> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.countermarch.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Unexamined Idea - URL: https://www.countermarch.org/the-unexamined-idea/ - Published: 2026-09-15T14:00:04.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-15T14:01:12.000Z - Description: Choosing an idea is different from making it your own. - Author: Scott P. Richert - Tags: Forward March In June 2015, when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president, most of the readers of *Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture* (of which I was at that time executive editor) viewed his presidential bid as a lark, if not a joke. Trump, when he had toyed with a bid for the Reform Party nomination back in 1999, had called Pat Buchanan a “Nazi,” and now here he was, claiming as his own versions of nearly every position Buchanan had taken in each of his presidential runs, particularly on trade, immigration, and foreign policy. Those positions, of course, were not Buchanan’s to begin with but, as he acknowledged in an interview with Bill Kauffman in 2000, had been formed in the pages of *Chronicles*, where they had come to be known, collectively (and always a bit tongue-in-cheek), as *paleoconservatism*. And so it was not surprising that, as Trump’s campaign picked up steam and voters seemed to be responding to his platform and not just his celebrity and eccentricities, more and more of our readers decided to take a ride on the Trump train. By the time Trump’s nomination had been ratified at the Republican National Convention, an article by an anonymous Straussian had exploded on social media, arguing that the 2016 presidential election was a “Flight 93” moment, the last election that would ever matter should Trump lose. There was considerable internal debate at *Chronicles* between members of the board of directors and the editorial staff about the proper approach to take to Trump’s candidacy and possible presidency. I argued that we should do as we had always done, under both Democratic and Republican presidents: judge politicians not only by their rhetoric but by their actions. When they said something we agreed with, say so; when they did something we agreed with, do the same; and when they departed from what we believed to be the right course, call them out on it. I lost the debate as the board of directors went all in on Trump and, after his inauguration in January 2017, viewed any criticism of his appointments, failures to follow through on his promises, or even outright reversals of his positions as somehow betraying what *Chronicles* had always stood for — even though those appointments, failures, and reversals were the actual betrayal. I chalked up much of this to the fact that our board included some longtime Reaganites who had actually been in the Reagan administration and were hoping that the Trump presidency would prove a return to their glory days. What ultimately led to my decision to leave *Chronicles*, however, was not the hopes of board members but hearing from more and more readers who had, for years, subscribed to and supported the magazine because of the positions we had taken and the beliefs we had espoused, who were now defending Trump as he appointed neoconservatives to key foreign and economic policy positions and backed away from elements of the platform he had espoused on his way to the White House. The cognitive dissonance was too much for me. Throughout all of Trump’s first term, that seemingly facile abandonment of long-held beliefs and positions not just by Trump’s supporters in general but by people who (I kept telling myself) knew better continued to puzzle me. The best explanation I could come up with was that Trump held sway over them by force of personality, but that became harder to believe as his first term went on, and especially now in his second term, as the man who had derided “Sleepy Joe” Biden routinely falls asleep during daytime events after spending hours the night before posting incessantly on social media. Then came the sudden and decisive pivot on foreign policy, when President Trump, on the heels of creating his Board of Peace, began talking openly about the possibility of invading Greenland; then actually toppled the government of Venezuela; and finally, in an action that even a number of neocons who had never met a war they didn’t like found a step too far, launched a war on Iran with no clear objective, no definable American interest, and no justification under international law or just-war theory. That was the last straw for some of those who had continued to support Trump as he abandoned the positions he had adopted in 2015; but others — far greater in number — simply abandoned, once and for all, the foreign-policy positions that had represented the best part of Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his first term (although he had applied those positions inconsistently even then). Eleven years since Trump’s ride down the golden escalator, I have a new working theory about why so many who had held paleoconservative positions while Trump was still denouncing Pat Buchanan as a “Nazi” discarded them one by one as soon as Trump posted his own changes of mind on Truth Social. And, oddly enough, it came to me as I have been thinking more and more about the possibilities and dangers posed by AI. Like many other things he is often identified with, Steve Jobs did not coin the phrase “strong opinions, weakly held.” (Paul Saffo, a technology futurist, did.) In the context of technological development or even product design and aesthetics, the phrase encourages boldness tempered by humility, or at least a willingness to change when presented with a better, bolder option. Today, however, I think the phrase can be applied in a rather different way to the political positions people hold. In “[I Have an Idea](https://www.countermarch.org/i-have-an-idea/),” I addressed the debate over using AI to “write” for you through the lens of Benedetto Croce’s insight that there is no idea until it is expressed. If I cannot put my intuition into words (or some other medium), it is not *an idea*, much less *my idea*. But I have begun to realize that Croce’s insight may apply just as much (though in a slightly different way) to ideas we adopt from others as it does to ideas we fashion within ourselves. The Catholic historian John Lukacs frequently said that “People do not have ideas; they choose them.”