I'm still a conservative, you know, someone who believes in limited government and balanced budgets and the Constitution.
It is an uphill fight to persuade workers that the minimum wage is not in their interest.
The shock of Trumpism has made me rethink what the conservative movement was about and who our allies were and what our assumptions were.
There was always the paranoid strain in American politics, particularly on the Right.
I don't think Trump is a conservative. I think he is a man without any fixed principles. And to the extent he does have any ideology, it owes far more to European-style National Front right-wing politics than to American conservatism.
I knew Buckley - he was a friend of mine - and Steve Bannon is no William F. Buckley. Buckley marginalized the kooks. Bannon empowered them.
One of the surprises to me was the willingness of many people in the conservative media to roll over, to abandon long-held conservative principles, and to embrace Donald Trump.
I feel dumber every time I listen to Sean Hannity. I don't want to be that guy.
A lot of Americans do not have an appreciation for our history. They do not understand the Constitution, why we have these norms. And at some point, yes, the media has some responsibility, but so does the public.
I'm not usually absolutely speechless.
In our era of zero tolerance, I would surely have spent most of elementary and middle school shuttling between suspensions and expulsions, with an occasional time out for social studies.
Across the country, universities that had abandoned in loco parentis in the 1960s because it was too oppressive and intrusive have replaced it with in loco Big Brother programs of political and cultural re-education.
During dull moments at school, I admit, I not only drew soldiers shooting one another but also tanks, bombers, fighters, and even the occasional space ship with planet-destroying powers.
White liberals face this cognitive dissonance: if they decide that America is ready for a black president and back Obama, they would also be forced to surrender or at least modify decades of convictions about American bias.
In 2008, conservatives ridiculed the Left for its adulation of Barack Obama, only to succumb to their own cult of personality eight years later.
There once was a time when employers could be reasonably certain that college graduates had a basic sense of the world and, as a minimum, could write a coherent business letter. That is simply no longer the case, as some academic leaders appear ready to admit.
Nothing annoys academics more than pointing out how little time they actually spend teaching students.
To put it bluntly, the push for 'college for all' sets up students to fail.
Despite the evidence that we already have too many students in higher education, the hot new idea among the political class is to double down by pushing for 'free college tuition.' The problem with the 'free college' idea is, however, not merely financial. It also reinforces the myth that college is appropriate or even possible for all students.
The thing most frightening about Donald Trump is he doesn't know what he doesn't know and doesn't seem to care about what he doesn't know, and as a result of that, he doesn't know what the consequences of his actions might be.
