Nats OF Bryce Harper hasn’t merely won over much of the baseball world with his hustle, willingness to get plunked without tantrum or ability to deflect stupid questions. He’s also been embraced by Mark Judge, author of “A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll”, who tells the Daily Caller‘s unlucky readership that Harper, “is a conservative hero” (“watching Bryce Harper play is like listening to an economic speech by Paul Ryan: It’s long on reality and short on excuses”). Some CSTB readers on the West Coast haven’t had breakfast yet, so I’ll spare you the part where he compares Jason Heyward loafing after a ball to teacher’s unions.

Harper has slapped baseball awake, and every time he steps up to the plate, years of crusty baseball routine no longer apply. He swings the bat with a blinding snap of force, and in the outfield dives for balls that bored veterans would let go. When he hits a double he usually tries to stretch it into a triple. Manager Davey Johnson tries to bench him for being hurt, and Harper confronts him and says, like a person with enough dignity to refuse welfare: Let me work. Then he wins the game with a crucial hit.

Conservatives, and even a few young liberals, accept that life isn’t fair, but that winners tend to be people who shake things up and pivot, even while never forgetting sound fundamental principles. This a good definition not only of Bryce Harper, who electrifies even while never botching the basics, but Mitt Romney, who understands the creative destruction of modern capitalism even as he has mastered the fundamentals of economics. Liberals will falsely claim that Romney wants to return to the 1950s, while never admitting that they are stuck in the much more dysfunctional 1960s.

If America is to be solvent and healthy, we cannot keep doing what we have been doing since the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. We have to do things differently, just as Bryce Harper is not playing baseball the old way. Harper is not going to sit back and accept what the status quo tells him to accept (where does he get off stealing home?). And conservatives are not going to expect to retire at age 65 or to send their kids to the college of their choice if it costs $50,000 a year. We are going to adapt. (In a strange way, conservatives are not only like Bryce Harper, but have become like the do-it-yourself punk rockers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Don’t have a record label? Start your own. Are the old rock groups bloated and sloppy? Boot them off the stage.) Meanwhile, liberals occupy everything so that they can demand — what was it again? Oh yeah, peace. And taxes.