Duke Chronicle columnist Oliver Sherouse writes there’s no need for conservatives to despair at the results of last week’s election. The “cultish enthusiasm” for hope and change will fade, the senior writes, leading the country to remember why we don’t often elect liberals to the White House.
The left wasted its out-of-favor years on anger. Unwilling to admit imperfection, its members imagined conspiracies of comical proportions, called everybody in sight stupid and clamored for the impeachment, arrest and summary execution of pretty much the entire executive branch. I think we can do better.
This is time we can devote to considering our principles and re-articulating them for a new generation. We should stew ourselves in the old classics-in Friedman, Buckley, Kirk, de Toqueville and the rest. And as we soak we must always ask, “What do these ideas mean for us today?”
And then we go on the offensive. In our classrooms, in our churches and clubs, on the bus, in the dorm common room, we must always be ready to explain what we believe and why we believe it, not to confront but to convince. We must never shrink from engaging when we hear that America is not a force for good in this world, or that corporations are evil and success is a crime or that morality is always relative and there is no such thing as truth.
After all, if you cannot stand up to the Nietzsche-and-Rawls-spouting hippie knock-off in your lecture class who fancies himself an intellectual, well, who is it exactly that you think you can stand up to?
Indeed.
