Make Hay While the Sun Shines

Nothing is guaranteed, so get in the game while you can.

Recently I heard a libertarian claim that there was no real difference between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and that the conservative movement might have been better served by a Harris victory in 2024.

I was flabbergasted. No matter what criticisms one might have of President Trump—and there are many valid criticisms—it’s unreasonable to say that life under a Harris administration would be better by any metric. Trump closed the southern border, gutted USAID, wound down the federal Department of Education, cut taxes across the board, pardoned the January 6th political prisoners, stopped the Justice Department’s crackdown on free speech and persecution of pro-life activists, and has reduced the federal government to its smallest size since the 1960s.

Most importantly, the second Trump term has given Christian conservatives room to maneuver. Rather than spending every day fighting a defensive retreat against a government that’s been weaponized against us, we have space to gain ground at the state and local level. The Trump administration has been an ally with regard to reforming Medicaid and public education, as well as protecting girls and women’s spaces from the transgender lobby.

The only area in which a Harris presidency would be advantageous to conservatives is with regard to fundraising, which is the cynical answer to the statement that began my thought process here. The Obama years saw great growth in the conservative movement, as numerous organizations coalesced and gained money and influence due to the backlash against his progressive policies. Yet all the fundraising and organization can’t make up for the fact that the Obama era was a disaster for America. Obamacare still plagues us to this day, while gay marriage, DACA, and even Cash for Clunkers continue to negatively impact society.

You win by winning, not by losing. You’d think this would be common sense, but apparently not.

On the one hand, there is a sense among many conservatives that the war is lost and we must regroup by purging all remnants of leftism and statism from our movement, at which point we can make a counterattack. This view, often called accelerationism, presumes that if things get bad enough, then the vast majority of people will wake up and join our crusade.

Tell that to the Russians in 1917, the Germans in 1933, or the Chinese in 1949. Hoping that your enemies win so that the people will finally “wake up” is a fatalistic fallacy that almost always leads to long term disaster.

On the other hand, some people and organizations are wedded to the short term view that they are our nation’s only salvation, believing that anything that helps their fundraising must be a good thing. They would see our country burn to the ground so long as they can rule over the ashes. This might be even worse. I say you should ignore these sorts of cynics in the same manner as the accelerationist doomers.

The truth is that God gave each one of us a limited time on this earth to accomplish whatever we can in our own spheres of influence. Our job is not to stand by and let things get worse and worse, hoping for a miraculous uprising or even the rapture.

One of the last pictures posted on social media by Nampa mayor Rick Hogaboam before his untimely passing was a display on his desk with city memorabilia, a picture of his family, and a timer counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left in his tenure.

“Make every day count,” it said. Hogaboam surely wanted to remind himself that every moment he was in office was a chance to do some good for his community. His timer was, sadly, much shorter than he imagined.

The Gospel of John records our Lord Jesus Christ saying, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.” Whatever time we’ve been given—whether it’s five more days or fifty more years—is time to do good for our community and our posterity. We don’t know what challenges the future holds, so we must do what we can today.

Farmers know they must make hay while the sun shines, because rain will surely come again. We don’t know what the future holds, and gambling everything on a losing bet is a fool’s errand. J.R.R. Tolkien understood the assignment:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Our assignment is to do the best we can to bequeath a better world to our children than the one we received. Little by little, day by day, we reclaim the land for good. We won’t be the generation that lost our civilization forever. Instead, at the end of all things, I hope we can look back on our time as Ronald Reagan did when he left office in 1989:

My friends: We did it. We weren’t just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.

Feature image by Microsoft Copilot.