What do you think?
Rate this book


310 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 18, 2020
Conservatism advocates limited government, but that does not mean the absence of government. Conservatism is about ordered liberty with the recognition that order requires a properly functioning government, and liberty requires it to be limited to stay within those proper functions. Put another way, while conservatives do believe in a smaller, less powerful centralized government, they are not anti-government. They are simply pro-limited government. (p. 16)
Donald J. Trump was for most of his life a registered Democrat. . . . .Then he joined the Republican Party and won the GOP nomination in 2016. . . . . For most of Trump's life, he never spoke for the conservative cause. He was not known to have supported conservative candidates for office. In fact quite the opposite, he made numerous contributions to liberal Democrats. . . . .
People change and positions change and converts to the cause should always be welcome. But Trump never acknowledged that he changed his positions on abortion, trade, federal spending, the deficit, the debt, foreign policy, healthcare, property rights, free markets, and monetary policy--in every one of these policies Trump was 180 degrees out of phase with commonly understood conservative thought. Instead, candidate Trump asked us to accept a different reality--his reality. When Trump became president, he simply redefined what conservatism was. Shockingly, most self-identified conservatives cultishly accepted the new ambiguously twisted conservatism and jumped aboard the Trump train. Left behind were the guiding principles of conservatism that gave the Republican Party its governing philosophy. (p. 14)
During Trump's presidential campaign, "conservative" had come to mean supporting of the policies uttered, however incoherently, by Trump. That meant adopting an unshakable belief in a wall on America's southern border, banning immigrants based on religion, a single-payer healthcare system, an affection for tariffs, a radical skepticism of free trade, withdrawing from NATO, kowtowing to dictators, and promoting inflationary easy-money policies from the Federal Reserve. Today it has also meant something else, and I've seen this firsthand as well: castigating anyone who refuses to go along with these newfound "conservative" policies. (p. 6)
And the right to life extends far beyond the right to be born; it is the right to maintain life. And to the extent that essential healthcare is necessary to maintain life, healthcare is therefore an inarguable basic human right. If there exists a right to life, there also exists a right to maintain it. In the profession of that right, surely conservatives and liberals can find a large measure of agreement. But conservatism also professes-and this is where we part company with progressives-that there is a huge difference between protecting the human right of healthcare and government providing a system of Healthcare. (p. 157)