As a young person I held many conservative ideas. As a student of theology at the end of the last millennium I learned many more. I especially enjoyed arguments that encouraged me to look for the good things conservatives were seeking to preserve: holiness in LGBTQ inclusion, life in abortion, dignity in welfare, creation in economic development. 

Now I wonder if I will ever again hold a conservative idea. The current U.S. administration’s cruelty and the lack of conservative complaints about it make me wonder if conservativism is morally dead. One example: I have spent much of my life believing abortion is wrong, but I would never oppose abortion, either as a medical option or a political idea, because 1) the anti-abortion movement’s impacts on the Supreme Court and the U.S. government are so far-reaching and deleterious; and 2) abortion rates decline faster under pro- abortion administrations. Practically and politically, opposing abortion is an exercise in cruelty. Arguing that abortion is wrong now takes so much ground-clearing in terms of who has opposed it that I’m not sure one can do it.

Since virtually no Republican politicians oppose the current administration in any way, I will have difficulty listening to a conservative justification for doing anything other than removing them from office. I have not seen those conservative voices speaking in the last 10 years, so what would it mean for me to listen to them now?

Trevor Bechtel, Ann Arbor, Mich.