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May 21, 2014 at 08:52 AM
(Bloomberg View) — The prominent conservatives who met last week to try to ensure that Republicans will be on board with movement conservative orthodoxy in 2014 and 2016 published a platform full of platitudes and generalizations.
As Dave Weigel, who got to this first, said, their proposed agenda contained “nothing that any national Republican isn’t on board with, nothing that is hard for a moderate to seize onto.”
Ed Kilgore has been doing a terrific job of tracking how this would-be debate played out in the primary elections this spring. The bottom line is that in this supposed fierce battle between “establishment” and Tea Party Republicans, candidates from all factions are supporting the same agenda.
Party schisms are just about the most important events that can happen in a democracy. The Democratic break in the 1940s and 1950s resulted in the end of Jim Crow. The split among Republicans between conservatives and progressives in the early part of the 20th century had huge consequences, as did the later Republican division between conservatives and moderates, the Taft-Eisenhower split. And that’s without getting into the crackup of the Democrats in the 1850s.
What each of those schisms had in common was real fights over policy. They were all based on serious intraparty cleavages that could not be papered over, and that ultimately no one even wanted to paper over, whether it was prohibition for 1920s Democrats or civil rights for 1940s and 1950s Democrats.
In other words, these conflicts were far more consequential than is the competition among today’s Republicans to show how much they hate Obamacare. Cue “Life of Brian”:
