I think that the one way to think about the difference is about whether your politics begins from what you care about most, what you love, or whether it begins from what you fear and what you hate. To me, as a young person, conservatism was appealing and has remained appealing because it’s fundamentally rooted and begins from what we love in the world. It is a defense of what I take to be best about the world, and what is best about the world is always threatened. It’s always challenged. It’s challenged just by the realities of human nature. Sustaining it requires work. It requires moral formation and political action. And that’s the work that conservatives at their best do. We conserve the preconditions for a flourishing life in a free society. But if the reason you have for entering politics first and foremost is to combat the left, to oppose what you don’t like, then your politics are going to be different than that. Now, look, to defend what you love means fighting people who oppose it. And politics is argument and it’s always contestation. But I think it matters a lot whether fundamentally the reason that drew you in is itself the fight, or whether the reason that drew you in is a commitment to something you love, is fundamentally conservative, is about wanting to preserve the good. And I do think that that is the generational question for the right now, a question that can only be answered by the political fortunes of this experiment. Now, I will say that the kinds of extremisms that you describe are not the dominant core of the right, but they matter. They’re bigger than they used to be. They’re more significant. And social media and other things mean that they’re much more influential. And so it seems to me that it’s incumbent upon older people on the right, like myself, to make the case to younger people on the right, that ultimately we win by advancing what we love in the world and by persuading the country, by persuading other Americans that they should love it, too. And that understanding ourselves as being at war with our own society is not a recipe for an effective politics or a good life.
