IN WAR AND PEACE, Leo Tolstoy created an absorbing story about how individual actors created the events that shaped European history, but how none of them ever knew what was going on when they did.

Napoleon won battles during which no one followed (or even received) his orders, and yet was credited with strategic genius for those victories.

Weather and disease lost other battles (and the war) and Napoleon got the blame. In Tolstoy’s view, the sweep of history is nothing more than the story of individuals blundering about, doing the best they can with their limited views of circumstances, and grand generalizations about it all are just hot air.

The opinion pages of Rhode Island’s newspapers are routinely filled with exactly these kinds of grand generalizations, facile words describing how our state’s politics can be explained because voters have “chosen” the status quo, or “refuse” change because they re-elected so many members of the General Assembly.

I’m with Tolstoy on this: It’s silly to encase the individual acts of hundreds of thousands of people in some kind of frozen metaphor like “the people want . . . .” It doesn’t explain anything and besides, in our government, “the people” have no way to express “their” opinion. If you are reading this, you probably have opinions about how the state would be best served. When you were in the voting booth the other week, did you feel that any of the choices on offer represented your opinions well?

The fate of our state deserves at least an essay question, but elections are multiple-choice tests. Actually, given how many candidates run unopposed, many elections are True/False tests, where you’re not allowed to check “False.”

So, given all that, can we learn anything from the state election results. The best I could come up with was this: When given the option, voters often seemed to prefer new faces, but not Republicans. Where elections were about policy issues, progressive views seemed to prevail. Mostly.

That’s not much of a lesson, really, but it does lead to some interesting questions about the Republicans, who lost almost half their General Assembly seats, bringing them down to four senators and six representatives.

For the most part, the new faces that the state Republican Party introduced to us were an unimpressive group of radicals, and most of them lost.

In other countries, this kind of electoral catastrophe brings about a realignment, as new parties form to fill the void left by political failure. Why not here? It’s not as if people aren’t trying.

Businessman Ken Block has organized the “Moderate Party.” The name is more a sign of our times than an accurate description, since the platform is basic Republicanism, albeit of a generation ago. Robert Healey’s Cool Moose Party gave it a shot in the 1990s, but didn’t get much traction, either.

But all is not bleak for the Republicans. There were two notable Republican winners. You didn’t hear about them? Michael Pinga unseated Sen. Stephen Alves, of West Warwick, and Ed O’Neill, of Lincoln, trounced Senate President Joseph Montalbano. You might have overlooked them because to win, they abandoned their party and ran as a Democrat and independent, respectively. And here’s the real rub: Conservative as both of them are, they will find many compatible colleagues among the Democrats of the General Assembly.

The failure of the state Republican Party is a failure to recognize that there is demand for a constructive and conservative party here. Sadly, state Republican leaders refuse to supply that demand. Governor Carcieri seems to relish spending his time bashing immigrants, unions and advocates for the poor on the radio even while candidates who concentrate on those issues lose. Meanwhile Pinga and O’Neill, who appear to approximate old-time Yankee Republicanism, did just fine.

What can be done? Look to Minnesota, where there is no state Democratic Party. That state’s affiliate of the national party is officially the “Democratic-Farmer-Labor” party, a linguistic vestige of a long-ago merger when moderates captured control of the Farmer-Labor Party after electoral losses and merged it with the weaker state Democratic party.

The Rhode Island Republican Party could benefit from something similar.

That is, someone needs to rescue it from the radicals currently in charge.

Here’s my suggestion for those potential rescuers: Stop running on nonsensical solutions to hot-button social issues — Throw all the immigrants out! End all abortions tomorrow! — and the cartoon version of the legislature. Stop governing as if tax cuts are the answer to every single issue. Fiscal responsibility used to be a Republican virtue, and responsibility means paying your bills. (John Chafee sacrificed his governorship to get the state income tax enacted.)

Paint us a real picture of our state and offer real solutions. It is possible to do this from a conservative perspective, honest. Change your name to the “Yankee Republicans” and differentiate yourselves from the fanatic Republicans of the Southern and Western states. Offer us a real, sensible choice in elections, and I predict that not only will voters appreciate it, but you’ll be able to recruit better candidates, and maybe even turn some coats in the Assembly. I’m not the first to say our state would benefit from better choices on our ballots, but it now seems clear that we’re not going to get them from this Republican Party.

Tom Sgouros is editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter.