GOP Can Whip Nation Together, Needs Right Napoleon?

Gerard Baker says “The GOP Has a Chance at More Than Election Victory” if only it will NOT “look back to Trump or Reagan” while Biden butchers his job, but seizes the moment to break the nation’s political stalemate with bold new ideas ala a Napoleon. Yet, wasn’t it Gen. Bonaparte who said, “Never interrupt an enemy” when they are making an ass of themselves?

Argued the WSJ columnist: “It’s easy to understand Republican complacency. Why not sit back & enjoy the spectacle of Democratic ineptitude & ideological overreach and wait to receive its fruits.” After all, isn’t that the strategy Biden used against President Trump who was struggling with a hopelessly inevitable pandemic while Biden was sitting in his bunker? “Yet, tempting as it is,” Mr. Gerard writes, “merely waiting out Democratic failure and the swing of the pendulum would represent a historic missed chance for Republicans.”

That is, out of the current turmoil “they may have an opportunity not only to reverse 30 years of mostly indifferent political outcomes for them but perhaps even to begin bridging the great divide in American politics & build a governing coalition the country hasn’t seen in a generation. Will they seize it?” Mr. Gerard wants to see “a coalition of economic populism & cultural conservatism that addresses the dystopia in modern American life; elevates the family & traditional values; resists the advance of cultural nihilism & rejects the pure neoliberal market economics that has … exacerbated the crisis.” In other words, the GOP needs an independent platform based on “common sense.” But, if Mr. Trump can’t or won’t grow into the statesman many hope he’ll still become, who is the Napoleonic horse with enough brains to make Gerard’s carpe diem moment come true?

Davd Soul