But “principled loserdom” is wrong. The American Founders were not content to fight against the British Crown and accept losing, so long as their lofty principles were followed along the way; on the contrary, they pledged their “lives…fortunes and…sacred honor” to the cause in the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln was not content, either, to fight to preserve Union and accept losing, so long as his high-minded principles were followed along the way; on the contrary, he was motivated by his great moral conviction, as espoused in his 1854 Peoria Speech, “that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”

Substantive justice must always be conservatives’ political lodestar. And if conservatives find themselves irrevocably hamstrung by a peculiar conception of the permissible means to achieve that end, at least over a reasonable duration of time, then it is time to change the means. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” goes the famous paraphrase of Justice Robert Jackson’s 1949 dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago. Neither, for that matter, is American civilization itself. And contra the coffee-sipping canine of online meme fame, things in America are not “fine.”

Conservatives must start acting like they actually understand this, wielding whatever levers of power they are able to attain. Given the Left’s successful Gramscian “march through the institutions” chokehold on all of the major institutions of civil society, that means using crass political power. It means, in other words, following the example of Florida Republicans and Disney.