Op-ed: How I became a conservative

By Madeline Bodin
©2026 Telegraph Publishing LLC

I was standing in the cold and the rain on the lawn of the Vermont State House. I was clutching a sign that said, “Protect the US Constitution” in red, white and blue letters. I had colored in some of the letters to look like a flag.

As I listened to speakers including former Vermont governor and U.S. ambassador Madeleine Kunin and Sen.Peter Welch speak about the importance of good relations with Canada, Medicare and Medicaid, science, the rights of women and more, I thought how hard it had been to pick just one thing to write on my sign. So much was at stake.

It was April 2025, and I had already watched the rule of law in the United States erode. Criminals were being released from prison because they had powerful friends. A woman was in jail for what she had written in a student newspaper. People were being snatched off the streets by masked men. The idea of “due process” seemed to be history.

I had seen two institutions – NATO and the United Nations — that have more or less kept us from a third world war since the end of the Second World War, get stomped on. Nations that were long-time U.S. allies were being punished. Long-time foes were catered to.

As I listened to the speakers and stood in the cold rain, I thought about all I was there to defend: due process – also known as a fair trial, science, reason, faithful allies, peace, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, fair labor practices, the Bill of Rights. An All-American line-up, I thought. Why not baseball and apple pie, too?

Then I wondered: When did my political stance become the same as Dwight David Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign platform? And yet, it had.

Could anyone be more conservative than the commander of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, who then served his country again as a two-term Republican president, terms spanning that most-conservative of decades, the 1950s?

Eisenhower was president when Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver were popular television shows. He was president when Elvis Presley’s dance moves were considered scandalous. Eisenhower famously compared modern art paintings to something run over by a paint-splattered car. He was conservative both politically and culturally.

But this conservative American military hero believed in the U.S. Constitution, NATO, and New Deal benefits such as Social Security. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law. He loved baseball, even though he played football at West Point. His stance on apple pie, however, is unknown. (Cookin’ with Congress on Instagram has a story about Eisenhower and the apple-pie-adjacent apple brown Betty.)

Might I have sported an “I like Ike” button in 1952 or 1956, if I had been alive then? It seems unlikely, given my current liberal political leanings. But if the other choice was what we have now, I think I certainly would have liked Ike.

Our current president has declared “antifa,” or anti-fascists, as domestic terrorists. As the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during WWII, Eisenhower was the ultimate antifascist, the OG antifa.

Extreme times can cause extreme changes in where people fall on the political spectrum. I wasn’t alone as a sign-carrying protester in 2025 who was more conservative, in the standard definition of the word, than the far-right sitting U.S. president.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech that pushed against his own and the then-new Republican Party’s reputation as radicals:

“[Y]ou say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;’ while you with one accord … spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. … Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.”

I learned about Lincoln’s speech, and gathered that quote, from historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter, which gives historical context for current events. “… That old policy …” was the idea from the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

To Lincoln, that meant all men, no matter the color of their skin. For some Republicans of the time, it meant women, too.  I know that from my research into Achsa Sprague of Plymouth Notch,  a Vermont abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. In that context, Lincoln’s words resonate through the decades. They couldn’t be more relevant to our current times if he had written them yesterday.

Maybe supporting the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution has always been radical. Maybe opposing tyranny has always been radical. Maybe Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower are the kind of democracy-supporting radicals we need today. You know, the conservative kind.

Madeleine Bodin writes from Andover.