Roger Kimball is one of the most thoughtful Americans in public life today. Everything he writes deserves to be carefully read and thoughtfully considered.
He has done it again with his new article, “What Is American Conservatism?”
His opening move is brilliant. Instead of trying to provide a universal definition of conservatism, he zeroes in on what matters to you and me — American conservatism. American conservatism, he writes, is “skeptical of utopias, wary of unintended consequences, and unafraid to call things by their proper names.”
And what of Donald Trump? Replete with learning and common sense, Mr. Kimball does not let his mild and cheerful definition of American conservatism get in the way of his ability to appreciate President Trump. In an article entitled “Donald Trump Is a Great Man of History,” he writes,
I believe that Donald Trump is on the threshold of saving America. That is, I believe that his diagnosis of America’s problems is accurate. High on the list of those problems are a paralysing commitment to woke ideology, mass migration, stupefying debt, and cratering cultural self-confidence.
Some Americans who call themselves conservative are put off by how Trump is going about saving America. Kimball is not. How do we understand that?
Let’s consider a situational addendum to Mr. Kimball’s definition.
We often refer to “the ship of state.” Putting that analogy to work, we can see that conserving the ship of state means one thing in calm seas and quite another when a storm threatens to sink the ship, one thing when there is not another ship in sight and quite another when it is surrounded and being bombarded by enemy ships. Drastic action will be required of the captain and the crew to save, to conserve, the ship when it is on the verge of sinking or of being sunk.
President Trump understands that he is the captain of the ship when it is in danger of being lost. The rigged election in 2020, the fact that the Democrats got away with putting a senile nincompoop in the White House and keeping him there, and their confidence that they could replace him with a non-senile nincompoop raised alarm in every patriot heart.
It is clear that if President Trump does not manage to save the ship, in all likelihood, America will never have another free and fair election. He is trying to save America from one-party rule by the Democrats. We already have all the information we need to understand what that would mean for America, for American liberty, and for the forces for good around the world that depend on America for a chance to survive. You only need to consider what one-party rule by the Democrats has done to California — and how quickly it was done.
Guided by common sense and a sure grasp of the extent of the danger America is in, President Trump is attempting to restore America to its former greatness in the midst of a great national emergency.
To criticize the captain because he is not conducting himself as if he were sailing in fair weather and open seas, and to do so while calling oneself a conservative, is quite simply deranged.
Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.
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