Divisions on the Right pt. IV

Daniel Drezner takes notice of Jacob Levy's post (see below) on his problem's with Bush. He then goes on to quote Andrew Sullivan's recent post on "the looming Republican [civil] war."

My own sense is that Sullivan is over-stating the effect of divisions within a coallition. If contradictory, conflicting factions blew parties apart, the democrats would have exploded a dozen times by now. Parties have ways of managing diverse opinions. As Drezner notes, "it's telling that the Bush administration has decided to award prime time slots at the GOP convention to a lot of Republicans that have had strained relations with the White House. It's also telling that they've accepted." Bithead posted in the comments section of Drezner's blog that its, "mere wishful thinking on Sullivan's part." That seems pretty accurate to me.

Sullivan writes, "The FMA battle now looks more and more like an attempt by Santorum to identify Republican social moderates so he can use primary hardliners to challenge them in the future." Perhaps, but I think it looks more like an attempt to force Kerry to clash with the pro-gay-marriage forces in his own party, possibly sending them to Nader. If Bush makes enough of an issue of it, it may rally some parts of the base. The question of whether it can do so without alienating other parts of the base relies on how its done. Levy mentioned it by writing, "The President doesn't play a direct role in amending the Constitution and anyway I feel sure that the FMA will never pass." Likewise, I discount it as so much pandering, all fluff. Not the direction I would take, since I would just take the state out of the marriage business altogether, but no one is asking me.

Drezner thinks that a Bush win will salve party divisions: "Nothing eases internal party divisions like winning." Though he also suggests a loss will produce, "internecine conflict [...] bloodier than [Sullivan] projects." Sullivan is clearly unhappy with the influence of the Religious Right in Republican circles, as he wrote in the Sunday Times. Sullivan misses one key part in the telling of this story, however, the hostility toward faith by the Left, and more and more by the Democratic Party. The Dems, as Sullivan points out, once had Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Jews. They have lost nearly all of the faithful because of their absolutist position on abortion, their strict seperationist politics, and their approval at the purging of religion from public life.

Plenty of Republicans accept the need for legal, safe abortions, but they don't feel the need to be absolutists. Plenty of Republicans favor an accomodation of religion far short of Roy Moore and would defend the principle of seperation of church and state without the need to purge the seal of the county of Los Angeles of its mission past. As a result one party is more hospitable to faith than the other. That is something the Dems did to themselves. He concludes by writing, "The partisan fusion of politics with religion in this campaign is poisoning an already toxic cultural atmosphere. God help us if it makes its way onto the altar itself." I think its a long accomplished fact and is a legacy of the New Left, not the New Right.