I think it was Orson Welles who said, “If you want to tell a story with a happy ending, it all depends on where you stop.” To put it another way: every story is a tragedy, if you tell it to the end. As with lives, so with republics. Freedom is a living thing. It dies. Conservatives are like doctors. They can only win for the moment, the day, the year, the election cycle. And no matter the victory, time only goes one way. The republic grows older every day, the people travel further from their founding values and nothing...