If you’re part of the solution to these Trump years, you are thinking along the lines of what Peggy Noonan wrote in her most recent column, predicting — and even hoping for — the blue wave that happened yesterday:
The Republican Party has to get healthy again. Healthy doesn’t mean “the establishment returns.” It will never return. The GOP establishment of 1990-2016 ran things into the ground, is discredited and over. Also they’re 80. They destroyed the party by detaching from the legitimate needs and pleas of its base and by secretly regarding that base as stupid nobodies.
The new Republican Party, the one that will have a chance at being born, will keep the good of MAGA (man is not only an economic animal but has a soul; the base isn’t full of fools who know nothing of policy) and the good of the old establishment (professionalism, integrity, an understanding of the economic facts that fueled America’s 20th-century greatness). Party intellectuals are at least trying to return meaning to Pat Moynihan’s wry 46-year-old observation: “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas. . . .”
That party can get a chance to begin forming in the trauma of major loss.
The trauma has been years in the making — even before Trump came on the scene (making it possible for him to happen).
Character matters. Principle matters. Coherence matters.
Don’t count on Democrats overplaying their hand. They probably will. Be something better.
I know people hoping for a third party. I think that would only be a spoiler, as much as a restart would be grander.
We need good people to listen for the call to run as a service to the country and her people, not to their narcissism; people who truly love their country as a gift that they are duty-bound to be good stewards of. I’m 200 years younger than the United States (my bicentennial birth will be of no novelty ever again soon), and we’ve had that in my lifetime. We can again.