Jay Nordlinger was asked the question posed in the headline, and …

I suppose I could get away with being, or pretending to be, an arbiter or even a commissar of conservatism, owing to my position: senior editor of National Review. In some quarters, NR is thought of as the flagship journal of American conservatism. But I eschew arbitration (most of the time).

Consider the issue of immigration for a moment. The editors of the Wall Street Journal are pretty loose about immigration. Indeed, in 1984 — the high noon of Reaganism — they proposed a five-word constitutional amendment: “There shall be open borders.” The editors of National Review, by contrast, are restrictionist (though not restrictionist enough for some on the right).

Which is conservative? The Wall Street Journal editorial page or NR?

NR is a drug-legalizing magazine. NR is the “flagship conservative journal.” Does that mean that Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan, et al. are not conservative, because they disagree with NR about drugs? Virtually all conservatives are anti-legalization, right?

You see what I mean. You see the problem.

In the past, there were actually moderate and liberal Republicans. One such — probably a moderate — was Senator Richard Schweiker, whom Reagan designated as his running mate in 1976. (It was a gimmick before the convention, a last-minute gambit.) When Reagan became president in 1981, he appointed Schweiker his secretary of health and human services.

Margaret Heckler was a moderate Republican from Massachusetts. Or was she a liberal? Anyway, she, too, served as Reagan’s HHS secretary, and later ambassador to Ireland.

There were House members like Silvio Conte and Jim Leach. There were senators like the Oregonians, Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood. There were many stripes of Republican, in every region of the country.

Today, there are virtually no moderate or liberal Republicans. Yet the Right has never been more interested in hunting heretics. John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Jeb Bush — men such as they have to stand in for moderates and liberals, since there are no real ones anymore in the party. They have to be targets of attack.

Paul Ryan used to be a prince of conservatism, a prince of the Right, until he veered an inch or two away from whatever the Right’s orthodoxy was that day. Then he was “Paul Ryano.” (We used to apply “RINO” — Republican in Name Only — to pols such as the Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter. Now it is applied to Ryan and anyone else who incurs the displeasure of the commissars, however temporarily.)

Not a day goes by when I myself am not accused by someone on the right — through social media — of being a moderate or a liberal or a traitor to conservatism. The Left attacks me for being Attila the Hun. Some on the right attack me for not being Attila the Hun. (In truth, I am Attila, trust me.)

What I am, really, is a Reaganite. I once said, the greatest thing Ronald Reagan ever did for me was give me something to call myself. In fact, let me quote from an essay I wrote at the time of Reagan’s passing, “A Name of My Own”:

Of all the things Ronald Reagan did for me, maybe the best was that he gave me something to call myself. I am a Reaganite. It can be difficult to answer when someone says, “What are you, politically?” The word “conservative” is subject to a thousand interpretations. You don’t want to launch into a lecture about the Scottish Enlightenment, the strange journey of the word “liberal,” the advent of Frank Meyer, etc. So, instead you can say — if it’s true — “I’m a Reaganite.”

Of course, the more distant we get from Reagan, the less comprehensible the term “Reaganite” will be. In fact, maybe it’s too obscure for some now. But I’m loath to cast about for a different term at this date!

A man in Albuquerque said, “Why do we have to call ourselves conservatives? We’re liberals, right?” I said that to Bill Kristol, a long time ago. Hang on, let me dig out another essay and quote from it — “A World of Labels” (2012):

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, I grumbled to Bill Kristol about being stuck with “conservative.” He said, in essence, “Get over it. You have to accept labels as they are used and understood in your own time and place.” In 1960, Hayek wrote an essay called “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” Well, tough luck, Friedrich: Today you would for sure be a conservative or right-winger, whether you liked it or not. The world doesn’t give you a choice.

In Australia, the conservatives, or the Reaganites, or the Thatcherites, are known as the Liberals. They belong to the Liberal party. But that usage died in America probably in the 1930s.

Ponder this for a second: People on the left want Social Security to be frozen in aspic, basically. People on the right want it to be reformed, so it will be viable for future generations. The former are known as “progressives” — the latter as “conservatives.”

I noticed something in 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president. (I’ll pause to let the Right boo and hiss.) (I won’t pause for the Left, because they’re not reading.) W. was running in favor of reforming everything: Social Security, Medicare, education, the military, you name it. His Democratic opponent, Al Gore, was running essentially to preserve the status quo. Bush, of course, was known as the conservative.

