During his recent speaking appearance at Grove City College, syndicated conservative political columnist Jonah Goldberg began by stating he wasn’t expecting to talk about Donald Trump. That is, until he arrived and realized his lecture was promoted with the title “Conservatism in the Age of Trump.”

He didn’t shy away from the topic, but he did limit his comments about the former president.

“I’m not a big fan of Trump, Trump’s not a big fan of mine,” he said.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who regularly reads Goldberg’s political columns on Mondays in this newspaper. Goldberg hasn’t been known to hide the fact that, while his beliefs are very conservative, he’s far from a Trump supporter.

True, that concept could be hard for some Americans, who embrace the former president, to grasp.

Goldberg was appearing just across the state line Tuesday evening as part of Grove City College’s speaker series, “The Conservative Mind.” It’s rare that I get an opportunity to hear one of our political columnists — that is, other than staff writer David Skolnick — share views in person. So, I opted to skip the Guardians’ final game of the American League Division Series (good decision, it turned out) and instead made the 55-minute trip.

Goldberg demonstrated his deep knowledge of conservatism, delving into intellectual definitions of types of conservatism and describing its history. He went well beyond what many Americans today view as conservatism, often just thought to be the opposite of liberalism.

I won’t dive deeply into his discussion for fear of either boring you to tears or, worse, demonstrating exactly how much of Goldberg’s intellect was way, way over my head.

What wasn’t over my head, though, was his patriotism and obvious impenetrable belief in conservatism and, with that, his love of this country.

The job of American conservatives, according to Goldberg, is to defend the basic vision and structure that the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us and to conserve American values.

“Conservatism is gratitude,” Goldberg said simply. And then he explained.

Both gratitude and patriotism come from a presumption that there is something about our nation that we think is valuable and important and that we want to pass on.

For that, he said, we are grateful, or at least we should be.

Sadly, that’s a lesson we don’t teach anymore. Instead, he noted, we teach entitlement and resentment, and we teach that we have a grievance or a reason to be ticked off.

Those types of sinister forces have come to manipulate our lives, and the beliefs that there is always someone out there trying to get you.

This is the strategy that we teach as a culture, Goldberg said, when instead, we should be teaching people gratitude.

Even with all of our nation’s flaws, “this is still the best country that has ever existed in human history,” Goldberg said. And we should have a level of gratitude for it.

He denounced beliefs by liberals who he said have described our constitution as “morally neutral,” and called such a presumption “idiotic.”

Rather, Goldberg said he sees our constitution as the end result of thousands of years of warfare where people put issues of conscience to the sword, and then, through vast trial and error, we came up with a “system that lets people live in freedom and pursue happiness as they see it.”

We all should be dogmatic about our commitment to defending the incredible rights that we have — a right to confront your accuser, to have a fair trial, to worship God as you see fit.

Goldberg called our rights “hugely important moral victories in human history,” and we should not treat them as open questions, as if there is a better way.

“There isn’t a better way,” he said.

Our forefathers believed and established that our rights come from God, not government; that we are citizens, not subjects; that the fruits of our labors belong to us. This cannot be improved upon.

“We should be proud of it,” he said. “We should be grateful for it, and we should defend it dogmatically.”

blinert@tribtoday.com