Peter Berkowitz: "David Brooks's Requiem For Conservatism's Most Recent Death"

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   Yes, Trump is vain and thin-skinned. Yet rather than adopt an authoritarian agenda, the 45th U.S. president cut taxes, curtailed regulations, restored the rule of law to America’s southern border, appointed judges committed to interpreting rather than rewriting the law, and gave states room to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
   Yes, some thugs and kooks rallied around Trump. Meanwhile, other thugs and kooks gravitated to the Democratic Party. The swing voters who were decisive in Trump’s 2016 victory, moreover, supported him not out of “hatred of the Other” but in self-defense against the scorn that progressive elites directed at them, their communities, and their faith.
   And yes, many conservatives feel embattled. But not, as Brooks ridiculously alleges, because “they need to continually invent existential foes — critical race theory, nongendered bathrooms, out-of-control immigration.” Conservatives and Trump voters feel embattled because, even as a New York Times columnist writing in The Atlantic dismisses their political concerns as a matter of benighted and feverish imaginations, they can see with their own eyes that schools indoctrinate students in critical race theory; that progressive elites make transgenderism a signature cause not to protect the basic rights of a tiny minority but as a lever to overturn traditional moral limits and teachings; and that since Joe Biden entered the White House, soaring numbers of migrants have illegally crossed the nation’s southern border.
   Not the least reason to cultivate the conservative spirit is to counter the extraordinary excesses on the left to which progressives, in their recurring rush to bury conservatism, blind themselves and the nation.