Opinion/Hanson: Will Trump ride out into the sunset?
I once wrote that whenever
In the iconic
The legalistic but impotent town council, the idealistic but outgunned sodbusters or the incompetent posse in desperation turns to unconventional deliverance. They suddenly need a
But to call in such Manichean outsiders is to admit that the status quo of a sober establishment has failed.
The outsider deliverers are suspiciously seen as self-absorbed. Their methods bother an endangered, polite society, even as they begin to bring it results.
We know such checkered iconoclasts from our own war stories of Gens.
As we learn from the second half of Sophocles' tragedies and the last 30 minutes of classic Westerns, the nearer the tragic hero comes to ensuring results, the more his benefactors can begin to second-guess his bothersome methods.
They start harping about his uncivilized mannerisms and recalcitrant stubbornness, but only because they now have the luxury of regretting their initial invitation to enlist his aid.
The denouement is as tragic as it is predictable.
A wounded
In "The Searchers,"
We remember Sherman for supposedly burning a swath through
Foul-mouthed Patton, with his ivory-handled pistols, is often recalled more as a madman who believed in reincarnation than as a genius who saved thousands of GIs.
A cigar-chomping LeMay, more than anyone, destroyed Imperial Japanese industry and created an effective Cold War deterrent. He ended up caricatured as a nut in the film "Dr. Strangelove."
So too, perhaps,
Some feared it was a matter of when, rather than if, communist
Conservatives hammered away at the principle that late-term abortion was wrong but feared that taking on
So in 2016 the peasants sought outside deliverance and so it came -- orange skin, dyed hair, Queens accent and all.
The more Trump beat back
The more the economy boomed, and the more Trump recalibrated foreign policy and changed the status quo with
So here we are in the wake of the most contested election in memory, and Trump may be officially declared the loser -- even after he won his struggle to stop America's leftward drift.
Often,
This article originally appeared on
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