Columnist.
For millennia, the ability to interpret hieroglyphics had been lost to the ages. So when Jean-Francois Champollion decoded the Rosetta Stone it was a monumental breakthrough. Since then, a "Rosetta Stone" has come to refer to anything that offers a roadmap for understanding the undecipherable. Today's political landscape is rife with puzzles and paradoxes in desperate need of Rosetta Stones. The one that I want to discuss is this: Why are we so profoundly incapable of having a reasonable dialogue about guns? National Review writer David French describes the "conversation" as hopelessly polarized. It's as if, he laments, we are coming from entirely different worlds when processing events like the massacre that took place in Orlando.
The editors and writers of National Review recently did something extraordinary. They came out *en masse* against a Republican candidate during the primary. Their "Against Trump" symposium and accompanying "Editors introduction" offer up a barrage of attacks on Donald Trump's surprising presidential candidacy. For the symposium, National Review assembled an enormously diverse group of conservative thinkers, from "movement conservatives" to more "establishment" types, to "conservatarians." Clearly, this is no monolithic bloc. Yet there they are — an eclectic bunch of odd bedfellows making the same core argument: Donald Trump is not a conservative based on any meaningful definition of the term.
