My initial response to this is that, if your principles are to be followed only when you are winning, they’re not principles, they’re just tactics. Conservatives should be the adults in the room who seek to preserve not only a moral and orderly society but also a government of rules, norms, and public legitimacy. We should do so because nobody else will, and the things we seek to conserve are worth conserving. We should also do so because standing for the rules that underlie public order is what brings people to conservatism in their adulthood.

Our constitutional system of limited government is a good in itself. The rule of written law, which applies equally to all, is a good in itself. The survival of every inch of a private sphere where the government cannot reach us, where we can do as we please and follow our consciences, is a good in itself. Our system, composed of our American way of deciding things, is a good in itself. We have democracy to involve the greatest number of people in making decisions, and we have deliberative democracy, with federalism and separation of powers, in order to ensure that their decisions to make changes are considered at length and incorporate support that is broad across time and constituencies. This was the very argument that Edmund Burke made for all manner of English institutions that resisted change, which “render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of necessity . . . rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable.”