GOP’s epic internal struggle: The modernists vs. libertarian fabulists

The essential conflict in today's politics is not between Democrats and Republicans -- but factions of the right

KIM MESSICK

If we look for unity in our politics today, where can we find it? Only in the claim that it has never been more divided. Everyone seems to agree on that. “The two parties have never been further apart,” wrote the liberal Ezra Klein last fall. “Republicans and Democrats are currently further apart ideologically than our political parties have traditionally been,” wrote the conservative Ross Douthat, a mere four days later. Only the fact of our polarization brings us together; we are fractured in everything except our mutual sense of brokenness.

Many liberals attribute this situation to an increasingly radicalized Republican Party. Some Republicans do, too. Immediately after the 2012 election, Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, lashed out at the “offensive, bizarre comments” of some GOP candidates, whom he accused of espousing a “dumbed-down conservatism.” Republicans, he insisted, must “stop being the stupid party.” The RNC’s own “autopsy” of the 2012 results, issued in March of last year, made many of the same points. (In kinder, gentler terms, of course.)

But some Republicans bridle at this kind of talk. Polarization suits them just fine. As they see it, there is only one alternative to being their kind of Republican, and that alternative — namely, being a Democrat — is truly a fate worse than death. Calls for them to be more “moderate,” more “reasonable,” strike them as calls to adopt policies like those of liberals — advice they reject with great alacrity. David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, provided a characteristic formulation of this response not long after President Obama’s victory in 2008. Anticipating that Republicans would be pressured to work with Obama “on a wide variety of issues,” David Limbaugh cautioned that if “Republicans reduce themselves to offering merely liberal lite the next four years” they would do nothing but compound the damage of Democratic legislation.

But there is more to our predicament than disputes over policy. These differences, after all, aren’t so much the scourge of politics as the reason we have politics in the first place — if everyone agreed about everything, we wouldn’t need elections. Our problem isn’t necessarily that Republicans support lower marginal rates for high-income taxpayers or smaller cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients. We had a politics like that once — as recently as the George H.W. Bush years — and, though often fraught and volatile, it ushered in actual achievements. Things got done.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/02/15/gops_epic_internal_struggle_the_modernists_vs_libertarian_fabulists/