Kevin Williamson is no longer moved by lesser-of-two-evils arguments for voting for Republicans — not after Trump and January 6, not if it means raising the profile of the Republicans he finds to be cretins and quacks, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Lindsey Graham. He says to me and Dan: “I get it. I do.”

And I suppose my response is “I get it” too.

My attitude toward the Republican Party between, say, 2004 and 2008 was probably closer to what Kevin’s is now — I basically detested the organization and identified with people on the margins of it. I think it was Joe Sobran who said that an unjust war is simply organized mass murder. Even if Sobran said a lot of things I can dismiss, I’ve never shaken off that one. During those years, I viewed the war in Iraq as unjust. Consequently, as the Republican Party bound itself to defend the war from too-late and too-little criticism from Democrats, and then nominated Mr. “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb” Iran as its candidate, my feeling was “to hell with them.” Around this time I viewed even the party’s nominal commitments to the other issues I cared about — stopping abortion, for instance — as insincere ruses. The Office of Special Plans got what it wanted; when would the March for Life? Probably never.

I just never voted for Republicans — and besides, even where the party nominally agreed with me, the local Republicans in New York probably didn’t. Why would I vote for a party that was defending the reintroduction of torture as a means of war? How could I listen to the GOP blather about the Constitution as it continued to grow the number of countries in which we fought undeclared wars? I even detested some of the same figures Kevin does now — hi, Senator Graham. And the conservative movement itself — all those figures in it were turning out psychotic books about how we could do regime changes in another half dozen or dozen countries. The Republicans were the party of corrupt boobs that Matt Continetti exposed in The K Street Gang — weirdos like Senator Wide Stance.

But I also realized that, in principle, Obama was nearly as against me on foreign policy as the Republican establishment was. He saw American power in similarly messianic terms. So in those years, I tended to drift to whatever Republican was willing to say anything remotely sensible or sane on foreign policy. Once it was a libertarian goldbug like Ron Paul. In 2012 I think Tim Miller and his guys got the idea that I might cotton to their candidate. I had no idea. But when Jon Huntsman responded to a question I asked about Iraq by saying he did not believe in preemptive war, that was it — I was for him. He had a pro-life and pro–Second Amendment record in Utah (thanks partly to the deep-red legislature there), and he made sense on the most important issue to me — war. It didn’t matter that he bled and cried purple, and refused to even smell red meat.

I haven’t really changed on the foreign-policy stuff, but as that issue faded from salience and Republicans got used to my sort of criticism aimed at Obama, I found chances to work with and collaborate with Republicans and conservatives on issues other than foreign policy that I also cared about. In the last decade, even before Trump, I found that the GOP’s pro-life commitments were becoming more credible with state legislatures really making a difference. I was surprised by the level of Democrats’ hostility toward hospice nuns and religious schools, and then more recently by their ever-clearer commitment to overthrowing the minoritarian constitutional limits on their and only their governance. I don’t intend on ever making excuses for January 6, either, and I do hope the party moves on from Trump. I’ve gotten older and realized that, this being politics, the psycho ideologues and partisans, the corrupt boobs and weirdos, will always be with us. But on balance, I want ours to win now more than ever.