One of our leading lights is getting some mainstream attention

It's quite gratifying to see Charlie Sykes getting a chance to express the kind of sanity he embodies in a couple of venues that will make it possible for a wider audience to know that real conservatism is not dead.

He has a column in the latest issue of Time entitled "Roy Moore Signals the End of the Republican Party," and an interview in The Daily Beast about his new book, How the Right Lost Its Mind.

I highly recommend both.

He's among the most cogent of those conservatives who refuse, nine months into the Trump residency and in the face of relentless attempts by Trump enthusiasts to humiliate them (us) into slinking away into obscurity, to alter their (our) always-held position that Trump, and the yee-haw-ism that he embodies, is bad for the GOP and conservatism. This puts him in distinguished company: Kevin Williamson, Stephen Hayes, Erick Erickson, Susan Wright, to name a few.

These people have not slithered away. They have not been silenced. One could say that those trying to convince the public that this is the case are engaging in "fake news."

It can get a little tricky to be in his (our) position. We must keep the three pillars of conservatism front and center, so that the leftist argument - "you say you're opposed to Trump, yet you strive to repeal Obamacare, dismantle EPA regulations, and walk away from the Iran deal" - can be seen for what it is: a temptation for us to succumb to the notion that there is strength in numbers, that if we'd abandon our principles and join forces with the Left, rendering Trump powerless might be strived for more effectively. That's an invitation we must decline.

Conversely, we must not see areas of overlap between actual conservatism and the Trump "agenda" as signs that it's all going to work out fine.

I like what Sykes has to say about Paul Ryan in this regard:

One person Sykes is definitely disappointed in—although they remain friends—is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, whom he has known, and respected, for years. “I have said Ryan has struck a Faustian bargain,” says Sykes. “I think he is fundamentally decent, but is unwilling to take Trump on, and is willing to stay on his good side to get tax cuts. And he has made the calculation that as speaker he doesn’t have the independence to comment on every stupid tweet.”

I'm always on the lookout for signs of encouragement, and one such is that the "he's-a-fighter" / "populism" arguments may be starting to ring hollow. Listen to any radio rant by Laura Ingraham, any television bellow-fest by Sean Hannity, any lame drenched-in-attitude column by Kurt Schlichter or all-caps comment-thread outburst by any of the lesser-known adherents to the Trump phenomenon, and you can't find any actual workable set of principles or policy prescriptions. What you do find, at least by inference, are a lot of things that are decidedly not conservatism: class envy, protectionism, and, most significantly, a willingness to overlook boorishness, hedonism and a disinterest in character generally.


It doesn't get any easier, the deeper we get into this present era, to continue to exhibit and refine the qualities we extol. There is still the war on our civilization being waged by the Left, and now there's this further set of complications.

We know that giving up is not an option. Would you be able to sleep at night knowing you walked away from what you knew to be right and true just because it became more difficult by several degrees?