense of a change of mind. Mind-changing is for losers — which may be why nowadays so many traditionally pragmatic and anti-ideological Republicans and conservatives, as I noticed in this space last month (see “Ideological follies” in The New Criterion of May, 2026) so often seem to long for the comfort of an ideology of their own that will assure them they need never change their minds again.

A case in point. Tucker Carlson has been apologizing to his many followers about his past support for President Trump. He, too, would seem to have changed his mind, except that the burden of his complaint against him is that in his view it is Mr Trump who, by launching the war against Iran, has changed his mind and so made Mr Carlson feel “betrayed” — as if the Carlson feelings ought to have been the president’s primary consideration in deciding whether or not to go to war. The Trump phenomenon turns out to have been all about him — he whose own mind is as firmly made up as it has ever been.

I think you can tell a real convert by his humility. Just listen to Mr Darcy, the happy lover at the second time of asking as he looks back on the first, when his own incivility was matched by Elizabeth’s:

What did you say of me, that I did not deserve? For, though your accusations were ill-founded, formed on mistaken premises, my behaviour to you at the time had merited the severest reproof. It was unpardonable. I cannot think of it without abhorrence.

And Elizabeth replies in like manner: “Oh! Do not repeat what I then said. These recollections will not do at all. I assure you, that I have long been most heartily ashamed of it.” That shame, on both their parts, produces the author’s benediction — and that of two centuries of her readers — on the happy couple, for it is the only possible guarantee of the sincerity of their happy changes of mind.

It’s sad that so few people today, at least among those who live by their opinions, will ever know such happiness. The media and those whose minds have been made up by the media require the certainty of an ideology in order to resist any possible change of mind — even when their stated opinions are obviously, to reasonable people, contrary to what Richard Overton (no relation to him of the Overton Window) in 1645 called “the laws of common modesty and civility which nature hath written in the hearts of all men.” By their persistence in uncivil, aggressive, threatening or simply untrue beliefs about others they are guilty of an intolerable arrogance — which, along with error and shame, is another thing that, apparently, ideologues can never recognize in themselves. Not without ceasing to be ideologues.