You know who’s a conservative? David Cameron, the prime minister of Britain. Edmund Burke, patron saint of conservatism, would adore him. Cameron is steady, pragmatic, incremental, prudent, and all the rest of it. We Reaganites, and Thatcherites, are impatient for more, and faster. We say that Cameron is not conservative enough. Actually, he’s very conservative. It’s we who are not.

Many years ago, when the Web really got going, we had debates over who was a journalist. Bob Novak said, “If you call yourself one, you are one.” That settled the question for me. Novak had standing to say what he did, because he had been prominent in journalism — print and television — for decades.

If you call yourself a conservative, are you one? There may be something to that. I’m for a biggish tent, when it comes to conservatism — and Republicanism — but not for too big a tent. Otherwise, terms, philosophies, and parties have no meaning.

At last I’m coming to the point of this article — which is to give you my sense of what conservatism is, in our time and place. In the America of today. I’ll rattle off what I rattled off in Albuquerque. I believe that to be a conservative is to be for limited government. Personal freedom. The rule of law. The Constitution, and adherence to it. Federalism. Equality under the law. Equality of opportunity. Relatively light taxation. Relatively light regulation. Free enterprise. Property rights. Free trade. Civil society. The right to work. A strong defense. National security. National sovereignty. Human rights. A sound, non-flaky educational curriculum. School choice. A sensible stewardship over the land, as opposed to extreme environmentalism. Pluralism. Colorblindness. Toleration. E pluribus unum. Patriotism. Our Judeo-Christian heritage. Western civilization.

I want to throw in, too, the right to life. (I have said, over the years, “Show me where a man stands on abortion and Israel, and you have shown me all I need to know.”)

Now, it could be that I have simply declared what I believe in and called it “conservatism.” And I have no doubt that I’ve forgotten a few important things, as my critics on the right will no doubt tell me. (“Proof that Nordlinger is a Communist is that …”)

I also bear in mind something that Reagan often said: “If we agree 75 percent of the time, you’re my 75 percent friend, not my 25 percent enemy.”

Last summer, Mona Charen and I talked to Roger Scruton in a podcast. Scruton is the great British philosopher and great conservative. I told him about our intra-Right wars here in America. And I said that, if I allowed anyone to be a commissar, it would be he. He said,

“I would be very lax in my duties. My view is that the most important thing for conservatives is to be in alliance with each other, not to have witch hunts over small points of doctrine, not to identify heresies and persecute them and so on.

“I think that, in the end, there is something that unites all conservatives, which is that they are pursuing something they love. My view is that the Left is united by hatred, but we are united by love: love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on. And what makes us conservatives is the desire to protect those things, and we’re up against people who want to destroy them, and it’s very simple.”

Yes.

Matthew Continetti assumes, probably correctly, that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee next year, and …

To hearsome tell it, Clinton’s election as president is a safe bet. I won’t lie: I think these commentators make a strong case, but not an entirely convincing one. There are too many factors at work. Inside the Democratic Party, the Clinton Restoration is almost complete. The country at large, however, despite the Democratic advantages of demographics, population distribution, and near cultural hegemony, remains wary. Clinton is a vulnerable nominee. She can be beaten.

How? Let’s stipulate that campaign effects are overstated. The economy and the popularity of the incumbent, in my view, are far more important. But candidates also matter. Whether she is liked or disliked, whether she is trusted or distrusted, whether she is someone with whom voters identify or someone from whom they recoil, whether she spends her days proclaiming her message or in damage control—all of these factors shape voter impressions, voter enthusiasm.

Which is where Clinton falls short. Sure, she’s preferable to Bernie Sanders. Who isn’t? Sanders appeals to the left of the left. He’s a fringe figure. Of course Hillary beats him. This is news?

Sure, Hillary did okay before the House Benghazi Committee. Trust me: Looking more sympathetic than members of Congress isn’t an achievement. It’s a freebie. All you have to do is show up and not take the Fifth. The media were always going to say Clinton left the hearing untouched. They’ve never thought Benghazi was a real story.

But look at what’s happened since Clinton’s “great 10 days.” The more one examines the statements she made before Congress, the more they are revealed to be not entirely true. The polling says the electorate has the same impression of her that it’s had for some time now: She can’t be trusted. Twenty-seven percent in the Journal poll says she is honest. And “Clinton has the lowest rating for honesty” in the Quinnipiac poll, “as American voters say 60-36 percent she is not honest and trustworthy.”

