Dave, I follow you, read your articles regularly, and genuinely respect and appreciate your humor, your skill, your perspective, and your values — even if I mostly stand on the other side of the aisle.
First, let’s establish the givens: President Trump is not a conservative, and I am embarrassed by his comportment, attitude, and political incompetence.
Nevertheless, he is the face of the GOP and therefore, the conservative mindset, and so I have to hope that Congress mitigates his personal idiocies, but still subscribes to some conservative principles.
Important Qualifier: I am dismayed and fully aware that the GOP has not adhered to conservative principles for most of my 56 years.
The impetus for my responding here is narrow and singular. Your stance is that conservatives are a one size fits all animal, and so your superior progressive principles will inevitably and inexorably vanquish the GOP and the conservative cohort on the basis of your superiority.
- The GOP belief in a strong military is the primary reason that the US is one of two true world powers. Despite myriad mistakes and miscalcualtions, the net effect of our arrogant and heavy-handed approach to world affairs has been overwhelmingly positive. For every mistake, there are plenty of examples of peoples who have avoided subjugation, or who have been freed from autocratic rule.
- The GOP belief in the primacy of the individual, notwithstanding its erratic adherence to the concept, is still a great thing. The ACLU and other progressive organizations owe a great deal of theoretical debt to the notion that the individual is more important than other agencies. (Progressive principles threaten the autonomy of the individual because they are often based on the belief that government can be reliably humanistic. No government has ever been able to sustain a humanistic approach for very long.)
- Your sense of US vs. Them is counter-productive, and part of the reason that Trump won. The cockroaches who came out to vote for Trump were tired of the smugness and condescension of the left. They are currently turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to Trump’s inadequacies because they find the typical progressive to be a self-righteous bore who’s naive faith in the wisdom and altruism of the government is terribly dangerous.
- Keep writing, please. Keep finding the humor and the insanity in things. Please lose the arrogance. It does not become you, and it ensures that bores on the right will continue to creep to the voting booths to shout down the obnoxiousness of the left.
- I know the progressive agenda is not all that I described here, but it is what the worst of the right sees and hears, and so it undermines the health of the debate.
