We are witnessing, in slow motion, the crack-up of the fragile Republican coalition. And it’s delightful to watch.

The two main groups in conflict are the economic royalists, the conservatives motivated by greed and keeping their dominance over the poor, and the theocrats, motivated by making state-sponsored religion the law of the land, removing gays from the country and banning abortion. There’s always been an uneasy truce between these two camps, but the 2008 election is putting them in conflict. And the best example of this is Peggy Noonan’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Noonan’s subject was Mitt Romney’s highly offensive speech on (how there’s not enough) faith in America. It was very clear that, far from being a speech about the separation of church and state, it was about how you better have a church, so long as Mitt Romney wants to be the state. Today the Romney campaign refused to acknowledge whether or not atheists have a place in America. And Peggy Noonan speculates why Romney, who represents more of the economic royalist wing, felt the need to insult people who don’t share this feeling of faith. By the way, Noonan liked the speech because she essentially likes Romney, but she lets her slip show at the end:

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else. (emphasis mine)

La Noonan couldn’t have made it more clear than that; theocrats and so-called “values voters” are idiots, whose intolerance doesn’t fit with the model of America. Of course, if any Democrat said this, there would be pure outrage. But that Noonan said it reflects the strain between the theocons and the econocons.

We can also see this in the attacks on Mike Huckabee that we’ve seen this week. They were incredibly coordinated and transparent. All of a sudden, every traditional media outlet ran with the Wayne Dumond story. When’s the last time you saw any giant news story triggered by something in the Huffington Post? It doesn’t happen. This was clearly opposition research run amok, as suddenly the royalist wing saw Huckabee, a charismatic theocon, as a threat. We’re now seeing the Club for Growth drop ads in Iowa and South Carolina. These ads pretty much are the manifestation of this breakdown in the Republican coalition.

We’ve heard talk about a third-party candidate from the theocon wing entering the race if Rudy Giuliani or someone insufficient to their beliefs were named the nominee. We’re seeing how the other side of this battle fights back; through insults and negative ads. Economic royalists think they own the GOP. They aren’t taking kindly to the theocon wing thinking they deserve anything more than lip service.

This is going to be a full-fledged crack-up, and it’s about time. It’s great news as we move forward toward a more progressive nation.

Posted by David Dayen
Friday, December 7, 2007 at 4:51 pm

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