I’m a conservative now, I guess? It’s a surprising turn of events for me, a man once referred to, repeatedly and affectionately, by the late Sen. John McCain as a communist. He wasn’t too far off—for as long as I’ve been old enough to wear Birkenstocks, I’ve been a supporter of liberal causes and candidates. As a kid, my favorite record was the feminist children’s album, Free To Be You and Me. I’m a vegetarian, for God’s sake! Everything in me rebels against institutional power.
And yet, there I was recently, sitting in a Las Vegas noodle bar with my buddy defending the goddamned IRS.
I had come to town for a solo, poker-playing vacation. My friend and I met up for dinner one night and got to talking politics. I haven’t known him very long and I was surprised when he told me he voted Trump. Worse still, the dude is in his late 30s and said the last election was the first time he’d voted at all.
To be clear, I like this guy a lot. He’s smart and kind. He’s built a nice business for himself. If he harbors animus towards anybody, I’ve never seen it. He comes across as moderate and sober; the sort of guy who maybe would have voted for, say, Mitt Romney when voting for Mitt Romney was still a thing people did.
When I pressed him why he voted Trump, he gave me the familiar song-and-dance about taxes, government overreach and “waste, fraud, and abuse.” He was worried about the border. He was worried about the Democrats getting us entangled in foreign wars. I’ll be frank here—he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
We argued. Well, maybe “argue” is too strong a word—we engaged in exactly the kind of respectful but passionate conversation all of us good little libs have been encouraged to have with our Trump-supporting friends and neighbors. Both of us reached across the proverbial aisle and tried to hash things out, an endeavor which left me in the unfamiliar role of being the conservative voice at the table.
American institutions, I told him, are worth preserving and strengthening: Public education, scientific research, foreign aid, our national parks, space exploration, infrastructure, the arts, access to good healthcare and food for those who need it. The post office for God’s sake! All of it useful, successful and worth protecting and defending. All of it is now on the chopping block for our gold-plated tapeworm.
I’m a conservative now, I guess, because I believe in the social compact? Because I believe in such a thing as “the public good.” Because I want to conserve that which made the United States the destination of choice for those with dreams larger than their nations of origin can hold. I’m a conservative now, I guess, because I love so much about this country and it hurts me to see it gutted.
When we think of our country’s founding, we tend to view it through the prism of conservatism—a bunch of bewigged white dudes dipping their quills. But what was the Declaration of Independence if not a punk rock manifesto? Equality among men, consent of the governed, the overthrowing of tyranny. Throw some drums and fuzzy guitar on that and you’ve got yourself a Black Flag song. Hell, we had an actual revolution.
250 years on, though, and the monarchs are trying to retake the throne. These princes of finance and kings of tech. These goobers wielding their AKs in the name of God. When the most elite rail against the elites and the most pampered men assume the role of victim, we are in, as the popular tune of the American revolution went, “the world turned upside down.”
And so here I find myself in that upside down world, speaking words to my friend that would have been at home in Dwight Eisenhower’s mouth. The nation is worth defending, I told him, in all of her contradictions. Its institutions are worth defending. Its people, the sons and daughters of that revolution are worth defending—those who can trace their heritage back that far and those who risked life and limb to make the passage later. Those who came here voluntarily and those who did not.
All of it is worth defending—conserving, even, in the deepest sense of that word. I’m a conservative now, I guess, because I still believe in the promise of my flawed home. It’s a promise that has served us well these last couple of centuries. Not all of us, and not all of the time. We have been imperfect and we have been cruel. We’ve also been big-hearted. Innovative. Jubilant.
As a people, we’ve never all rowed in the same direction, and that’s OK. I would argue that’s better than OK. It’s good. Diversity of thought is our great strength. We’ve had shitty presidents before. We’ve had incompetent administrations and bone-headed policies. But this—this mobbed-up scrap metal enterprise posing as a government—this is something new. And I hate it.
So I’m a conservative now. A proud one. Not a proud boy, but a proud man. Standing up for the most unfashionable pillars of our democratic republic. (Yes, that means the IRS.) To all of the faceless bureaucrats keeping the clocks wound. To one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I’m a conservative because too many people like my buddy won’t understand what they’ve got until it’s been sold off to the highest bidder. I’m a conservative now, and it’s never felt more punk rock.
The post Opinion: Welp, Donald Trump’s America Has Made Me a Conservative appeared first on The Daily Beast.
