America's search for its lost conservative values | Editorial

The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board
Updated ·3 min read

Happy New Year. Big changes lie ahead.

The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board, though long a bastion of liberal values, hereby endorses candidates at all levels in 2024 elections, local, state and federal, who hew to conservative principles.

The list of these principles includes truth-telling; personal integrity; transparency; safeguarding from unnecessary government intrusion; responsible stewardship of public money; respect for personal privacy; charity; and the sanctity of the family. That’s not by any measure an exhaustive list but these are the basics ― traditional American values.

As the Editorial Board begins its annual endorsement interviews of public office-seekers this week, these are the North Star values by which we will evaluate them: Conservative principles as valid and necessary today as they were at the nation’s founding. These are the values that we hope our readers also will weigh, as they sort through media reports, mailings, public statements and debate performances through which candidates reveal or disguise themselves.

Fireworks explode around an American flag during the Cactus Hills fireworks show north of Dearing, Kan., Saturday evening, July 3, 1999. The Kimbrel family provides the free show annually to the public on their land. Choreographed to music, it contained 1,200 aerial shells ranging from 3-to-6 inches and a large ground display during the finally. Over 2,000 aerial shells are planned for the millennium show next year. (AP Photo/Inependence Daily Reporter, Fred Hunt) ORG XMIT: KSIND101

It's a challenge for all of us, especially as many officials who so opposed masking during the pandemic are so quick to mask their political intentions from today's voters.

Many who say they would free the public from government intrusion choose instead to make government, rather than parents, the arbiter of which books our children should read. They put guns before our children's lives. They assign to politicians rather than individuals, families and personal medical advisers to which reproductive rights a woman may ascribe.

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They even assign to themselves what truths of history we are allowed to explore. As to the bedrock Declaration of Independence's assertion that "all men are created equal," they append, except when it comes to voting, diversity, equity and inclusion.

Many who profess to personal honesty line up behind a presidential candidate who has demonstrated the opposite, time after time. To a man who employed deceit and duplicity to overturn an election he lost in the Electoral College and by 7 million-plus of popular votes, they turn the other cheek.

Those who want to bolster family values cannot possibly support candidates who would steal elections, favor autocrats, desert allies (except those with oil wealth), or wrench asylum-seekers' children from mothers' arms at the border, without concern that they ever be reunited.

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We endorse fiscal conservatives who not only restrain government spending but who would grow revenues by strengthening IRS enforcement to catch sophisticated cheaters, and by ending tax loopholes and rate reductions for those who need them least. We oppose tax cuts for the wealthy that needlessly inflate the national deficit. We oppose spending to send Florida law enforcers like a private army to the Texas or Arizona border, or to fly unwitting immigrants, many already traumatized by their circumstances, thousands of miles farther north just to score political points.

We stand behind men and women who not only see through these cynical perversions of decency but who go the necessary steps farther to take on party-think and fight to conserve true American values.

This new year offers a crucial time for America to find its way back, not to an imagined era of greatness but to what is truly exceptional: our pursuit of what is righteous, of social justice for all of us, and of a future of unrestrained learning and accomplishment.

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We're 22 million-strong in Florida, with significant sway over a nation of 332 million that in many ways sets the pace for the rest of the world. May 2024 be the year we leave the false idols of a distorted conservative philosophy behind and move forward for the good of all.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: America, unite, behind truth-telling and social justice | Editorial