[\[1\]](#fn1) But we choose some ideas the way we choose a single blue mint from our grandmother’s milk-glass candy dish that has only ever held blue mints, and others the way we choose (or should choose) our spouse. We know we want a mint, and we know we like blue mints, but we choose the particular mint unthinkingly, because every plastic-wrapped, mass-manufactured disk of blue-tinted sugar is as good as any other. Weighing one mint against all the rest would be a waste of time (not to mention an indication of a serious mental imbalance). To choose our spouse the same way we choose a blue mint, on the other hand, would constitute spiritual, moral, and intellectual malfeasance. I can say with certainty that I did not know everything about Amy on our wedding day, nor will I know her completely until we both (God willing) pass into the presence of the Lord. That our marriage has lasted 34 years, however, is a sign that our mutual choice was not thoughtless, and that she took seriously what it means for me to be *her* husband, and I what it means for her to be *my* wife. But we all know (or at least know of) men and women (men more frequently than women) whose repeated choices of spouses have been closer to “strong opinions, weakly held.” And that, I would submit, is how far too many people today treat the political, economic, cultural, and even religious ideas they have chosen. If you choose your ideas the way you choose a blue mint, you’ll never make them your own. There are, perhaps, few original ideas to be found in the two million or so words that I have written and published over the past 35 years. But every idea I have *expressed* in my essays (as opposed to merely discussed or critiqued) is one I have made my own through the very act of writing. My political, economic, cultural, and even theological positions reflect my wrestling with ideas in the light of my experience. Because much of my writing has consisted of columns, my essays have tended (like this one) to be personal and narrative, revealing as they unfold how I have chosen my ideas and made them my own through a process that is much closer to choosing Amy as my wife than to choosing a single blue mint out of a bowl of three dozen. The mistake I had made over the past decade was in assuming that those who had said they agreed with what they had read in *Chronicles* had gone through a similar process and made those ideas their own. Lest you dismiss that last sentence as intellectual snobbery, let me clarify: I am not suggesting that one must be a writer to think clearly and to have strong ideas (rather than opinions) strongly (rather than weakly) held. Many people read widely and deeply, wrestle with ideas, and discuss them with others, and, in doing so, hone their beliefs and positions. But more and more do not, and the atmosphere of tribalism and partisanship that pervades life in the United States today has replaced the blue mints in Grandma’s dish with a mix of blue and red pills. All that matters now is which color you choose. No one seems to realize that the purveyors of each pill may change their contents over time, so that the choice of one particular color today may mean something very different from when you first chose that color. All that matters is that you keep taking the same color pill you once chose to swallow. The choice between a red pill and a blue pill was first presented in *The Matrix*, the very premise of which is that what we see on the surface does not necessarily reflect the reality of the world inside.[\[2\]](#fn2) That the Wachowski brothers who wrote, directed, and released the film in 1999, when Donald Trump was calling Pat Buchanan a “Nazi,” were the same as the Wachowski sisters who released *The Matrix: Resurrections* in 2021 seems a more apt metaphor for politics during the second Trump administration than the color of the pill Neo chose. An even better metaphor, however, may be that scene in Frank Capra’s *It’s a Wonderful Life*, when Mr. Gower, out of his mind with grief, fills the pills he sends George Bailey to deliver with cyanide rather than medicine. George realizes what is wrong and takes a beating from the pharmacist when he points out the truth, but he ultimately brings a grateful Mr. Gower back to reality. Early on, we learn that George Bailey has a lot of strong opinions and big dreams, but thankfully they are weakly held, which allows George to stand up to Mr. Potter’s insatiable greed as he does the hard work of making his own the principles and beliefs that his father had embodied. George works those ideas out in scene after scene, essays in spoken form, bringing them to life as much for himself as for those to whom he is speaking. The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. I would not say that the unexamined idea is not worth choosing, but choosing an idea is a very different thing from making that idea your own. Only if you have made it your own are you likely to be willing and able to defend an idea when others have chosen to toss it aside. --- 1. As Lukacs would acknowledge, that was a deliberate overstatement, but it reflects the reality that most of what we think of as *our* ideas, on matters big and small, are not new to us but have come in some way, shape, or form from others. There is nothing wrong with that; if each person had to construct for himself the entire corpus of ideas that allows us to act in the world of which we are a part, the human race would have died out a long time ago. [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. Which — intentionally or unintentionally — makes the focus on the pills’ colors, rather than their contents, ironic. [↩︎](#fnref2)