Conservatives may have the wind at their backs, author, pundit and former U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., said in a conversation with this page Monday, but the country is still looking for the "adult in the room."
For eight years under President Barack Obama, he said, we "tried the progressive socialist model, and it did not work. We need to get back to a free-market, free-enterprise economy."
West, the retired Army lieutenant colonel who spoke to veterans at Morning Pointe Senior Living Monday morning and to a Hamilton County Republican Party fundraiser Monday night, said the United States needs someone who connects with a majority of people on fundamental principles and values the way President Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.
"We need to have a discussion," he said, about whether we want to promote "the individual over the institution [government] or the institution over the individual."
Instead of getting wrapped up in faux issues such as Confederate statues or football players taking a knee during the national anthem, West said, we need a leader who can talk to people about "what it means to be an American."
However, he said, "I don't think President [Donald] Trump can do that."
West credited the president for taking on the political establishment and for seeking to put the country back on a solid footing of economic growth and prosperity but referred to him as a "stopgap" and "not that end-stage leader" we need.
Trump, he said, is plagued not only by a Democratic Party that seeks to divide the country but alsoby a Republican House and Senate that are "not on the same sheet music" as the president.
When the president was elected Nov. 8, West said, the new Republican majorities should have pulled together on Nov. 9.
Unfortunately, he said, many of them can't decide if they want to be Democrats-lite or the constitutional conservatives they should be. When they talk about expanding Medicare as part of a better health care system, as was done with the Affordable Care Act, they're "not on the same page." When they talk about taxing the rich, he said, they're talking about a plan that already has failed.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky talked in August about Trump having "excessive expectations," West said.
On the contrary, he said, that is a president who wanted to "do what you said you'd do. We need a legislative branch that legislates."
Meanwhile, West said, Democrats are still the party that believes it "can call people a basket of deplorables" and "thinks it can be successful. They're not examining themselves."
It's like the definition of insanity, often attributed to Albert Einstein, he said, of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
While long Democrat-led cities like Chicago are suffering from frequent gun homicides (in a city where guns are highly regulated), from a lack of minority educational attainment and a dearth of minority small business growth, West said, Democrats and attendant groups like Black Lives Matter are blathering on about Confederate statues and Christopher Columbus.
"They're not in touch," he said. "They're not connecting" with the many people in the country who profess a "Judeo-Christian faith heritage" and are the real "forgotten men and women."
That lack of connectivity plus a "flawed candidate" in Hillary Clinton won the presidency for Trump in 2016, but West said congressional inaction is likely to generate "a rise of constitutional conservatives" in 2018 primary elections and a 2020 presidential election in which Trump must answer for what he accomplished.
All the while, he said, progressive socialists are moving from high-wage, high-tax states like California to cities that offer better economic opportunity and then voting against that economic opportunity. Cities in Texas, such as Dallas, where he currently lives, are examples. That's how states go from red (Republican) to purple (swing state) to blue (Democratic), he said.
"That's the challenge for red states," West said. "We need to be aware of their [Democrats'] grand strategies."
Part of the way he is doing that, he said, is by becoming more involved in the Guardian Fund, a political action committee he founded in 2012 that helps elect young, conservative veterans and minorities such as Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa and Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, be elected to Congress.
As for West, who won a Florida House seat in 2010 but lost re-election in 2012 when his seat was redistricted, he said he won't seek election to an office in Texas in 2018, despite "a lot of people asking," but will consider it in 2020.
In the interim, among a conservative website, a regular column in Townhall and frequent appearances on the Fox News Network, he is trying to convince as many of his fellow Americans as possible that the "great experiment" - a phrase often used about the establishment of the country's constitutional republic - is worth keeping.
"True liberty," he said in a recent Townhall article, "comes when the individual is elevated over the institution of government. Our Founding Fathers recognized that premise and created something the world had never known, or seen, but needed."