Let's go.

Welcome to Citizen.

Let me begin with a sentence that will irritate nearly everyone who hears it.

Conservatism is not the politics of strength.

It is the politics of restraint.

A statement should not be controversial, and yet in 2025, it feels almost heretical,

an indication not of its falsehood, but of how far political language has drifted from its original meaning.

The discomfort it produces is a diagnostic.

It reveals something broken in a snut in conservatism itself,

but in the way politics is now discussed, understood, and pursued.

Because today, nearly everywhere you look,

politics is framed almost exclusively in terms of power,

not in truth or legitimacy,

not in law, not in moral obligation, not in the Constitution, but in power.

Who has it? Who lost it? Who needs to seize it? Who must be crushed to obtain it?

And what should we do when we get it? Now, this language dominates cable news and online commentary, even top-level politicians

in our country on both sides of the aisle.

It saturates campaign speeches and donor emails.

It animates activist rhetoric and increasingly defines what passes for serious political analysis,

even in spaces that call themselves conservative.

The tone varies, the enemies change, the aesthetics differ, but the underlying framework remains the same.

Politics, we are told, is a struggle for dominance.

...