In the event of a Republican bloodbath a week from this coming Tuesday, a battle is clearing brewing between competing visions of the Republican party – neoconservatives, the National Greatness Conservatives, the libertarians, and the christianists.
It should be interesting to watch – and I make no claim to specials powers of vaticination.
David Brooks’s last column was especially poignant – as he points out that the Republicans in this election have ceded the center and abandoned the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. He has been speaking for some time of the need for a pro-government conservative movement – which he calls National Greatness Conservatism.
Meanwhile, Radley Balko, editor of Reason, editorializes that the Republicans must lose so that in their time in the wilderness they can become, once again, the party of limited government.
I don’t think both of these visions can work together very well – as Bush’s neoconservative/christianist presidency demonstrated.