Utah

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Salt Lake City, Utah Here I sit in a Salt Lake City coffeehouse, wishing I’d donned the uniform (white shirt, black tie, nameplate) of a Mormon missionary. Now that would throw the ambient hipsters for a loop. Last time I buzzed through the Beehive State was the dawn of 1984, when I fled the Imperial City on the Potomac after 30 months legislatively assisting Sen. Pat Moynihan. I went to Washington a left-of-center populist and returned a novice in what Henry Adams called the Conservative Christian Anarchist party, of which he mistakenly thought himself the only member.