The blog Power and Control makes the point, "Voting coalitions are ruled by the least committed members. So the question to the cultural conservatives is: do you want 2004 to be the Republican high water mark or would you like to extend the string."

Some cultural conservatives reply, "So if cultural conservatives would just give up on the main issue which keeps them in the Republican Party, then the GOP would enjoy a longer period of political control in Washington?If you put yourself in the culturecon's shoes, you have to ask yourself 'What's the point?!' If the party doesn't fight for what really matters to you, why should you give a flip about the party's success?"

Sort answers include,
1) incremental wins
2) preventing the other side from doing worse things
3) the ability to create spaces where your wing of the party gets to advance its agenda (much easier in a federalist system than a unitary one)

What Power and Control's author understands is that parties are coalitions. Diverse groups of (yet still further diverse individuals) interests working together to advance more of their agenda then they could with any other likely coalition. Some members of coalitions are loose. That is they cross over frequently to the other side, but remain affiliated with the coalition. Some members are not affiliated, but justed the coalition just because the agenda appealed more (possibly every so slightly more) than the other agenda. Let's also make allowances for external circumstances, such as family party affiliation, past party affiliation, geography, and so forth. The more you look into it, the more parties are just vessels for interests to organize and have no particular ideology themselves. This is one of the reasons that parties can swap ideology.

The social conservative view represented in Power and Control's comments goes on to say, "If you really believe that the Republican Party is a coalition, then I would remind you that coalition partners are in a coalition to further their own interests, not those of their fellow members. And it is very important for you to remember this: if you sacrifice the objectives of one of your constituencies, don't count on that constituency being very committed."

Coalitions who don't cooperate on the interests of other coalition members, but only seek their own agenda are not effective coalitions. Coalition partners who don't understand that they have to compromise with other partners are hurting their coalition. There is no interest that can govern by itself. Only coalitions of interests can govern.

People who put a socially conservative agenda at the top of their concerns are not a majority of the Republican coalition and are a minority of the Democratic coalition. This means they need to comprimise with enough moderates to get something rather than nothing. Its clear that some people would rather get nothing and remain ideologically pure, than to get some thing now and possibly impress a larger number with the success of this policy. Education reform has traditionally be very incremental drawing on the huge numbers of local programs out there. No one gets 100% of what they want in education.

Too many people who share their opinions with a quarter or less of the American people get mad that they can't get their will imposed on the whole country. When people on the other side hear this frustration, or maybe just hear the agenda, come to the conclusion that the "religious right wants to impose its values on the country." The frustrating thing about this is that its the result of people generalizing from a small group of people who don't understand politics.

Parties are effective when they advance a broad agenda with the cooperation of most of the coalition on each point of the agenda.