Jonah, Mark, I read the Gerson piece with the same mixture of gloom and exasperation as you did, but not only for its combination of straw men argumentation and pulpit chit-chat. If (as I think it is) the GOP is moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, in the direction of becoming a European-style Christian Democratic party (to an extent, the rise, however temporary, of Mike Huckabee is saying the same thing), articles such as Gerson’s are an interesting window onto the future. Give it a few more years and there is at least a reasonable chance that the GOP will be more Gerson than Reagan. That’s no cause for celebration.