On Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan shares how maintaining conservative and moral principles in the face of adversity isn’t always easy. Video and partial transcript below:
When I was a kid, really before I was even a teenager, I remember listening to things that people said to me, and asking myself, “Is that true or is it just easy?” I find myself still asking that question a lot today, I guess because I’m from that generation that listened to John F. Kennedy say we’re going to the moon not because it was easy, but because it was hard. And this is one of the reasons — you know I don’t like a lot of Christian entertainment, for that matter, I don’t like a lot of Christian thought and preaching — [and] my central problem with it is that it makes faith look easy, and happy, and pleasant, instead of difficult. A difficult road to a higher joy.
I think conservatives do the same thing with politics. We tell you capitalism and freedom and morality are going to make everything better, and that is true in the grand sense, but not always true in your immediate life right now. In fact, what we conservatives and we Christians are proposing is hard. It’s a harder life, and it’s only a better life in a high sense, not necessarily in the low sense.
Abortion is a perfect example. You’re a guy, you get a girl pregnant. You don’t want to marry her, she doesn’t want to marry you. You’ve both got your careers and your social life going on; neither of you wants to have a baby. Abortion is easy. Doing what’s right is hard.
The Democrats keep telling us that climate change is our World War II, which at least has the benefit of being hilarious. World War II, everybody’s son, husband, and father — even movie stars, millionaires — left home [and] went to endure the rigors of basic training. Many of them risked being shipped out into mortal danger to push back against a cancerous present evil.
With climate change, a bunch of wealthy Democrats funnel your tax dollars to billionaire political donors in order to subsidize their useless businesses with the word “green” in the title, to fight back against clouds. Risking your personal life for righteousness’ sake is hard. Virtue signaling, and risking nothing while flying on your private jet to green energy conferences, is easy.
Welfare is easy; work and risk are hard. Sex with strangers is great; building a relationship is hard. Drugs are fun; sobriety is hard. If you ever wonder why we as conservatives, and as Christians, feel like we’re swimming upstream in the great debate of our time, it’s because we are. This is a country [that] has generated a lot of wealth and offers a lot of ease and fun and virtue signaling for no apparent cost and no apparent risk. The fact that it will one day, all collapse on our grandchildren is not that big a worry — They’ll think of something and we’ll be dead then.
So [here’s] what we have to understand: The human brain, the human body, are not built for freedom. They don’t like it; they don’t want it. They want to eat and drink and screw around. In times of scarcity, we do what’s right out of necessity when the money comes rolling in. We do what comes naturally. My generation inherited the wealth of centuries. We went nuts. We threw it all away and we sold you a crap philosophy of free stuff and free sex and murdered babies and unsustainable debt, and you bought that crap philosophy because it was easy. Now, conservatives and Christians are asking you to give up that easy life in exchange for hard reality, truth, and noble joy.
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