Charlie Sykes

Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.

It is harder to explain why free markets create wealth than it is to pander to workers who have been displaced by global competition.

For years, Republicans have effectively outsourced their thought leadership to the loudmouths at the end of the bar. But perhaps the most extreme example of that trend has been the issue of guns, where the party has ceded control to a gun lobby that has built its brand on absolutism.

During dull moments at school, I admit, I not only drew soldiers shooting one another but also tanks, bombers, fighters, and even the occasional space ship with planet-destroying powers.

Denouncing Nazis is the easiest thing in the world: All it requires is a modicum of historical perspective and a working moral compass.

The N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the Right.

White liberals face this cognitive dissonance: if they decide that America is ready for a black president and back Obama, they would also be forced to surrender or at least modify decades of convictions about American bias.

Since the election, President Trump has shown a persistent penchant for conspiracy-minded suggestions about his political opponents and elements of his own government.

Both the Left and the Right need to connect as people rather than as political entities.

It is an uphill fight to persuade workers that the minimum wage is not in their interest.

For decades, conservatives have struggled with containing crackpottery, most notably William F. Buckley's famous excommunication of the John Birch Society in the 1960s.

On his first full day in office, Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.