“Conscience is the most sacred of all property,” said James Madison.

Yet when Ted Cruz stood in front of delegates at the GOP convention last Wednesday and uttered the words, “vote your conscience,” the world turned upside down and many in the room wildly drowned out his words with boos.

And we though being a conservative was about principles? Guess not.

“This is a crisis of conscience of the likes we’ve never seen before,” argues Daniel Horowitz. On this week’s episode of the Conservative Conscience Horowitz breaks down how the real battle is not R’s vs. D’s but about protecting our conscience and advancing our values.

Every four years it’s the same song and dance. We end up sacrificing conservatism at the Republican altar. This year we have Donald Trump and again the knee-jerk reaction is the same – “we MUST support him so that the Democrats don’t win!” But he’s not a conservative – “we don’t care!”

Conservatives need to start asking themselves, is this strategy working?

As Daniel explains, there is a big difference between strategically voting for Trump while concurrently focusing on long term reforms and retaining our values than realigning all of our views to comport with some of his problematic positions.  There is a disturbing trend of some conservatives adopting new liberal positions in order to show “unity” with Trump.  This is a big mistake, and is frankly the mistake that has cost us any solid progress over the past 28 years.  Vote for whomever you want, but retain your conscience and don’t change your deep rooted principles.   

Key Quotes

“Instead of seeking new and foreign principles because we continue to fail in pursuit of tired, old tactics, why not renew our old timeless principles with new, innovative tactics.”

“We die on their hills; fall on their swords.   We lose elections anyway either right away or 2-4 years later because of it.  We’ve had the people’s house, the body closest to the people, for 18 of the past 22 years.  Look at the result.” 

“We win enough victories that are too minute and too insignificant to fundamentally move the ball forward, yet tantalizing enough to allure us into a false sense of security.  This prevents us from pursuing the tough long-term reforms that will actually create enduring victories.”  

Don’t Miss:

·         More than a speech: How Cruz destroyed the ‘lesser of two evils’ narrative

·         Trump speech: The good, the bad, and the ugly