It’s hard not to feel sorry for Charlie Sykes. At least a little bit. A successful Conservative radio host in Wisconsin for more than 20 years, Sykes found himself to be a man without a party, out-righted by Trump supporters. To his credit, Sykes stood up to them and took the consequences. Like many conservatives who opposed Trump, he was trolled and attacked, often maliciously.

Sykes is, by his own account, a “principled Conservative,” meaning that he is in favor of small government, low taxes, and individual freedom. He appears to be thoughtful and well-read, two characteristics that Trump supporters are not noted for. He is also the author of a 2017 book entitled How the Right Lost its Mind. That’s how I came across Sykes. I had been wondering the same thing and thought it might be useful to get a Conservative perspective.

Essentially, according to Sykes, it’s a story of the White Supremacists, Evangelical leaders, and disenchanted voters who like their political philosophy distilled to bumper-strip slogans being willing to trash traditional Conservative values and join a parade behind a candidate that most of them admitted wasn’t even within rock-throwing distance of those values. To anybody who has not been under a rock for the last two years, that’s not news.

However, the book provides new insights into just how much pretzel twisting a lot of the better-known people had to do to rationalize their acceptance of Trump and his actions, from the leading Conservative journalist who likened Trump to the chemotherapy that the country had to take to cure the cancer of liberalism (Your hair will fall out, you’ll throw up a lot, but if you’re lucky you might live a little longer.) to the evangelical leader who claimed Trump was a “baby Christian” who didn’t have a clue about how Christians talked or what they believed, but he joined the parade. Another evangelical said: “We’re electing a president, not a pastor-in-chief.” In other words, character no longer matters.

The book takes a shot at explaining several things, the most important being how the United States got to the point that someone like Trump could get elected. Included in the major factors are the right-wing and the alt-right media people who promoted a state of constant outrage, building to Trump’s claim that he was going to be the savior; the abandonment of fact as a basis for truth, especially at the Drudge Report, Breitbart, Fox News, and a number of lesser-known right-wing media; and—probably as the result of all of the above—the idea that the right had to save America at any cost because the election of Hillary Clinton would be a death sentence for the country.

Although I don’t agree with many of Sykes’ principals, I do admire his contention that we should tell the truth, that fear should not be the primary basis for running the country, and that we should promote personal responsibility. Those are principals that conservatives and liberals should be able to join together on. (Sykes wrote a list of “50 Rules that Kids Won’t Learn in School,” and I read the condensed version—“14 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School”—and couldn’t disagree with any of them. If he wanted to go on the road preaching that message, I’d be happy to join him.)

At the end of the book, Sykes points out that there is a sliver in the Venn Diagram of traditional Conservative belief and traditional Liberal belief where the circles overlap. He suggests that those who really want to see the country prosper and treat its citizens well work on expanding that sliver. That’s also an idea I can get behind.

However, just as I was admiring much of what Sykes says in his summation, my attention went back to page 70, where he has a lengthy quote from National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke, writing a defense of the GOP when it had been accused of “caving in to Obama.” Here’s the quote:

"Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have seen a carbon tax or cap-and-trade—or both. Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have got union card check, and possibly an amendment to Taft-Hartley that removed from the states their power to pass “right-to-work” exemptions. Without the GOP standing in the way, we’d now have an “assault weapons” ban, magazine limits, background checks on all private sales, and a de facto national gun registry. And without the GOP standing in the way in the House, we’d have got the very amnesty that the Trump people so fear.”

From my point of view, this translates into the fact that with the Republicans manning the barricades, we’re gong to live in a more polluted, more dangerous country.

The title of the National Review piece was “Against the Dangerous Myth that the GOP Has Given Obama Everything He Wanted.” Given the well-documented obstructionism of the Republican Congress in the last six years of Obama’s administration, I can’t help but wonder if the entire piece wasn’t an exercise in gilding the obvious. However, it did remind me that I should be careful if I want to get shoulder-to-shoulder with Conservatives like Charlie Sykes. They may be—and probably are—thoughtful and dedicated, but the results of their thoughtfulness and the things that they are dedicated to are often, in my opinion, bad for the country and really bad for the people of the country.