"As a conservative, I'm beginning to wonder: Are we the bad guys?" [View all]

[erronis]

From a Letter To the Editor - Washington Post
I don't have an actual link since I ditched it when it became the Bezos Post.

Robert P. George’s Dec. 7 op-ed, “There are valid debates among conservatives. This isn’t one.,” argued that conservatives should stop promoting “white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, the subjugation of women, and other forms of ideological extremism and bigotry.”

You know what this means. It means it’s too late. Telling conservatives to stop being bigots is admitting they’re bigots. And I’m pretty sure a professor of jurisprudence telling them to cut it out isn’t going to work. Hey, you guys — stop being bigots! Oh, okay.

I served in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations and would like to believe conservatism wasn’t always thus, but I’m beginning to wonder. Was the virus from which today’s bigotry sprang lying dormant in us back then, like chickenpox leading to shingles? The moral herpes virus? Was it like a recessive gene long buried in our ancestral DNA that suddenly got switched on and has become dominant?

Are these new conservatives in fact our descendants? Were we always secretly like this but were pretending we weren’t? I’m hoping these new conservatives are mutants, but I’m not so sure about that anymore.