The has-it-been-worth-it question looms larger than ever now

Maybe, as it seems conservatism may have survived the Trumpism infection

My credentials as a conservative are unassailable. You can comb my polemical writings and podcasts and you will not find one instance of wavering or granting the Left any kind of point.

Actually, I leaned left as a young man. Voted for Barry Commoner in 1980! My conversion experience happened thusly:

As you know, In the early 80s, Central America was the scene of some of the last proxy conflicts of the Cold War. I’ve always been a voracious newspaper reader, and that was a front-burner issue at the time. I sincerely wanted to know what was really happening there. The first step in my inquiry was a book by a New York Times reporter named Shirley Christian on Nicaragua. Then I read the autobiography of Jose Napoleon Duarte, at the time president of El Salvador. Those led me to further research. I was going to a Unitarian fellowship at the time. One week they had a guest speaker from the local peace fellowship who’d just come back from a “fact-finding” mission to the region. He said that the most important thing for people to know was that the Reagan administration was funding terrible people who were making life bad for the peasants. During the Q&A, I stood up and said, “Mister, you’re leaving out some essential details. The Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Farabuno Marti Liberation Front are hard-core Marxist-Leninist organizations closely allied with Cuba and the Soviet Union.” I kind of surprised myself and I know I suprised my fellow congregants. Audible gasps. I thought, maybe I’m not as much of a left-leaner as I’d thought.

So I looked into it further. Subscribed to National Review, Commentary and The American Spectator. I became a think-tank conference junkie. Met some of the big figures of the day, such as Jean Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz and Eliot Abrams. The next step was grad school - a master’s in history. I joined the Indiana Council on World Affairs and before long they made me their president. (Another case like the Unitarians where I was surrounded by left-leaners.)

I grounded myself in the great works of conservatism’s development: Witness by Whittaker Chambers, The Law by Frederic Bastiat, Ideas Have Consequences by Richard . Weaver.

You can read my posts from the early days of my blog, Late in the Day, in which I exhaustively dwell on Barack Obama’s hardcore leftist background: being mentored as a child by Frank Marshall Davis, advocating violent revolution as a student at Occidental College, wandering into a socialist conference while studying law at Columbia in New York and having his imagination fired by a Frances Fox Piven speech, being mentored during his Chicago community-organizer days by the likes of Heather Booth, Roberts Creamer, Greg Galluzzo, and, of course, the Reverend Richard Wright, Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers, in whose living room Obama launched his political career.

I’ve consistently opposed climate alarmism, government involvement in health care, feminism, the distortion of the thousands-year-old understanding of what marriage is, the distortion of the understanding that there are only two sexes, and the appeasement of regimes hostile to the United States and the West generally.

When the tea party movement arose a little over a decade ago, it had my enthusiastic support. I worked phone banks for Americans for Prosperity. I cringed when two lackluster Republican presidential candidates in a row, John McCain and Mitt Romney, went out of their way to characterize Democrats as merely misguided about means but pursuing the same basic goals as Republicans.

But I knew better than to ever fall for the Trump phenomenon. Didn’t give it a moment’s consideration. His sordid sybaritic past, as detailed in his guest appearances on Howard Stern’s radio show, his bankruptcies, his defense of his all-over-the-place campaign contributions as needing to have victorious politicians of whatever stripe in his corner, the sleaziness of his brand, and the lack of a coherent worldview as evidenced by his word-salad manner of expressing himself.

I will not attempt to deny fine policy moves that have happened on his watch: the judicial appointments, pulling out of the Paris climate accord, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

These have to be counterbalanced by protectionist trade policy, insulting leaders of allied nations to their faces, calling a roomful of generals "a bunch of dopes and babies", pulling the Bible-waving stunt in front of St. John's church, spending his appearance at the 2017 Boy Scout National Jamboree telling the crowd (mostly teenage boys) that Washington is a cesspool, dissing his predecessor Obama for sending his message via tape to the prior jamboree, telling a story, apropos of nothing, about a real estate developer friend of his, saying, "he went out and bought a big yacht, and he had a very interesting life. I won’t go on any more than that because you’re Boy Scouts, so I’m not going to tell you what he did," having summits with Kim Jong-Un that did nothing but foster Kim’s regime’s legitimization, telling a Michigan rally, "You better vote for me, I got you so many damn car plants," which was not only a crude way to put it but not true, strongly suggesting that Joe Scarborough murdered his aide when he was a congressman, and saying that Japan and South Korea ought to pay hefty sums to host US troops.

And now in the waning days of his nightmare term, as the second wave of the coronavirus surges across the nation and the world, and as the instability of a stalled transition process leaves the nation unsettled, he still spends his time tweeting, making clear that how he’s perceived is his top priority

and peddling outrageous conspiracy theories.

So the question looms large now that his destiny has been confirmed: Has it been worth it?

It’s a tough one. I don’t know that I can provide a hard and fast answer this afternoon. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and especially Amy Coney Barrett are absolute gems as Supreme Court justices. Compliance with the Paris climate accord's requirements would be prohibitively expensive, cede US sovereignty to an international arrangement, and would yield a negligibly minuscule impact on the global average temperature by 2021. It is also based on an utter fiction - namely, that the global climate is in some kind of trouble. Israel is the only Western nation in the mideast and ought to be dealt with as such. Religious freedom has enjoyed a ringing defense for the past four years, as has the right to life of fetal Americans.

One way this is all shaking out that has me gratified is that there is now an opening for a return to actual conservatism - neither this disastrous cult-worship that has in so many ways usurped that label, nor the conclusion that endorsing the Democrat party a la the Lincoln Project was the only alternative for self-described righties opposed to Trump.

We kept our heads, we resolved to embrace clarity, and we are still here.

Our task is daunting. Ideas and principles, not to mention absolute verities, are not exactly in vogue right now. But eventually, as stalemate fails to provide answers to the problems that will persist moving forward, the people of this land are going to take an interest in what would actually work.

We need to be standing by to step up when that moment arrives.