A veteran baseball coach once said baseball is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched. The sport of the long season requires emotional equipoise, a continuous combination of concentration and relaxation. As does democratic politics, which is an unending exercise in patient persuasion.

Furthermore, in politics, style and substance are braided. Many things, and all the most important ones, cannot be effectively advocated at the top of the advocates’ lungs. Try to shout a persuasive argument for caring about the separation of powers, or why the judiciary should be actively engaged in countering the excesses of the majoritarian branches.

Critics will respond: Most voters do not give a tinker’s damn about such matters. This is true, which is precisely why persuasion is necessary to temper the public’s instinctive aversion to the patience that politics requires — the public’s proclivity for disparaging institutional impediments to immediate gratification. Only conservatives will undertake such persuasion.

Indeed, making difficult constitutional arguments is central to conservatism’s raison d’etre. This is particularly urgent now that conservatism is identified with the president-elect, a conservative-of-convenience who expresses his adopted convictions as though he recently purchased a Rosetta Stone program for quick fluency in speaking conservatism.