Bill Maher recently repeated a familiar refrain: his politics, he says, haven’t changed. Rather, it’s the Democratic Party that has migrated leftward, leaving him behind and recasting him as a moderate. There is, to be sure, a plausible case for this. The party that once nominated Bill Clinton—a man whose flaws were abundant but whose political instincts were, for a time, well attuned to the country’s temper—would likely treat him today as ideologically unacceptable. Not, interestingly, for the behavior that once drew moral scrutiny, but for uttering a now-unforgivable phrase: “The era of big government is over.”
This shift tells us something about the party. The Democratic Party has indeed moved leftward on a number of issues—from economic policy to cultural identity. But Maher’s response tells us something perhaps more interesting about him—and about a broader disposition that masquerades as intellectual virtue. He seems to regard his unchanging views as proof of consistency and principle. He has not yielded, he believes, to the tides of fashion. He has stood firm while others drifted.
But what if that’s not the commendation he thinks it is?
I don’t suggest that Maher should have followed the rest of his party off the proverbial deep end, only that to go decades without altering one’s views is not, necessarily, a mark of conviction. It can also be a symptom of intellectual stagnation. Most people, particularly those who engage seriously with politics, come to their opinions through a combination of observation, experience, and reflection. These things do not end at age 25. If a person’s views remain precisely what they were in youth, the likely explanation is not that they discovered absolute truth early and clung to it—but that they ceased to grow.
We live in a world that resists our attempts to simplify it. History, economics, and human nature continually conspire to complicate neat ideological narratives. A mature mind learns to account for these complexities—not by surrendering principles, but by refining them. To resist all change is not to be principled; it is to be immune to instruction.
That immunity, I suspect, is less about devotion to ideas than it is about devotion to the self. There is a kind of pride—subtle, but deeply entrenched—that tells a man he has nothing left to learn, especially at an early age. It tells him that if he once saw things clearly, then time and trial have nothing new to offer. This is not conviction. It is arrogance.
And arrogance often cloaks itself in the language of authenticity. We are told that remaining “true to oneself” is admirable. But if one’s self never changes—never matures, never reconsiders, never yields even to lived experience—then what, exactly, is being preserved? Not authenticity, but inertia.
None of this is to say that every shift in public sentiment should be met with accommodation. There is, of course, such a thing as true principle—values that deserve to be defended even when they fall out of fashion. But the notion that wisdom is achieved early and never revisited is a dangerous conceit. It invites a kind of mental sloth that masquerades as steadiness. And it substitutes vanity for virtue.
I don’t mean to pick on Bill Maher. His honesty is refreshing, and one admires that he has the courage of his convictions. And, indeed, the political landscape is littered with people—on the left and the right—who congratulate themselves for having never wavered. But if we are to take ideas seriously, we must also take seriously the process of refining them. That process requires humility. It requires listening. And it requires the courage not just to speak, but to change.
And if changing one’s mind requires courage, and it does, then refusing to do so often reveals something else: fear. Not always fear in the dramatic sense, but the quieter fear of being wrong, of seeming inconsistent, of losing face or forfeiting a carefully cultivated identity. For many, to revise a belief is to risk unraveling the whole fabric of self-understanding. And so the easier path is to pretend certainty—to take refuge in the illusion of having been right all along.
In the end, those who boast of never changing their minds may imagine themselves standing tall in a shifting world. More often, they are simply standing still while the world moves on—unchanged not because they’ve seen the truth, but because they’ve stopped looking. It’s not moral clarity that keeps them rooted, but a kind of cerebral flatlining—the quiet death of curiosity, sealed off by the pride of having once been right.
