Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

I was pleased to read that Donald Trump did not use the Republican National Committee talking points in his speech on immigration reform (“Discord Deepens Between Trump and Committee,” front page, Sept. 3).

Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination in large part because he is not a puppet of the establishment. He was nominated by a coalition of conservative Republicans, Reagan Democrats and other law-and-order American voters who believe that it is time for serious action on immigration, and that it must begin with securing our borders.

So while Donald Trump’s immigration speech may have torn “a painful new wound in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Republican National Committee,” it was cheered by what I would submit is truly “his most important remaining political alliance”—the voters.

Mr. Trump and his supporters understand that the president should serve the American people, not the Republican National Committee.

BRIAN PANNEBECKER

Shelby Township, Mich.

I don't like anonymous writing and generally don't support it, but I'll make an exception for this essay. Rush Limbaugh quoted from it extensively yesterday. I don't think there's a single motive that unites the Never Trumpers. Some of them, I am sure, have a principled (and therefore respectable) opposition to Donald Trump, but others, I am equally sure, oppose him because it's good for their business or because they're engaged in moral preening or virtue signaling. These are not respectable motives.

Philosophers distinguish between ideal theory and nonideal theory. In ideal theory, you have the luxury of describing (and defending) what you take to be utopia. In nonideal theory, you take the world as it is (for better or worse) and try to make it better, even if only incrementally. Many of the Never Trumpers aren't men or women of action; they're eggheads, policy wonks, or talking heads. They have no idea how to make real-world changes and they look down on those who dirty their hands by engaging in political action. My suggestion is that conservatives stop reading the likes of Jonah Goldberg, George Will, William Kristol, and Stephen Hayes. They've opted out of practical politics. Fine. Those of us who care about our country and understand the need to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House opt out of them.

Yesterday afternoon, at a Shell station in Fort Worth, Texas, I paid $2.099 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. With my Kroger card, it came to $1.999. What're y'all payin' in your neck o' the woods?

Band of Gypsys (1970). Recorded live at Fillmore East in New York City on New Year's Eve 1969. The band consists of Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, and Billy Cox.

Here is Ann Coulter's latest column.

You will be traveling to distant lands for business purposes.

Conservatism does not take any single political ideal, value or alleged 'natural right' to be supreme and to override all the others, although it accords a certain primacy to security, whose preservation it regards as the main task of government.

It does not concern itself with liberty in general or liberty in the abstract. But it does uphold traditional, customary, established liberties. It is opposed to the according of absolute power to government and therefore endorses the preservation of a large area for the private activities of individuals and of the non-governmental associations or institutions in which they are involved. It is unimpressed with the credentials as lovers of liberty of those professed liberals who wish to prevent buying a drink from anyone prepared to sell you one, smoking in public places or the reading by children of Little Black Sambo.

Conservatism does not identify equality with justice and, in view of the massive and massively varied differences between people, does not admit any initial presumption in favour of equality of condition. Justice, for the conservative, is, in the first instance, procedural, the impartial application of the law. Substantively, justice is a matter of guaranteeing the enjoyment of customary and established rights. It may often be reasonable and proper to extend the enjoyment of certain rights from some people to others, but that is not to say that such extensions are requirements of justice.

Democracy, as embodying a particular form of equality, is thus not seen as a good in itself. But representative parliamentary institutions, continuously developed in parallel with the political maturity of the population, is, in advanced Western societies, an historically established mode of proceeding and, therefore, worthy of preservation. That does not make it a universal political panacea, as the melancholy history of almost universal lip-service to it makes clear.

(Anthony Quinton, "Conservatism," chap. 9 in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993], 244-68, at 260)

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973). Tonight, in Dallas, all hell breaks loose. I will be in the midst of it.

Here.