1776: Would You like to Reconsider by Andrew Roberts in The WSJ

First, the Republicans need party leaders and candidates who confront people like Mr. Trump seriously from the start and do not coddle him in the vain hope that if you’re nice you inherit his supporters when he collapses. Second, it is ludicrous to have debates controlled by TV channels that want the GOP to split and the Democrats to win, and which frame their questions accordingly.

If we in Britain got over losing America and went on to become the largest empire in history, you can get over four years of Mrs. Clinton. The word “again” in “Make America great again” is a terrible libel on your country, which is still great on any objective criterion, albeit clearly going in the wrong direction. Self-pity is not a part of the American national character—however emotionally and rhetorically alluring it might be during election time—and you must not permit Mr. Trump’s sloganizing to allow it to find a place there.

Fourth, the percentages of support that guarantee a candidate a place in the debate should be drastically higher so that you don’t have a dozen or more people taking part and thus sometimes given no more than 30 seconds in which to try to sum up complex issues, leading to a moronically low standard of debate. If Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were forced to debate each other in 30-second bursts, answering politically loaded questions from CNN and ABC and CBS intended to embarrass them, you probably wouldn’t have got a much better outcome.

The Republican Party should not have allowed itself to be hijacked by a man with so minute a record of contribution to the nation, and it needs to alter its rules to prevent a similar demagogue with deep pockets and no conscience from doing it again. The Republicans need a superdelegate system of sane party elders who want to see the party win. If there hadn’t been superdelegates in the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders would be within a hair’s breadth of the White House right now.

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