By Andrew Boyd

For any of you that have read my previous missives, first, God bless you; second, you’ll know I’m a big fan of metaphors. So, when my esteemed editor emailed me requesting a column themed ‘Ragnarök’ I was gleeful, recognizing immediately what an apt framework it provided to discuss the phenomenon that is Trump and today’s body politic.  

To my way of thinking, Trump was the inevitable, final and desperate gambit by a plurality of Americans who believed, right or wrong, that their economic futures were being sacrificed by preening, global elites in the name of a cause unknown, probably greed. The folks in flyover country were tired of being talked down to and dismissed by the establishment writ large, and so they crowned the beast, the vulgarian, the fire-breathing monster and said, “burn it all down.” 

Four years later, they’ve returned to the ballot box with, notably, a more racially, politically and socially diverse coalition of voters to say the job is not yet done. And they’re bolstered by an increasingly unhinged left that can’t imagine theirs is not the only right and righteous idea for how to run a society. And while conservatives may yet lose the presidency, I think the broader election outcomes speak to a war that has just begun. You’re already beginning to hear from more centrists Democrats the notion that perhaps their party has lost the plot, that maybe the working assumption, that nearly half your fellow Americans are racist, homophobic, xenophobic trolls, isn’t a very strong foundation on which to build a sustainable political movement.

Perhaps, instead, it’s possible, just possible, that conservatives are people, too, with a different but still important and viable point of view; people who simple can’t accept the operative premise of the radical left that America is the America of the 1619 Project, the America of unbridled institutional racism. Or that caring, compassionate citizens can still struggle with the idea of a federal government takeover of healthcare, or federally funded abortions up to the moment of birth. Maybe they are rightly distrustful of an unaccountable bureaucracy and unbridled state power, and that terrible, awful, no good idea that words are violence and where that inevitably leads. 

Conservatism, after all, is not a place it’s a people; and if the land we love no longer wants us, then we’ll make a new land in which to live free and accountable to one another as sovereign and precious souls. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but only time will tell.

Blessings to all.

Boyd is a public relations and communications professional with 30-years experience. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Charlotte, N.C.

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