Legal Commentary

Fractured Factions of the GOP

By TChris

David Brooks looks at a divided Republican Party and sees two factions: the Traditionalists and the Reformers. The Traditionalists include Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform), Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), and Leonard Leo (Federalist Society). The Reformers are people like Peggy Noonan and David Frum and (at the moderate end, he says) David Brooks. The Traditionalists “insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West Coasts.” The Reformers take global warming seriously and don’t hate Hispanics.

Perhaps that classification is useful for Brooks’ purpose (which is apparently to announce Brooks’ alignment with an elite class of Republican Reformers), but the current Republican rift isn’t simply between the conservative intelligentsia and the Palin-powered base in real America. To hold power, or at least remain competitive, Republicans since the Age of Reagan relied on a sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting alliance of (1) Wall Street/K Street interests; (2) neocons and Federalist Society zealots; (3) the religious right; and (4) traditional conservatives. Groups with money funded attacks on the Democratic opposition while the religious right, if properly motivated, could be counted on to get out the vote and win close elections.

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The glue that held these factions together dissolved during the last term of the Bush administration. Thinking Republicans who couldn’t stomach Sarah Palin and who wondered why John McCain had no economic plan refused to support the McCain-Palin ticket. The religious right, on the other hand, fell in love with Palin and is starting to understand that evangelists have been used by Republican politicians who parrot their intolerant language while living elite coastal lives, chasing after interns and arranging abortions for their teenage daughters.

Traditional conservatives (more or less as described in this P.J. O’Rourke piece) are appalled by the arrogance of the neocons, by the ruling GOP’s willingness to run up deficits to feed Haliburton, and by the religious right’s desire for the government to interfere with private lives. The Wall Street/K Street interests oppose the traditional conservative aversion to bailouts, which would cost those interests dearly.

I am writing this post not just to make fun of David Brooks, as worthy as that project is in its own right, but to shorten a future post that discusses how Democrats can exploit these rifts to advance progressive legislation.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on November 13, 2008 (boomark / email).