Modern Conservatives Have Nothing To Offer America

A recent op-ed from a noted conservative thinker exposes the moral and intellectual bankruptcy at the heart of conservatism.

For a while now, I’ve been making an earnest effort to take American conservatism seriously. We live in a pluralistic republic, after all and I, like so many other people, worry that the increasingly partisan nature of American political (and cultural) life threatens to tear it apart. As part of that effort, I will often read the conservative voices that populate the (minority) of The Washington Post’s opinion pages, including commentators such as Hugh Hewitt and Marc Thiessen.

Most recently, I read Danielle Pletka’s most recent opinion piece titled “I Never Considered Voting for Trump in 2016: I May Be Forced to Vote for Him This Year.” Now, to be fair, I knew what I was getting into even before I started reading. If the title hadn’t given it away, my knowledge of Pletka would have. I’ve seen her more often than I care to count on MSNBC — usually as a guest on Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press Daily, a carnival of both-sides-ism and generally sloppy journalism — and so I figured that I knew where this was going to go.

Needless to say, the article is exactly as the title advertised. In what basically amounts…