You’ll hear pundits say trustworthiness doesn’t matter because the public didn’t trust Bill Clinton in 1996 but reelected him anyway. Ignore them. In 1996 Clinton was the incumbent, the economy was growing, and he was in a three-way race with two unsympathetic opponents. It’s not just that the public distrusts Hillary Clinton. It’s that its distrust is related to its unflattering view of her as unlikable and out of touch.

Clinton’s unfavorable rating according to the Huffington Post’s Pollster Trend: 49 percent. In the Quinnipiac poll it’s 52 percent. And she’s underwater in the “cares about my needs” question: 53 percent in the Q-poll says she does not.

That’s a terrible result for a Democrat. It was Clinton’s own pollster, Joel Benenson, who wrote in 2012 that Republicans lost because “voters simply didn’t believe that Mr. Romney was on their side.” Will they believe that of Hillary next November?

The job of the Republican nominee is to make sure they do not. You do it by reminding the public, day after day, that Clinton can’t be trusted. Trade, same-sex marriage, crime, foreign policy—she’ll betray you whenever it suits her political needs. She lied about the Benghazi video; she lied about her email; she lied about Sidney Blumenthal. That’s what she does. She lies. The Republican nominee will have to say this repeatedly, just as Donald Trump brands his opposition as low energy. It will take discipline. But it will also reinforce voters’ suspicions—and damage Clinton.

Republicans won’t need to paint her as unlikable. She’ll take care of that herself. Eventually she’ll commit a gaffe that she’ll spend three days apologizing for. It’s in her nature. Hillary Clinton is nowhere near her husband in terms of political talent. She’s isolated, living in a bubble for decades. Every so often she lets the “real” Hillary out and ends up regretting it. The authentic Clinton isn’t the woman who appeared at the debate or before Congress. It’s the Clinton who, when asked if she had wiped clean her private server, sneered, “With a cloth or something?”

The risk for the GOP is to go overboard, to so eagerly define Clinton as unlikable that she has the opportunity to play the victim. She did it with Rick Lazio in 2000, and with Barack Obama in 2008. Better to focus on how she can’t be trusted, and let her unpleasantness speak for itself. It won’t remain hidden for long.

The Democrats say they have the policy advantage. They point to areas where polling suggests they are in the mainstream and the Republicans are not. They oversell their case. Republicans may not have much in the way of a middle-class economic agenda. But that is not to say the Democrats are totally in sync with the American public.

On the contrary: Clinton is moving left on gun control despite public opposition. Her interest in Australia’s confiscation policy was so extreme her campaign walked it back. The election results in Virginia, where Michael Bloomberg spent $2 million in a failed attempt to win the state senate for Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe, show just how unpopular limitations on the Second Amendment are.

Then there’s crime. Criminal justice reform is the policy fad of the day. Clinton has eagerly embraced it. Why Democrats would want crime to return as an issue is beyond me, but I’m no Democrat.

President Obama’s Justice Department released 6,000 prisoners last month, “the largest one-time release of federal prisoners.” Likely Obama will release additional nonviolent offenders before he leaves office. If but one of these former inmates commits a violent crime, Hillary Clinton will own it. And any Republican who ignores the issue will deserve to lose.

Unfair? Far more fair, I’d say, than suggesting Mitt Romney was responsible for the death of a woman from cancer, as saying he paid no income taxes for 10 years.

Clinton carries a burden. She’s running for her party’s third term in the White House. Her problem is not that the laws of history will prevent her from winning. It’s that she will have to answer for her predecessor.

The two dubious achievements of Barack Obama’s presidency—Obamacare and the Iran deal—are both unpopular and uncertain to survive in their current forms. Clinton has to defend them. She’ll also have to defend moving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the Supermax, which the president seems intent on doing. Criminals in the streets and KSM in Colorado—ladies and gentlemen, here is your Obama legacy.

The Obama campaign spent a fortune in the spring and summer of 2012 defining Mitt Romney as an out of touch businessman who didn’t care about workers. To beat Hillary Clinton, Republicans will spend a similar amount defining her as untrustworthy, unlikable, and aloof from the day-to-day life of people without a family foundation.

They will unapologetically portray Clinton as someone who would release convicted felons into your neighborhood even as she takes away your Second Amendment right to self-defense. They will remind the public, relentlessly, of the woeful consequences of Obamacare and the Iran deal. And yes, finally, they will do all this while projecting optimism and empathy.

A tall order, I know. But look: A race to the bottom is a race we can win.