Change. It's one of the things that make America an exceptional country. It's the secret sauce that has made the American experiment in self-governance a success for 248 years.
"America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers." says James Earl Jones in the film, "Field of Dreams." "It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again." Change has always been the byword of Americans, and the day we stop trying to reinvent ourselves is the day we stop being Americans.
And now, in the 21st century, with dark clouds hovering overhead at home and abroad, we're trying to reinvent ourselves once again. The vessel that Republicans have chosen to carry the message of change is not a perfect man. But he's not The Beast either.
Ronald Reagan said in 1980 that one of the things that surprised him most about the campaign was how the further east he went, the longer his horns and tail grew. For Donald Trump, the Satan comparison is complimentary compared to what some Democrats have said about him.
The task ahead for Trump is monumental. Can he wrestle and subdue a bureaucracy already primed to block his every move? Can he convince congressional Democrats that they should serve the national interest before their partisan whims? It's ironic that the Democratic Party has now become the party of the status quo after 50 years of the New Left portraying itself as the revolutionary descendants of the Founders.
The Democrats are already planning impeachment strategies. All they need is a trumped-up "crime," the appearance of a crime, or the hint of a crime to proceed. It's something that Republicans are going to have to deal with — hopefully from the vantage point of the majority in both houses of Congress.
Republicans have just concluded one of the most successful conventions in modern political history. As a TV show, it was nearly flawless. "Republicans have learned from experience that nothing says success like a joyless mood around the MSNBC anchor desk," writes the Wall Street Journal's James Freeman. Even Democrats had a hard time trying to dismiss the unity, the sense of purpose, and the rock-ribbed determination to bring about change in America.
Much commentary has been devoted to the notion that this is a new Republican Party. The casual, often tattooed Trump crowd, wary of entanglements abroad and eager for a manufacturing renaissance at home, certainly represents a break with the party’s Bush era. Sadly, the Bush terms were haunted by costly and inconclusive wars abroad and heavy regulatory expansion at home.
It’s less clear that Team Trump represents such a dramatic break with Ronald Reagan, who famously won the Cold War against the Soviet Union without firing a shot and saw the Washington bureaucracy as another great threat to the liberty of our citizens.
Yes, the Reagan Revolution is dead. What this GOP is building from the wreckage will be imbued by a populist energy that America hasn't seen since the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Trump's running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, has said that the GOP is in a “late Republican period,” and the party needs to “get pretty wild, and pretty far out there.” I'm not sure that's the answer to the nation's problems.
The last party to "get pretty wild, and pretty far out there" was the Democrats in 1860. Radicalism is never the answer. As dire as one might think the situation is (and, all things considered, it isn't nearly as bad as both sides seem to think it is), extremism only makes everything worse. At least half the country will not accept any radical change. Just look at the last four years and tell me how well the radical changes that Joe Biden proposed went over.
I loved that Kid Rock performed in the build-up to Trump's acceptance speech. The energy he brought to the venue was phenomenal. And the look on the faces of button-down Republican men in suits and ties and matronly grandmas, headbanging and pumping their fists along with everyone else, demonstrated that the winds of change are blowing hard across America.
No, this ain't your granddaddy's Republican Party.
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